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In this episode of Building Texas Business, I speak with Brian Birdy, the CEO of PMI Birdy Properties and a regional developer for Dill Dinkers. Brian shares insights about managing his family business, which his father started in 1979. He discusses the complexities of succession planning and how involving family members can strengthen the business for future generations. Brian's latest venture, an indoor pickleball facility, highlights his ability to identify emerging trends and foster a unique business culture. We explore effective strategies for business growth as Brian emphasizes the importance of a solid foundation. He talks about the need for a strong team, comprehensive training, and well-documented processes to navigate unexpected challenges. Additionally, we discuss the hiring landscape post-COVID, where Brian advocates for a proactive approach to recruitment and the importance of adapting to new employment trends. As we move into the topic of franchising, Brian shares his experiences with Dill Dinkers and the potential of using repurposed industrial spaces for pickleball courts. He reflects on the benefits and challenges of setting up a franchise in this fast-growing market. His connection to San Antonio adds a personal touch, as he expresses his passion for the local community and its cultural vibrancy. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS I discussed with Brian Birdy, CEO of PMI Birdy Properties, about managing a family business founded by his father in 1979 and his strategies for succession planning and family involvement. Brian shared insights on the importance of building a resilient business foundation through strategic planning, comprehensive training, and process documentation, emphasizing adaptability to technological advancements. We explored the post-COVID hiring landscape, where Brian highlighted the significance of a proactive hiring approach, prioritizing candidates with a positive attitude and aligning with changing employment trends. The conversation delved into the burgeoning pickleball market, with Brian expressing enthusiasm for his new venture in opening an indoor pickleball facility and the potential of franchising with Dill Dinkers. Brian revealed the challenges and opportunities in the residential property management industry, particularly in differentiating oneself in a competitive market and adapting to shifts in housing demand. We examined the process of opening a pickleball franchise, discussing the benefits of franchising for newcomers, the importance of choosing the right franchise, and the potential for repurposing industrial spaces for pickleball courts. Brian emphasized the value of surrounding oneself with capable people, investing in staff, and being open to new ideas and changes to drive business success, while reflecting on his connection to San Antonio and the local community. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About PMI Birdy Properties GUESTS Brian BirdyAbout Brian TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: Brian, welcome to Building Texas Business. Thanks for taking the time to come on the podcast hey thanks for having me. So you know, let's dive right in and talk about some of the things that you're doing as an entrepreneur and business owner and just introduce your companies to the audience. Brian: Sure. So I'm the broker and owner of Birdie Properties, which is a real estate company that specializes in residential property management. It has been in business for over 46 years. My dad actually started that business back in 1979. I've been running it and working at it and eventually running it since about 97 and have grown it to one of the largest residential property managers in South Texas, learned a lot of lessons in growing that business and the newest adventure is Dilldinker's Indoor Pickleball, which I'm sitting in, and I'm very excited that we will be opening our first location here in about a week and a half. Chris: Well, that's great. So two full-time jobs, it sounds like. Brian: Yeah, Well, the other one's a family-owned legacy business. It's three generations deep. Like I said, my dad started it. My brother and I both worked in it. I've owned it and run it for 20, 28 years and currently all of my three adult children and my daughter-in-law all work there and do the heavy lifting. With a little bit of guidance from me, that gave me the ability that could run effectively without my daily requirement, gave me the ability to actually continue that entrepreneurial spirit and try something completely different, which is indoor pickleball. I saw a true need in my city for this. There wasn't anybody delivering it. I saw it as an up and growing and when I actually started on it, less people knew what pickleball was. In the last 18 months it has really come to the forefront and so I got on. I started riding the wave at the right time and I hope it just keeps rolling, yeah well, it's certainly taken the last couple of years. Chris: It's taken on like a life of its own, it seems like. So let's go back to, I guess, Birdy Properties and maybe the unique part of what it's like in a family business to do the succession from your dad, who was the founder, to you and your brother then taking over that business. What were some of the maybe the pain points and lessons learned about doing that and what maybe advice you might give to someone that's in the process or thinking about it, of what to do or not do? Brian: Yeah, running a family business it's wonderful and it's tough, both hand in hand. The wonderful part about it is their name is on that business. Their future is tied into that business. Their commitment generally if they really care about it is they're a lot more committed than just an individual employee. But at the same time it's problematic in that you can't separate yourself from business. Family meals are filled with business. Taking an entire family vacation becomes almost an impossibility. And then succession is an issue. I bought the business from my father and it was clearly me. I own it. So my brother continued to work there but was not in ownership of it. That has its own problems. We found a way for him to actually build a business out of this and he's actually gone out on his own, is specializing in short-term management and is running his own business now, and so that was a way to kind of figure out how that could work. So he is the owner, sole owner, of Birdy Vacation Rentals. But I've got three kids that work for me. Each of them have unique qualities. They own all own a very important part of the business and they really can't survive without them working together, which works great now, but it's going to be. I'm going to wonder, I keep wondering and trying to figure out how, what is the best way to pass this on? And I don't have the right answer for it, but continuing to work at it, you know, giving them all individual pieces that they could own and be the masters of, and then by doing that, everyone needs each other kind of helps with that whole process. You can't no one of them can survive without the others. Chris: Well, it seems, if that's the case, right then you've set it up well for success because that fosters that team environment and team mentality. And you know we love talking about culture. So obviously you have the unique relationship with your children. How have you tried to take that beyond the family relationship with the other employees so that they feel the same engagement with the organization and tied to the organization's success? Brian: So we've gone through lots of that and growing and basically anybody who works for us can see that. I mean their last name isn't Birdy, they're not in the succession plan but we treat everyone within our business as if it was a big family. We believe in family. We believe in quality time. Individuals who work for us recognize we want them to do a great job for us but when they need time, when they need something they know they can ask for it, they can get it and just building that kind of culture has allowed us to have. Number of people who have worked for us for 15, 13, 12, I think is my current people that are out there have been here for a very long time. They're part of the family even though they're not. You know, their last name doesn't say birdie on it, but we work really hard in building a core that can. You know, property management is a tough business. I've said all along one of our core values is that we're going to have fun, and so one of the things we've always built is if we can have fun doing the worst part of that business, then we got it made. So we have a lot of fun when we're doing the fun parts of the business and when we go out of our way to make sure people are going to have fun. But we also find ways just to have fun and to really own that. There are tough parts of that business also. Chris: Sure, well, true for any business, right. There's always, yeah, the piece that you don't enjoy doing. But you know you have to right, it's a necessary piece but it may not be the most fun. I think you're right. If you can bring joy and fun into that, then the rest should be easy. Brian: right, because it's the stuff you like to do and want to do and, as I think about, I've been doing that for 28 years and I love going to work there. I love people that I work with and even though it's in a very tough and stressful because I mean, at times I have to evict people from their homes, I mean that isn't something that's fun, you know. But it has encouraged me that I'm waiting to see how much fun is running a pickleball facility going to be, where we have a core value of bringing joy to everyone through the sport of pickleball. And I'm like, if I can have fun doing property management, I think I should find it a little easier to have fun running a pickleball facility. But I don't know yet. We haven't opened our doors yet, we're going to find out, but it's. I mean, I'm just it feels like it's going to be fun, but you know, I don't know what, I don't know yet. Chris: So going back to Birdy and property management is anything innovative? Or you know how? Has technology or innovation kind of helped you be more efficient in what you do and maybe more profitable? Brian: Yeah, so we've. We have challenged ourselves to chase technology. You know, if you go all the way back to probably, I mean, and we've done this for a long time and we've had a website since 1998 when it didn't do anything and most people didn't have it, I mean we have a five letter URL. I mean we are www.birdy.com, you know, and people have wanted to pay a lot of money to buy that name, but it's just something. Fortunately, my dad said I think this might be something someday, let me just get our name now. He was lucky, he did that. But from that we've continued to chase the changes. Every business has had major changes. I will tell you that, coming out of the 07, 08 mortgage industry collapse and all the problems that happened, property management got brought way up into the forefront and technology, of course, coming on strong at that time saw this as an open lane that nobody was in and they have been chasing after us like crazy. And we have said all along if we want to continue to be relevant, if we want to be a hundred-year-old business, the only way we're ever going to get there is we have to embrace technology, embrace change, figure out the ways to do that, race to it, understand it and apply it. You know however that is, and so we've dramatically changed our business from where we first I mean when we first started, you know everything was on paper. It was all in a folder. The folder was in a cabinet. You know, you met people face to face. I mean, everything has changed and you know, at our last national event, the big thing that was there was all AI driven. Not only have we used technology and we use computers and we've automated some things, but now we're having the computer starting to figure out what can they really do for us in the industry, and I see that being big changes coming forward as to what can it really do for us. Coming out of COVID, we learned we can do a lot and we don't really need an office to do it anymore. We can have remote team members. We can do a lot on Zoom. We can do everything with computers. I think AI is just going to push that, and that even runs into this business. Bill Dinkers has changed a lot and it's only a couple of years old, but it's incorporated on court cameras that film the sessions for the players, and now that company is building AI, so it's going to be able to tell them automatically. You know some statistics from their match, you know counting things for them and I'm like, and so again, very early stages open landscape that technology and AI development is just stepping into, and I'm just curious and excited to see what can that take us to. I mean, because that's the future of our business, all of our businesses. Chris: Oh for sure, I mean, technology is not going anywhere. I think I had someone tell me one time never bet against technology. Technology always wins right Eventually it continues to evolve and you may not be an early adopter, but you better pay attention and learn how to integrate it sooner rather than later, or you're going to get left behind. Brian: Well, right, and it'll show you ways that you can like. We can manage more properties with less people. Because of technology, we can have individuals working for us now all over the world and we have been embraced that for a long time and we're about a 50-50 business. Half of our employees are here in town. The other half are all remote team members and primarily in Mexico, because I'm in South Texas, so I need people that can speak Spanish, and what greater way to have somebody work for me whose primary language is Spanish? So that part has been a significant change in the property management side of it. And that comes with technology. Right, because they have a computer. They can do everything. They have a phone line, so you call my office and you hit the phone. It's calling them Because phone is now what? A computer? Everything is a computer. If you can learn how to adapt the changes in your business to automation, you find ways to grow and to make money when you're doing it right. Chris: So you mentioned the 08 kind of market crash. What were some of the lessons you learned? I think that's a pretty important or severe impact on your business business and we always learn, kind of through some of those crises. So what were some of the things that you learned, maybe about your company or, more importantly, about yourself that kind of helped pull the company through to continue on a path of success? Brian: Well, if you think about it, most people saw that as a crash, as a problem. In my world it was actually a good thing. Besides the fact that people were losing their houses to foreclosure, that was certainly a negative. That didn't help me at all. But what came behind that was investors, and investors were buying those properties and turning them in to single family rentals and they needed management behind it. People who wanted to hold onto their house but had to leave them could not sell them Again. Another thing we were ready for growth. We were prepared for growth and we were not scared to grow as fast as we possibly could In those years. We doubled in size in both 07 and 08. And I think a lot of that was we were preparing for growth and then something happened that we didn't expect. But we were ready and I don't think anybody else was, so we benefited from that. We exploded over about a two or three year visit and really skyrocketed us up that. We've never lost that position since. Chris: That's amazing. So you talked about you were preparing for growth before those events happened. What was it you were doing to be preparing yourself for that growth? Brian: Making sure I have the right staff, all my training, all my processes, systems, policies and procedures. You know, you, when you first start and you're an entrepreneur, you have this great idea. You know how to do it all in your head, you make sure it can work right. What a lot of entrepreneurs aren't great at is writing it all down, systematizing it all and teaching people how to do it. And so, as you're growing, you're just throwing things trying to fill in these holes and you have to learn there's got to be a better process to your business and growing your business, and an individual who is forward thinking and really crazy ideas and just really interested to go do all these wonderful things can come up with some great stuff, but they're not the person that's going to carry it the long-term, step-by-step and so, understanding what you're good at, learning who you need around you to fill in those pieces where you're not and luckily for me, you know I have children who are from me but not really like me and so and they're not really like each other and so, collectively, the four of us and others that we've built into that start to create more of a complete package, and we learned and we're continuing to learn. We are forever changing and we are forever growing. It never stops, and that's, I think, it. I think at that time, what we wanted was I wanted to grow. We were talking about growing and I was trying everything to be visible because, remember, technology hadn't taken over. You know, people weren't finding you online. You had to. You know, I was still paying for ads and newspapers and the yellow pages because I wanted people to find me. But I found technology earlier than anybody else. I found a program called allpropertymanagementcom when it first opened and it was the first marketplace for property managers on the internet and I raced to it. I was the only one there in 2007. And that's when everyone started freaking out what am I going to do with my property? They looked and they found me, and that was a big part of so just the little steps like that was like not, I mean, that was an investment, I was paying money to do that, but I thought there would be a payoff. I didn't expect the tremendous payoff I got, but it really was a lot about just making sure you know what you have around you and a lot of times, what happens is we don't hire for growth, right, we want growth, then growth happens and then we get squished by the work. Everyone gets overworked, everyone gets stressed, nobody's happy, culture starts to get hurt and you can't sometimes, can never hire fast enough to catch up to train them all. So, knowing your business, watching closely, investing in growth by investing in your people, those are some of the lessons I learned because I did all that wrong at first and I suffered because of it and I've learned to do it differently because of that. Chris: Yeah, that's a beautiful point. I mean to your point about if you start to grow you haven't, excuse me, hired for it then you start making hiring decisions out of desperation and that's a recipe for disaster, as opposed to being able to follow that process. As you mentioned, that process is in place, that you stick to that. You follow that. You're always looking to evolve and change and tweak as times change. But if you're behind the curve, if you will, then it's hard to catch up. Brian: You also have to change with times. I mean when you can be hiring, when you don't need to hire someone, you're not in a hurry. During your interview process you don't settle for okay, this person's good enough, right? You're like, if none of them are good enough, well then they're none. Keep looking right. But if you're in a hurry, if you're in a need, then anyone close you're going to take and it may not be a good fit for you. And I would tell you, before COVID you had people in large numbers applying for jobs, but after COVID that changed dramatically and it became a point. I mean I used to say if I could get 10 people to interview, five of them would show up, or maybe six, and one or two or three potentially could be good opportunities there and you'd be able to windle it down to possibly one good quality candidate. After COVID you were lucky if one person showed up, and I don't think that's really changed dramatically even yet today. Chris: That was my question. It feels, like in the last, say, 12 months or so, there's starting to be a little bit of a maybe it's slow, but a swing back towards people realizing. You know you hear the bigger companies saying five days back in the office and you know that you know where we had the quiet quitting going on in 21, 22. It seems to me there's a little less of that and it's coming back. There are maybe more people out there and you hear that you know new college graduates are having, you know, really difficult times finding jobs because it seems like it's tightening a little bit Well. Brian: Luckily I'm in a season in which I've not needed to hire and I've got everything placed out right, and so I hope when I start hiring again in that space I do see that change, because I've noticed a big difference there and even had to change my whole process of what's really important when I interview people I mean I have put you know the number there are two things that are at the top of the list, and that is an overwhelmingly positive attitude and an undeniable desire to work. And if people come in with those two things, I can take them from there with anything else, because I can't give them either one of those. I can't culture that to anyone, I can't teach that to anybody. They have to have those two things If they have those, if they have those two things clearly, and you can find figure that out pretty quick. Chris: So I have a chance to identify with that, because the words I use are we look for effort and attitude Right. And I like your desire to work. You would think that would come natural, but you and I both know it doesn't. You're interviewing people. They just want a job sometimes or a paycheck, and they don't really have a desire to work or work hard. So I agree, you have to have an interview process that can kind of figure that out. Brian: That's true and we've, and that's something you have to learn and experience and get through and continue to tweak because, as you think you have the best experience, your market of applicants change and then you have to change and adapt with them. BTXBAdvert Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom. And thanks for listening to the show. Chris:So we kind of look at the landscape out there. What are some of the headwinds that you either are dealing with now or that you think may be coming around the corner, that you're trying to prepare for to kind of not let them slow you down? Brian: I think that in the residential property management space, when times are good we do well, when times are bad, we do even better. So generally making sure that we're running the best business that we can, that we're providing what people need, figuring out a way to be being better Everyone wants to say they're better, but being better doesn't really necessarily draw anyone's attention anymore because it's like are you really better? You're just saying you're better. But when you're different and you can show someone why you are different, that's what really changes it, and I and so we focus on how are we different, why are we different, how can we be different and what differences are going to be important in the next five years that may not have been important in the last five years. Chris: That's really good. Yeah, I could see where and I would think even the lots have been written about it how difficult it is for people to purchase a home. Now, right, the interest rates, one thing, maybe the lack of accumulated wealth or down payments because of the lending markets. I can see where that would boost your business. Brian: I would tell you that in 2024, nationwide the market said that rental markets should have been skyrocketing and doing well, but for a variety of reasons it was not the best year. 2025 has started out as a much better year. Last year was a rough year on most residential property managers and when we look at that it came back to a tremendous amount of apartment complexes that were built coming out of COVID that opened and it drew a lot of the market space away People not buying, not moving, families coming together in one location, which reduces right. But we've seen a big change this year at probably one of our busiest first quarters in a while, so we're hoping that just continues. Chris: Very good. So, shifting gears a little bit Sounds like a company that you love. You said you love to have fun doing it. I guess we're in it for most of your life, bought it from your dad. All things going well, Kids are in it, Kids are thriving and against that backdrop you decide to step out and take on the pickleball business, which there's certainly some competition there. Maybe San Antonio's market was a little lacking. There's certainly some competition there. Maybe San Antonio's market was a little lacking, but there's all kinds of people doing pickleball courts now. So what was it that inspired you or drove you to make that decision and take on that risk? Brian: Well, so I started playing pickleball for the first time coming out of COVID in 2020, when our mayor said, okay, you can go and gather, but it has to be outside. And so there was a tennis place that had converted on a tennis court. Still, they converted and made these makeshift pickleball and I went out and said, hey, this is a lot of fun. Eventually, chicken and Pickle opened in San Antonio. I went inside to that and I thought, hey, I really like this, and started playing there. Quite regularly. My wife and a non pickleball related injury broke her ankle and we were out for about a year. When I came back one year later, everything had changed. It was almost impossible to book a court. The age of the players had dropped 20 years in a year. It used to be forties and fifties and I walk in and now it's twenties and thirties and I was like, okay, something has really happened here. So I did a lot of research, looked at all the numbers and then I started saying, okay, we don't have enough courts and we don't have any indoor courts, and I was like I think we could do a good job at this. I was first trying to find a place to go play, and what it led me to is there's a need. Maybe I can solve that need. And then, in researching it in the state of Texas, san Antonio was lacking in indoor courts In the country. We're doing awful. Houston was the only city in Texas even on the radar for the number of pickleball courts, and the number of indoor pickleball courts they have more than anyone in Texas. They have more than almost any other city in the country. So that city had figured it out and I'm like we hadn't yet. And I'm like we hadn't yet and I'm like, hey, if you're going to do something and you're going to be different, one of the greatest ways of being different is be first, because if you're first, you're different. There's nobody else, right? And so so I dove in, found a great Dill. Dinkins is a national franchise and I believed in what they put together and and so I'm one of their first franchisees. I'm going to be opening up my first club here in about 10 days here in San Antonio, and I'm a regional developer, so I have the right to develop up to 20 clubs. Whether I open them or help somebody else who wants to run their own pickleball location here, I will be supporting them and getting them open, and I can open all of my clubs. Other entities can open all theirs. There will not be enough pickleball, because if I fill all my clubs up all 20 clubs open and they're all completely full that would only represent a fraction of 1% of the Bexar County population, and so there's room for everybody and there's room for growth. And that's kind of one of the reasons why I got into this is that I'm like hey plus, I love it. I have so much fun, and I'm going to tell you what running a property management business has been a lot of fun, but I really hope that running a pickleball business is going to be even a lot easier to have fun. We'll see. I don't know yet. Chris: Yeah Well, in 10 days you'll start to figure it out. Brian: Well, that's free, that's free week, everyone's coming for free, so they're going to love me for at least a week, for sure. We'll see what happens after that. Chris: Good strategy there. Yeah, I know. Look, we've worked with some entrepreneurs and developers here in the Houston area doing this right, developing pickleball venues with the bars and the food service, and that's where they did the market research. And even in Houston it's interesting to hear your numbers on the covered courts in Houston, kind of leading all cities but there is a lack of courts in light of the demand especially, you're certainly private clubs have taken converted tennis courts or extra space where they put in pickleball courts, but if you're not a member of that club you don't have access. And so for the general public to have access, things like what you're doing and chicken, chicken pickle, et cetera, and some of the maybe non-national brands just worn off local things there's still a ton of demand for that. Brian: Yeah, if you look at it, lifetime Gyms and LA Fitness have both decided they're going away from basketball and they're going all in on pickleball. And I talked to their national developer and I said why are you making this change? And they said well, basketball has led to altercations and fights and problems and pickleball equals new membership and so they're all in and you can see, most of them are converting them. I have a couple of Gold's Gyms in San Antonio that have converted into pickleball in their courts. It's just there's such a need, there's such a desire. A lot of people say they find a way to play, they'll play anywhere. A lot of people haven't played because they say it's too hard to find a place to play. So we're hoping we can be part of the solution to that and start giving lots and lots of options for people to come out and play and see how easy it is, how fun it is. The community that's built around this is unlike other sports is the community that's built around this is unlike other sports? It is. It is a unique game in which it is the most gender equal and age equal. I can go out on any given day and lose to an eight-year-old or an 80-year-old, and both of them could be a male or a female. It doesn't matter, because this is. It is the equal sport amongst all sports. Chris: Yeah, well, I'll say you know, given the timing when you're opening and the fact that you know we're in Texas, being covered courts is going to be a nice added bonus, because I don't think you want to be in the middle of summer outside on a pickleball court for too long. Brian: Well, they've been doing it for years. What I have to do is get them in here so they can see, and that's the thing about being different. So some things that are different with us is we have pro cushion courts. They're all individually fenced. We have special LAD court lighting that's designed specifically for pickleball. Of course, it's not windy in here. There's no rain, there's no heat, there's no humidity and, as you can see behind me, all the walls are black in the playing surface, and that's so. When you're standing on your court and your opponent hits the ball pops, you know it's coming outside. You don't see that. You got wind, you got heat, you got sweat, you got movement, you got craziness, and so that's where we've dove into being different and we're hoping it'll pay off. Chris: No, all true. I mean having played myself. You're right, if you're outside and depending on where the sun is, you may, it's sometimes hard to see the ball. Brian: Yeah, true, not in here. Perfect lighting, perfect temperature, perfect courts. And the one thing I get annoyed I'm a spoiled. I'm a pickleball snob. Now. I cannot stand playing on a court where the court right next door is not separated and their ball keeps coming into mine. I'm like I can't even play that way anymore. I'm, I've become a. I've become a pickleball snob. I expect to be able to get on my court and play my game and not be disrupted by anybody else. Chris: There you go, as every man and woman should have a right to right. That's right. So so you kind of bit this off as a franchisee. Let's talk a little bit about that. What are some of the things that you learned about that process that maybe you weren't expecting that you could share with some listeners, and maybe a lot of people look at franchise opportunities. Brian: So I tell people all the time. So I've been involved in franchising in a couple of other ways. I went for about a four-year period and worked for a nationwide property management franchising company called Property Management Incorporated and I was up at the corporate level seeing. So I learned about franchising itself and people go why are you doing this, why should I do this? And I would give them reasons why. If you're already running your business, you already know what you're doing. You don't need a franchise when you're starting out from brand new and you have no idea what you're doing and you're not really sure how you're going to do it. You have to consider that Anyone can do the business on their own right. Even me, I could have opened this on my own. But do you know how much stuff I didn't know about pickleball that I learned from my franchise organization and the attention that it has drawn me? You have to figure out when that might be right for you. I think that there's been a lot of benefit of doing that. But you got to examine them all. I went and looked at every existing franchise when I started to do this Now. Since then, there are five new Pickleball franchises available and I'm sure there'll be five more in the next six months. So there are a lot of choices. I looked at them all, I checked into their history, I interviewed, expect what they need to do, and then I went and did a discovery day in Columbia, maryland, to find out what was Dill Dinkers all about, and a big part of it is who is the leadership? Who's going to be guiding you? Who are you going to be working with? And I absolutely loved the people that were involved, and that's a big part of this. You're going to be in business with them at the same time, and so this made a lot of sense for me. They were structuring in a very smart way of doing it, and they're the fastest growing Pickleball franchise that's out there, and they've sold 27 regions across the country. They've made great strides at improving everything that we do the play site cameras that we talked about earlier, with the AI involved that's something that's new. The pro cushion courts that's new from when we first started, and now all of our pro shops are powered by Pickleball Central, which, again, is also something new. So when you look at a franchise, it's like, yeah, they exist, but what are they doing to evolve? What are they doing to be different, because you're going to rely on that and work with them to show them how else they can be different. I decided this was the way for me to go and by being a regional developer here in town, I have my first one opening, I have my second one already under construction and I've got 18 more to go, but I'm probably not going to open all 18 of those. So there are opportunities right now and the way Jill Dinkers is, they have your corporate staff, but I'm the local representative. I'm here to help develop anyone locally. So anyone who wants to open one here has me helping them, and I've already gone through all the pain and suffering of what does it take to open a place. I know all. I know what you need to do to have it happen. They taught me what they knew. Now I've experienced here locally in San Antonio. I know what's going to happen here. Those are some of the advantages when you start looking at franchising and say, hey, I want to do a business, I don't want to do it alone, I don't want to start and it's tough. There's things you've got to know to be successful right out of the gun and you may not know everything on your own, it makes sense. Chris: And I said there's the franchisors got to show that value right. The why you're going to be making payments and getting the benefit of some of their things. It occurs to me too, one of the advantages, at least to what you're doing with these indoor courts and just kind of looking behind you is that you could take advantage of some of the big box locations that have been abandoned right that there's every city has those where there was some store that has either now gone to a bigger complex but left that space behind it looks like that's what you can kind of take advantage of from a real estate perspective. Brian: Right and I figured, with my real estate background, that this was going to be a piece of cake. But let me just tell you, san Antonio is a healthy city. We don't have big boxes just sitting around empty. Finding the location was the biggest challenge for me, and that isn't true everywhere else. That's why I'm franchise number one, but I'm not the first franchisee to open, because there are people who found it much quicker. The gentleman up in Pennsylvania went on his very first visit and found two locations and has opened both of them. One of them has 17 courts inside with 75 foot ceilings and no columns. Wow, I think it was like an aircraft hangar at some point. It was an indoor soccer facility for a while and it is like the perfect layout for indoor pickleball. But he found it in one visit, found one landlord, signed two leases and opened them both up. I have been to hundreds of places because I have to have the right hype, I have to have space between columns. I got to have air conditioning, I got to have bathrooms and I got to figure out, you know what's it going to cost to convert the place? And in San Antonio we don't have a lot of space just sitting around empty. Well, that's a good problem, it's good, it's good for the city. I mean, I found this one and I found my second one and I'm continually looking and there will be more opportunities and there will be more opportunities and there will be. Yeah, I think the strange thing in my city is we have probably the most vacant space in our city is industrial space. There's industrial warehousing all over and it's all empty and they don't want to talk to me yet. But they're going to one day they're going to say you know what I'm tired of being empty. Maybe we should talk to these pickleball guys, because it's the perfect layout giant empty buildings just sitting around empty. One day, when I can start turning them into pickleball, then the life's going to be real good. Chris: For sure. So just real quick, though, I want to ask about you kind of just as a leader right, your leadership style and how you think that's evolved over time, and kind of what you've learned maybe about yourself and about leadership in the process, in that journey. Brian: You know I learned leadership pretty young. I mean I go back and think about it and say you know, my dad was in the military. I was a military brat. We were all part of scouting. That was you start learning leadership and scouts right. I joined the Air Force myself, I served time in that and that the leadership is pretty well defined there. I mean, you know you can grow into being a good leader through that process. But in the military leaders comes with rank. Sometimes you don't really you haven't earned it, but you get it because you wear the rank and there's a difference in just knowing and understanding. And in that I learned I'm like if I want to be a leader, I've got to earn the right to be the leader of other people. As I started growing my own business, the challenge was I know how I want everything done. I like it done. A certain way. Most entrepreneurs are type A personalities we got an idea, we're going to run with it, we want to do it and no one could do it as good as we can. Well, you're going to be awful lonely and awful small if you think you can grow business all by yourself. So lesson you have to learn is how do I surround myself with people who make me better, who fill in the gaps of the things I'm not, and how do I let go and let them lead? So I've learned to invest in my staff and invest in them being leaders and letting it go. And remember, if you get from point A to point B and it doesn't cost any more money and it isn't illegal, does it really? And it doesn't use up any more time, does it really matter if they got there different than I would have? And honestly, it doesn't. But that's a lesson I had to learn. I was not very good at it, so my wife and my kids pulled things out of my gripped hands because they were like you got to let this go or we're never going to grow. And then you look back later and go wow, I'm so glad I did that. I mean, they're doing a better job at it than I ever did. And then you just have to make sure you're continually watching over what you're doing right, building good systems, checking on what you're doing, investing in your people, which means spending money on them, spending money to educate them, spending money for them to go out and try things, and also, don't be scared to try something. It's probably one of the biggest lessons I've learned Don't be scared to try something new that no one else has tried, because they're not all going to work, and I can tell you some of mine that were absolute failures. You figure it out, you go eh, switch back, we're done. But the ones that didn't work grew the business, made me money right, made us more efficient, and not being fearful to just change, adapt and be different is a big part, and when your staff sees that you're willing to do that and you're encouraging them and you're investing in them and you're giving them the ability to lead, you'll be surprised what they can do for you. Chris: Right. Well, so first, thank you for your service and second, yes, I think part of that for me is you can't be scared to fail, nervous. And second, yes, I think you know part of that for me is you can't be scared to fail. Uh. So if you don't take any chances, you won't learn, you won't grow. So you've got to be willing to do that and be observant of is it going well, is it not? Do I need to pivot, do I not? For your business and for yourself? Right? Brian: and you have to listen to your staff around you, because at certain point when you grow a business effectively, you start to get out of the day to day, and so you've got to check on it, you've got to hear from them, you've got to build on it and you've got to give them the ability to tell you maybe it is time to pivot, maybe we need to do something different, maybe there is a need out there, even though you didn't recognize it. They need to know. They can bring it to you and you'll listen Doesn't mean everything is going to change, but you give them a chance to speak it up and then it's out there and then you talk about it, and we do that regularly and it really changes the business when people have the freedom to bring up ideas and not be afraid of it. Chris: So let's move from the business side of things to just personal. Tell me what's your favorite part about San Antonio and why you decided to call it home. Brian: I moved here with my dad. He got stationed here when I was 13 years old and this has been my hometown almost ever since I joined the Air Force and I did leave here and I missed it all while I was gone. There's something about the community here in San Antonio the people, the events, the city that I missed. I've lived in other places. I don't think I ever missed not being there as much as I missed being here, and so this is truly my hometown. I love the city, all that we have going on, the fact we continue to grow and get big but we still feel like a small town Never and there's something for everyone. There's everything you possibly can want to do. You can do it here. I mean, we're in the middle of Fiesta. It's been going on forever, but there's still something in Fiesta that I still probably haven't even done. As many times I've gone out and done things and it's exciting just to be involved in that. I've been a Spurs fan since I moved here. I actually saw the Spurs as soon as I came back. We were coming back from Italy, moving to San Antonio, and the Spurs. I was 13 years old. The Spurs were in the Eastern Conference Finals against the Washington Bullets and they were up three games to one and I watched them lose the next three games and then not, and then I followed them and we didn't make it back to a conference championship for 20 years in 99. And then the next 20 years was a good payoff. We had a lot of fun and won a lot of games. Chris: So this is my town. Brian: I love my city. I love all that we do here. Chris: Yeah well, it's definitely spent enough time there to get a feel a very unique and welcoming culture and vibe. You mentioned Fiesta, but I don't see any badges on you. Brian: They're on sale at the front counter. Gotcha yeah, I actually was we made one, we've made one, we've traded some. A few people have bought them and it's a fun part to be part of that when you run a business in San Antonio. Chris: For sure. I've had the benefit of being there for a week on business during Fiesta and learned the whole thing about the badges and the trading and still have them with me. That's a lot of fun. Brian: Yeah, last weekend one of my managers took them all, went down and was down there handing out badges and also handing out flyers about our business Just getting the word out and getting connections to both people and other businesses. It's a unique time when everyone's just willing to talk to you and get face-to-face and everyone wants everyone else's medals. The Fiesta medals are kind of a cool thing, yeah for sure. Chris: Okay, last question Do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Brian: Tex-Mex for sure. I'll tell you this in traveling the country. There are other places where you can get barbecue. Maybe not quite the same, but there's some good barbecue out there. There is no good Tex-Mex anywhere except here. Chris: Yeah, yeah, I think it's a pretty accurate statement. Well, brian, I really appreciate you taking the time to kind of share your story, both on the property management side and Pickleball. Good luck with the grand opening coming up and look forward to seeing you guys succeed in that industry as well. Brian: All right, well, hey, great Thanks for having me on Great conversation. All right, take care. All right, bye, and there we have it. Special Guest: Brian Birdy.
In this episode of the IC-DISC Show, I sit down with Brian Schwam to discuss how Interest Charge Domestic International Sales Corporations (IC-DISCs) can help businesses save on taxes. With over 35 years of experience, Brian shares how IC-DISC has evolved since 1972 and why it remains a valuable tool for U.S. exporters. He explains how businesses, particularly in the aerospace industry's Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) sector, can take advantage of this incentive to improve their financial position. We walk through a hypothetical example to illustrate how an exporting business could benefit from IC-DISC. Brian explains how companies involved in manufacturing, repairing, or trading parts can qualify and why many eligible businesses overlook this opportunity. We also discuss the annual MRO conference in Atlanta, where industry professionals gather to share insights and best practices. This event highlights the ongoing impact of IC-DISC within the aerospace sector and beyond. Despite the clear benefits, many businesses hesitate to implement IC-DISC due to a lack of awareness or expertise. Brian talks about how our firm partners with CPA firms to integrate IC-DISCs into existing tax processes, making it easier for businesses to take advantage of these savings. He also highlights the underutilization of IC-DISC and why more companies should consider it as part of their tax strategy. We wrap up by discussing the upcoming MRO America's Conference in Atlanta, where exporting aviation maintenance companies can connect and learn more about IC-DISC applications. Whether you're new to IC-DISC or looking to refine your approach, this conversation provides useful insights for businesses considering this tax-saving opportunity.     SHOW HIGHLIGHTS In this episode, I discuss the intricacies and benefits of Interest Charge Domestic International Sales Corporations (IC-DISC) with tax attorney Brian Schwam, who has over 35 years of experience in the field. We explore the historical context of IC-DISC, including its origins in 1972 and the significant changes it underwent following international scrutiny and U.S. tax reforms, such as the 2003 Bush tax cuts and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Brian provides insights into how IC-DISC can serve as a valuable tax incentive for U.S. exporters, particularly those in the aerospace industry's Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) sector. Through a detailed hypothetical example, we illustrate how companies can leverage IC-DISC to maximize export profits, highlighting specific benefits for pass-through entities and closely held C corporations. We address common apprehensions businesses face regarding IC-DISC implementation and discuss how collaboration with CPA firms can facilitate a seamless integration into existing tax processes. Despite the clear benefits, IC-DISC remains underutilized, and we emphasize the potential missed opportunities for businesses not taking advantage of this tax-saving strategy. The episode also covers upcoming industry events, such as the annual MRO conference in Atlanta and the ICDISC Alliance Conference, which offer valuable networking and professional growth opportunities.   Contact Details LinkedIn - Brian Schwam (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-schwam-b6026a3/) LINKSShow Notes Be a Guest About IC-DISC Alliance About WTP Advisors GUEST Brian SchwamAbout Brian TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dave: Hey, brian, welcome to the podcast. Brian: Thanks, dave, good to be here. Dave: So where on planet Earth are you calling in from today? It's hard to tell by looking at your background. Brian: Outer space. I am in the sunny South Florida. Dave: Okay. Brian: Breezy, south Florida, okay. Dave: Now are you a native of Florida. Brian: I am not a native of Florida. I spent 50 years of my life in the upper Midwest in Wisconsin. Okay, I had to move to Sunbelt. Dave: Okay, Now were you educated in the Midwest then too. Brian: I was. I'm a proud alum of the University of Wisconsin, both for an undergraduate degree in accounting and also my JD from the law school Okay. Dave: So you've and I take it and I've known you a while, so I think that's been several decades ago that your career was started. Is that about right? Brian: Several would be a good good approximation. Yes, I've been at this for 38 years. I know it doesn't look like it, right, okay? Dave: And so, and how long have you been involved in ICDISC? Then Most of that time 38 years, oh, 38 years in ICDISC. Then most of that time, 38 years, oh, 38 years in the disc, wow, yeah. So how does that do you know? Do you have any way to quantify that? Like how many you know ICDISC returns you've, you know, signed or reviewed or prepared, or Boy, it's a big number, dave. Brian: It's probably five figures. Okay, probably, so you know, somewhere north of 10,000 for sure. Okay, over that time period. Dave: Well, and that is why I'm glad that you are one of the founding members of the IC Disc Alliance with me that when I had a chance to partner up with you and some of your team when we created the IC Disc Alliance, I was really excited because in my book I pretty much knew all the players in the IC Disc space and once the famous Neil Block retired after 50 years to me you were without peer in the IC Disc space. Brian: So I really enjoyed collaborating with you through the years here in the ICDISC space, so I really enjoyed collaborating with you through the years. Dave: Thank, you for that, Dave. I hope to be able to follow Neil into that 50-year stratosphere. Yeah, that's big shoes to follow. So let's just talk a bit about the ICDISC. What the heck is it? Why does everyone use that silly acronym? Brian: Because what it really stands for is a mouthful. Dave: Okay. Brian: Discharged Domestic International Sales Corporation and that is what the ICDISC stands for, short right ICDISC. And I don't know if we'll get into. I'll get into what the IC stands for and everything. But basically this is an export incentive that's been in the Internal Revenue Code since 1972. Okay, in various forms. Initially it was an export incentive that just about any company could use, that was exporting goods that were manufactured, produced, grown or extracted in the US. It came under some fire from our trading partners and in 1984, it was transformed into the ICDISC. It started out just as the DISC in 1972 for the Boston International Sales Corporation and it, like I said, came under scrutiny. Our trading partners said hey, you're a, you can't have an exemption from income because you're not. You know you tax things differently in your country. This flies in the face of the other incentives you give your taxpayers. So they changed it into the ICDIS, which made it into, instead of a permanent tax savings, at least on its face, into a temporary savings where, to the extent a taxpayer saved tax and deferred income from tax, they were required to pay an interest charge to the IRS on that deferred tax. Hence the IC. Dave: Okay, okay. Brian: That rate changes every year. It's based on the one-year average TBLO rate as of September 30th annually. And at the same time they instituted something called the Foreign Sales Corporation, which was widely used by thousands of companies, and that came under attack and eventually became the extraterritorial income exclusion which was immediately attacked and eventually, a couple of years later, it just went away. In the meantime, the disk floundered for quite a number of years. In fact, in the year 2000 there were only 787 disks in existence. Dave: Wow, it seems like a shockingly small number. Brian: Well, the tax laws weren't real conducive to benefiting from the disk at that time. Then, in 2003, the Bush tax cuts brought in the concept of qualified dividend income and it took the disk off of life support and really put it on robust territory for pass-through entities, because they could now, to the extent that they could qualify and we'll get into that, to the extent they could qualify and to the extent that they could benefit it provided a 20% rate benefit between ordinary income and qualified dividend income, so it was a significant savings. Now that's been whittled away over time, where it's been reduced here and there. Various tax law changes and probably the largest or the next biggest reduction came in in 2017 with the Trump tax bill, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced the rate on qualified income on non-qualified income. So it reduced the rate on S-corp income partnership income in an individual's tax return to a 29.6% level, and so now the spread between the qualified dividend rate and the ordinary rate just isn't as great as it used to be. It's approaching 6%. So where it used to be 20, then it went to 15, and now it's 6. But it's still a permanent savings for these past three entities and it's not something that they should ignore, because it can save significant taxes, depending upon the level of export activity. Dave: Okay, and now to be clear, depending on a company-specific fact pattern, that spread could be greater. Right For a pass-through. It could be as high as what like? Brian: 13% or so For a pass-through it could be as high as what like, 13% or so For a pass-through business. Dave: It could be as high as 13.2%, okay, but in general we see that it and it could even be somewhere between that, depending on. Brian: Anywhere in between 5.8 and 13.2. Dave: And our experience has been that most companies tend to gravitate more toward the lower end of the savings than the higher end. Brian: Yes. Dave: Yes, okay. Now what about for a C-Corp? Brian: C-Corp is a different animal. Okay, a C-Corp can't use an disc to pay deductible dividends to its owners if it's a closely held C corp. This is not something that a public company can benefit from. But if a closely held business C corp is paying dividends to its shareholders and would like to be able to deduct those payments, rather than not being able to deduct those payments, using an ICDIS can transform the dividend into a deductible dividend. Now, it doesn't save the shareholders any tax, because they're paying tax on the dividend regardless of where it comes from, but it would eliminate the corporate level tax on the C corporation, so that benefit could be as high as 21%. Dave: Okay. Brian: Okay, another manner in which certain C corporations use the disc is to fund bonuses for shareholders and key employees, and then that saves the shareholders 17% tax the difference between a tax on a wage and a tax on a dividend, qualified dividend. So that's a 17% savings for the shareholder. In that case the C-Corp doesn't save any tax. They're getting a deduction either way wages or commission to the disk. And now that I've mentioned the word commission, that's probably a good segue into how does a disk earn income? Yeah, and what is its income? So most discs are what we call commission discs. They earn a commission when a operating business that's related to that disc makes an export sale of qualified export property. So let's dig down into that first. What's qualified export property? Well, that's property that has been manufactured, produced, grown or extracted in the US. So if I'm manufacturing in Mexico or Canada or China and I'm simply selling what I've made in those other countries, you know the disc is not something that's going to benefit that type of a business. Dave: Okay. Brian: It is there to spur US manufacturing, create US jobs, right in line with the America First proposition that's headlining Washington in 2025. Dave: Okay. Brian: So it should be on safe ground, everything that's going on there. So if a company has property that's been manufactured, produced, grown or extracted in the US and they sell it for export outside the United States and not to a US possession, then that sale can potentially generate an ICDIS commission that would be paid to the ICDIS. And keep in mind this ICDISC is not an entity that the outside world sees or understands or knows about. It's simply an entity that does business, if you will, internally with the operating company, so customers don't know about it. It's really transparent to the world. It's just there to help US exporters save tax. Dave: Okay, it's just there to help US exporters save tax. Okay, and the logistics of it. Like say a company has just for simple math, let's say they have $10 million of export, of qualified export revenue, and the ICDIS commission that's calculated to say 10% of that. Brian: Okay. Dave: So 10% of that would be a million dollars, and so walk me through kind of the that's correct and it accrues the deduction, assuming it's not a cash basis taxpayer. Brian: It accrues that deduction at the end of the year, the DISC accrues the income at the end of the year and then by statute the DISC does not pay income tax. So now we've gotten a deduction on one side, we have non-taxable income on the other side and then when the disc pays a dividend to its owners, that becomes a qualified dividend and is taxed at a lower rate. Dave: Okay, so then, effectively, that million dollars gets reclassified from being taxed at ordinary dividend rates to qualified dividend rates. Brian: From ordinary income rates to qualified dividend rates. Dave: yes, Yep, thank you for that. And where that shows up for a pass-through is going to be on the individual shareholders, k-1, right. That box up near the top that shows ordinary taxable income would basically go down. Let's say there was one shareholder, that number goes down by a million dollars. And then there's a box further down on the K-1 for qualified dividend income and that's where the number's being shifted to right. Brian: Right. Assuming the disc is owned by the operating company, which most of the time it is in the pass-through business context, then the ordinary income gets reduced on the K-1 and the dividend income will increase on the K-1, not necessarily in the same year, but that will be the result over time. Dave: And then that tax savings then will show up on the individual shareholders. 1040, right, because their ordinary income line is a million dollars less. The qualified dividend income line is a million dollars more, and that's where that arbitrage. Brian: They pay less tax if they're getting a distribution from the company to cover their taxes, which is often the case, the company doesn't have to distribute as much cash, therefore increasing the working capital of the business. Dave: Okay, well, thank you. Thank you for that. Now, what I want to drill down into a little more today is looking at the aerospace industry, specifically what's called the MRO space in aerospace. Do you know what MRO stands for? Brian: I believe, I do, I believe maintenance, repair and overhaul. Dave: That's my understanding as well. Brian: That's a significant area in the aviation space. Dave: yes, Okay, and I believe that there's a big conference in Atlanta in April with like something like 17,000 expected attendees. Brian: Yeah, just a small gathering. Dave: A small gathering. Brian: For sure. Yes, that's my understanding as well. In fact, I'll be there. Dave: Yeah, I believe we'll both be there, yeah we'll both be there A few of our colleagues. Brian: Yeah, so it's a one a year significant gathering of companies that operate in this MRO space, supporting airlines and other aviation companies, and basically MRO is important because it keeps planes able to fly. Yeah, and we actually have a booth there. Dave: Yeah, and we actually have a booth there. 1818 BC and it makes it sound like it's a date from a long time ago. But yeah, we'll be there and this will be our first year in attendance or exhibiting. And this has come from, in recent years, I'd say, a big ramp up in the number of MRO companies who we are helping with their IC disk. Is that right? Brian: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, one of the sponsors of the conference was a company I was doing some work with and I asked them if he thought it would be a good idea for us to attend, and it was a resounding absolutely that he thought that we could meet a lot of companies that could benefit from this ICDISC similar to his company. Dave: Okay. What are the elements in the MRO space or the characteristics of the companies that make them a good fit for the ICDISC, because my understanding is it's probably only one out of a hundred of like all the registered corporations in the US are really a fit for the disc. Brian: Yeah, so it takes a specific fact pattern to really benefit. So the companies in the service side of the business so let's say they're carpet cleaners or something to that nature they're not going to be able to benefit from the disk. But let's say it's a repair center and airlines will ship in parts to the repair center because they've worn out and they need it. They need a replacement part so that they can fly this plane. So what happens is maybe the repair center takes their part and repairs it, but they previously repaired another part that's identical and then to the customer and that plane gets back in the air right away. So in that scenario, even though it's a different part that's going back out versus what was coming in, that type of activity qualifies as long as what they're doing qualifies as manufacturing and that repair is occurring in the US. Dave: Okay. Brian: Then that type of a company could definitely benefit Other companies. I don't want to use this term, but it's kind of like horse trading. Sometimes companies will buy a surplus of parts, knowing that eventually they're going to be used by somebody and they hang on to these parts, or they find them from somebody who says I don't want these parts anymore, I haven't been able to sell them. So they take a flyer, they take a risk and they buy these parts and they hang on to them and maybe they sell them at a significant profit and maybe they don't. But there's that space as well that can benefit from the disc, and there's some misconception out there that some of the companies that are similar to what I just described can't benefit from a disc, and so, for example, if parts are obtained outside the US, they stay outside the US. They stay outside the US and they're repaired, recertified and resold. Those aren't going to qualify for the ICBITS. But sometimes parts are acquired outside the US and they're brought into the US, they're repaired, put it back into inventory in the US and then sold for export, and that activity does qualify for the ICs, and so it's very important to know where this refurbishment or remanufacturing is taking place. Dave: Okay and yeah, and there's a US content piece to it, right, like if they buy a part from China and all they do is they just put a little lubricant on it and throw it in a box. Brian: that may not qualify and then they export it. The test is what's the customer's value when that part comes into the US. So if it's a burned out hot engine part, for example, yeah there's no value or very little value and it comes into the US, its customers value is close to zero. It gets repaired, it's going to easily meet the content test and it's easily going to be considered manufactured in the US. It's rare, I think, that we'll find that somebody will buy a new part from outside the US just to inventory it here for export. Dave: Okay, yeah, because there's that it's a 50% US content test, right which? Is also, I think confusing on the surface if you don't really dive down into the rules, right, I mean, the layperson may find it. Brian: How do you know what's 50% US content? Well, the cost of good, I mean. Think of it the other way. The foreign content can't be more than 50%. And the foreign content is the cost, the customs value when it was imported. So if I'm selling something for $100, I imported it for as much as $49.99. That's going to qualify as long as I did something, you know, remanufactured it once it got to the US and once it got to the plus, more often than not, I think the value of those things coming in because they're used and worn and damaged parts, they're going to have a low customs valuation where there'll be no problem meeting that content. Dave: Okay, I can see that. Well, I find and my listeners tell me they really like kind of case studies, little mini of case studies, little mini, you know, client case studies On an anonymous basis. Do you have an example or two of some of the types of companies we've worked with, just to give people a flavor of them and, again, you know, being anonymous to you know? What company it is, but just a sense of like the sense of the size of the company, what the benefit might have been. Brian: The size is sort of across the board, right. So some of them are someone on the smaller side. They might have export sales between $5 and $10 million, and then some of them might have export sales of $100 million. It all depends on the size of their business and the benefits are kind of all over the map. Because we don't just do a simple calculation of the benefits. And the reason we don't is because in this industry what we find is there's a lot of margin variability in the companies that are exporting, and then a transaction-by-transaction analysis of the disk commission is what makes the most sense. That allows us to benefit from the margin variability, allows them to benefit from a higher disk commission and obviously then they're going to save more tax. And in some cases the commission grows by 10x by using the T by T. Sometimes it's two or three x, sometimes it's. You know, I've seen you know where it would have been zero because there was an overall loss in the company, but we were able to get a significant discommission with a T by T approach. So it's hard to pinpoint an exact number, but generally speaking it's 15 to 20, you know the commission ends up being 15 to 20% of sales. And if you look at the statutes, one of the statutes says oh, the commission can be 4% of sales, and another implies that it could be anywhere from 4% to 10%, but we generally see in this industry at least 15% on average. It's significantly higher. Dave: Yeah, and I'd like to drill down into that because I tell, and based on my understanding, we may manage more IC disks than any other organization of the country. I mean we I think our number is somewhere north of 500 companies now that we're helping out, and when I'm having these conversations, you know. So I'm, as you know, I'm more focused on the sales side. You know, and you and your team are more focused kind of on the technical aspect of producing these returns, and what I tell people is that our real value isn't being able to produce an IC disk return. Our value is the incremental benefit that the transaction by transaction calculation yields. That the transaction by transaction calculation yields. Because you know just about any any cpa firm you know most of them their software includes the ic disk return. You know, if they just go do a four percent calculation, it's a, you know, reasonably straightforward calculation. But we find that you know they're capturing only a fraction of the total benefit. Brian: That's true, and while I've seen a good number of interesting looking disc returns, I tend to agree that if you follow the directions, anybody can probably prepare a disc return. We do that as well. That's not where we add the most value. Where we add the most value, adding the value comes in unlocking the highest commission possible so that the tax savings are as great as possible. Yeah, and a lot of businesses that are high margin I'm sorry, low margin high volume businesses. When you look at the disc, on its face it looks like oh, there's not much benefit here, we're only making 2% or 3% of sales on our bottom line. So our disc commission would be 2% or 3% of sales. But, like I said, with the transactional approach, if the commission approach is 15%, well now we've taken the company into a tax loss which could potentially save additional taxes for the owners over and above that 5.8%, because now we're offsetting that loss against other income wages, interest, et cetera and being taxed just on the qualified dividend income of the disc. And so you can't just look at the overall margin or overall profitability of the company and project what that, what it's going to look like, Because they vary all over the place. Dave: Based on this transactional approach, yeah, and I would like to talk a bit about. Oftentimes, when I'm talking to a company that's considering a disk, oftentimes they've never even heard of it. Their CPA firm may not have even mentioned the idea. And they'll say, and they'll ask me hey, does this mean my CPA, you know, screwed up by not telling me about it. In my response, you know I try to be generous and I explain it that, look, you know, in our experience only about one out of 100 companies are a candidate. And so let's just say you have a large local CPA firm and they have 100, you know midsize corporate clients. Statistically we find that only one of them, you know, would be a fit for the disk. And your experience may be a little different, you know, feel free to correct me. And so when you think about it from the CPA's perspective, if there's a special part of the tax code and they only have one client that benefits, it's a difficult economic dynamic for the CPA firm to invest in a whole team and expertise to serve one client, right? Isn't that like part of the challenge that the and I know you've worked at a number of large CPA firms Is my understanding correct? That's part of the problem is just their clientele. There aren't enough of them. That makes it worth doing yeah. Brian: Yeah, I think that's a fair characterization. I might phrase it a little bit differently. I mean, there are thousands of CPA firms and they're all excellent generalists. This is not an area where you can be a generalist. Cpa firms often outsource R&D, tax credit work, cost segregation work. This, to me, falls right in that same category. You don't want to dabble in this, and if you're not sure what you're doing, you can get you and your client in trouble. Have good intentions, but if you don't execute it properly, it can be more of a headache than it's worth. And so, like most people, I think people gravitate towards what they know and understand, and things that they don't know and understand can look and sound scary. Dave: Yeah. Brian: So it's like, oh my God, an IC disc. I've never heard of that. I'm not sure I can bring that to my client because I don't really know what I'm doing. Well, I wish I knew somebody I could call to him. He's not a competitor right who could help me through this and help my client through this, and so that's really one of the reasons why we exist, because, as you stated, you don't want it to be a competitor that you call, and so, because we are so hyper focused on what we do and we don't do the things that I'll call the cpa's generalists, that the generalists do, we're an excellent partner because we're not looking to take away anybody's tax return or any of the other type of work that the CPA might be doing for that client. We just want to play in our space. Dave: Yeah, sometimes I'm sorry. Sometimes you know clients or potential clients will say, yeah, but you know our CPA firm does. You know all of our work. It's a one-stop shop thing and I'm afraid having you do the disc return and then doing the corporate return yeah, but our CPA firm does all of our work, it's a one-stop shop thing and I'm afraid having you do the disc return and then doing the corporate return it's just going to be a nightmare for you all to coordinate your efforts. It just sounds like too much trouble. What would your response be to that? Brian: My response is I work with over 500 companies. Generally we do the disk work for those companies. The regular mainstream CPA does everything else. We coordinate our work with that CPA and it's never a problem. We say, look, we're going to need X number of days to turn this around, so please have a draft of the operating company return by a particular date, and then they work towards that date. They give us the return, we get data from the company and we turn the number around so they can finish their tax return and then we go ahead and finish the disc return and I would say 99.9% of the time it works like we're all part of the same thing. Dave: Yeah, because really the CPA they prepare that final draft corporate return. They then pull two numbers from the disk return that goes into the corporate return and then they're done, basically right. Brian: And they're done and they can go ahead and finish up their disk return, I mean their operating company return and their state returns and everything. And then we just have to get the disc return done. And sometimes you know they file their tax return in april and you know the disc returns aren't due till september. So one might say, oh, you could just sit on them until september. But you know, we try to get them done at the same time. Sure sure Everybody can rest easy. But I mean we think of ourselves as a bolt-on resource to that CPA firm while we're working with that and we work with probably 50 to 75 CPA firms around the country in that role- yeah. It works well. I mean, you can talk to any one of them about what it's like to work with us, and I'm sure you'd get a glowing recommendation for how we work with them and for their clients. Dave: Yeah, no, I'm with you. So, as we're nearing the end here, the other thing that people find interesting you'd mentioned in 2003, there were 700 IC disks under 1,000. Yeah, 787. And then, according, if my recollection is correct, the most recent IRS stats that updated that were published, I think, in 2010. And I believe in 2010, there were like 2000 disks. Brian: Yeah, something like 1926. Okay, To be exact, and that number I'm sure has grown dramatically since then. I would guess there's somewhere between eight and 10,000 disks out there now. Okay, yeah. Dave: Yeah, now what's interesting? This is what people find interesting. I believe there's about 50 million business organization, you know business entities in the country, and so let's just assume that's the number, 50 million. Brian: I mean it's tens of millions. Dave: I'm certain of that. For some reason, I think it's 50 million. Does that sound reasonable? Brian: It does so let's think it's 50 million, does that? Dave: sound reasonable. It does. So let's say it's 50 million and on your average, you know we find around one out of a hundred. You know, maybe one out of 200 companies are fit for the disc. So if we run through the math, you know one percent of 50 million, I believe, is 500, 000. You know approximate companies that we think would benefit from a disc. Yet most recent stats, there's only 2000, you know, and maybe it's 4,000, 6,000, you know. Even, let's say it's 10,000 that exists now. So if you divide 10,000 by 500,000, what is that? Like 2%, I think, of the projected eligible company actually have a disc yeah, and people can't. They always are surprised by that and I usually tell them it might. And tell me if your numbers are consistent. I say about 100. One out of 100 benefit or could benefit. The ones who could benefit 90 percent of them have never heard of the disc, maybe 95%, and the 5% of the 1% who have heard of it, even once they hear about it, they usually haven't implemented it. Brian: Right. Then there's a percent that have implemented it. They're not getting out of it what they can. Dave: Right right. Brian: So it's so. There's a lot of missed opportunities by taxpayers and everyone's always trying to save some taxes. It helps fun, you know. It might help hire another employee might help, you know, if the savings are moderate and it's 50, 6070, 1000 of tax savings that still could pay for an employee to come work at the company. Why do? Dave: you think that utilization is so low? I mean because it'd be shocking if only 2% of the companies who did research and development took advantage of the RMD tax credit. Brian: I think it's just not well known. I mean it's very esoteric, it's been in the tax code for ages and ages and it just doesn't you. You know, there were so many years where it just wasn't relevant when you think that it's not something people think about. And then if you know, if you're a small exporter and you're exporting a half a million dollars a year a million dollars a year unfortunately it probably doesn't benefit you to have a disc and so maybe someone will look at it whether that size and they're like, oh yeah, it doesn't benefit you to have a disk and so maybe someone will look at it whether that size and they're like, oh yeah, it doesn't work. And then they grow and they forget that it might work once they've grown. So once a company hits about three million of export sales really should look at it again, because that's where it starts to have economic relevance that's where it starts to have economic relevance. Dave: Do you think some of it could be that? I mean, in general, public companies don't use disks, right? Brian: They just simply don't. Dave: Okay, and so I've found that oftentimes small to mid-sized privately held companies receive a lot of their sophisticated business knowledge from their Fortune 500 suppliers or clients. You know they'll hear from them about something and you know, like the payroll protection program during COVID, you know I suspect some of those might have heard about that from you know some of their large customers. Maybe that's not a good example, but you know that could be another reason. Right, there's just a dearth of knowledge that the CPAs aren't focused on it because the economics don't make sense. The large sophisticated public suppliers and clients don't use it, so they don't hear about it from them. Right, it's not really in the news, it's just. It just kind of flies below the radar screen, doesn't it? Brian: It definitely does, and that's certainly a reason why it's not as utilized as it probably could be. Dave: Yeah, and it seems like you know most of our, you know virtually all of our clients come as a referral from either an existing client or an advisor who we've worked with other clients you know, like a CPA or attorney or banker. So yeah, it's just a yeah, even though you know the podcast is called the Icy Disc Show. I don't get the sense that I'm ever going to. You know, reach Joe Rogan's audience size. It just seems to kind of fly below the radar screen. Brian: Yeah, and the potential audience is probably a little smaller than Joe's. Dave: Probably Well. So the last thing, the other thing people tell me they're surprised about the first year of the disk return. When they set up a disk is to get everything done. And we tell them the disk return's ready and they say, super good, and e-file it for me, like the CPA does the corporate and personal returns. And what is our response when they tell us to go e-file it for them? Brian: The response is unfortunately, the IRS doesn't provide for e-filing of disk returns and we'll need to send you a paper return. You're going to need to sign it and file it with the IRS and the unfortunate thing there is gosh, I don't know what percent of the time, but it's a growing percentage of the time the IRS loses the return Right and then sends a notice saying, hey, we never filed or whatever. And some of these disk returns are quite large. The fact that they because when you do the transaction by transaction analysis, there's a lot of paper that gets produced and filed and it's shocking to me that the IRS would lose those what they do. Dave: So it's interesting what they do. So it's interesting. I like to say that not only does the ICDISC fly under the radar screen of most everything, it even, in some ways, it's almost like it flies under the radar screen of the IRS itself. Brian: Yeah, and they put some things in place with regard to the ICDISC in 1984 and have never changed it. For example, if you're in the situation where you have to pay interest on deferred tax, which often occurs. First of all, a lot of times taxpayers don't realize it and they don't do it. Secondly, if they do it. It's so antiquated that the instructions to the form where you calculate the interest it says please staple a check to this form and mail it in. I mean, who does that in 2020, right? Nobody. People, businesses prefer to do things electronically to avoid checks being stolen, fraudulent activity, so on and so forth. But here the IRS is saying staple a check to this form and mail it to Kansas City, missouri. Dave: Yeah, and I guess it kind of makes sense that you know if there's only a few thousand of these disks in existence. In the same way, you can't expect the CPA firms to make it a heavy focus, I suppose even the IRS. You know there's a hundred other tax incentives or a thousand other tax incentives that are more highly utilized that you know they maybe are spending their time on. Brian: Yeah, as I like to say, the people at the IRS that understood the disc were working there in the 70s and 80s, OK, and they're long retired. Yeah, and they're long retired. There's really not a lot of bodies at the IRS that understand the DISC and certainly when you're doing a transaction by transaction study and calculating the commission on each individual transaction, there's nobody there that understands that. Dave: Nobody Well, and it's kind of the same thing outside the IRS, right? Nobody Well, and it's kind of the same thing outside the IRS, right? I mean I have this joke that nobody makes partner at a big four firm being the IC disk expert. Oh, that's true, so it even especially nowadays. Yeah, and so it seems like like the average age of IC disks experts is about the same as the average age of the average Fortran computer language programmer. It just seems like you know new people are not coming into the disk and there's just a dearth of knowledge all around. Brian: Right, right. And I myself learned COBOL, which is a choice between Fortran and COBOL, when I was in business school, both equally non-usable. Dave: Is it part of that? Because since the disk came on in 1972, it seems like since 1973, people have been talking about the IC disk going away. So is that maybe part of it? People think, well, why should I learn something if it's going away? Brian: Maybe part of it. People think, well, why should I learn something if it's going away? There's always been a fear that it's either going to go away or that there's a technical correction coming that the disk dividend is not a qualified dividend. But the bottom line is politically, I just don't see that happening. Dave: It stands for too many things that are positive for the US Job creation export sales for too many things that are positive for the US Job creation, export sales, us companies being more competitive in the global market. Brian: So it doesn't really lend itself to be repealed. What can be repealed are some of the tax rates. Some of the tax rates can change and that can change the benefits of the disc. The concept of the disc itself and what it stands for really is very consistent with our country. Dave: Yeah, wow, I can't believe how the time has flown by, brian. Is there anything else that you want to mention about the IC disc or the MRO industry? Brian: No, I can't think of anything specifically other than I'm looking forward to being there and meeting many of the attendees and other exhibitors that are there and spending some time with you and our colleagues in Atlanta. Dave: Yeah, it will be fun. So it's the ICDISC Alliance. If you want to look us up on the website for the conference or stop by 1818BC. We also have a LinkedIn page for the ICDISC Alliance, and so I'd love to meet with any of you who are going to be at the conference. Awesome, well, thank you very much for your time, Brian. This has been really useful. Brian: You're welcome. You're very welcome. Special Guest: Brian Schwam.
In this episode of The Building Texas Business Podcast, I spoke with Brian Freedman, president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership, about the region's economic development. We explored the five major industry clusters shaping the area: maritime logistics, aerospace, tourism, healthcare, and petrochemicals. Brian shared updates on aerospace innovations at Ellington Field, including projects by Intuitive Machines and Axiom, while highlighting new opportunities in defence manufacturing. I learned about Project 11, an initiative to expand the Houston port's capacity for larger vessels. Brian explained how this infrastructure project connects to the broader transportation network, particularly the role of trucking in regional commerce. We discussed how the partnership works with legislators and industry leaders to address challenges like insurance costs and maintain economic momentum. The conversation shifted to leadership approaches and team dynamics in Texas business. Brian described how maintaining diverse projects keeps his team engaged and motivated. We explored how the Houston area supports entrepreneurs through community partnerships and mentorship programs while adapting to technological changes like AI integration. Our discussion wrapped up with a look at workforce development in the region. Brian explained how educational partnerships are building talent pipelines across industries. We covered the importance of aligning training programs with business needs while fostering collaboration between municipalities, educational institutions, and industry partners. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS In this episode, I spoke with Brian Freedman, president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership, about the economic development in the Houston Bay Area, focusing on the recruitment, retention, and expansion of primary employers. We discussed the significant industry clusters in the region, including maritime logistics, aerospace, tourism, healthcare, and petrochemicals, and their impact on the area's economic growth. Brian highlighted developments at Ellington Field, including contributions from companies like Intuitive Machines and Axiom, as well as the emerging opportunities in defense manufacturing and procurement. The episode explored the scale and impact of the Houston port, emphasizing Project 11's role in expanding the port's capacity and the importance of logistics and innovation for regional prosperity. We delved into the leadership style necessary for motivating teams and managing diverse projects, underscoring the Texan entrepreneurial spirit characterized by ambition and a collaborative approach. Brian shared insights on the vibrant business ecosystem in Texas, driven by a skilled workforce, affordability, and a supportive community fostering partnerships and mentorship opportunities. Finally, we addressed challenges like insurance costs and the importance of regional solidarity, as well as efforts to mitigate natural disaster risks and promote responsible development in the area. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About BAHEP GUESTS Brian FreedmanAbout Brian TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you will meet Brian Freedman, president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership. Brian shares how his organization works to recruit, retain and expand primary employers in the greater Houston Bay Area region. Brian, I want to welcome you to Building Texas Business. Thanks for joining us today. Brian: Hey, thank you, Chris. Honored to be here and great to catch up. Chris: Yes, likewise. So let's start with you. You're the president and the organizational name's kind of long it's Bay Area, houston Economic Partnership. Tell the listeners a little bit about what that organization is and what it does, to kind of put the rest of our conversation into context. Brian: Sure, so BayHEP is the short version of it. So we're the Regional Economic Development Group and kind of the, as I like to say, in the Houston-Galveston region. We're three o'clock to six o'clock on the watch, face right. So we kind of go out 225, all the municipalities and cities going out east and then going down south 45. We go a little west of 45, but really that 3 o'clock to 6 o'clock and we're really focused on how do you recruit, retain and expand primary employers in the region with the idea that if you can get great companies located here and have a group of industry clusters that are cranking away every day, that we can have a great place to live. We have great involved residents that are in this area and opportunities for the folks who live here and kind of build what the future will look like for this region. So a lot of good stuff going on and, happy to get into that a little further, we do economic development, recruitment, retention projects. So how do we get companies here? We do some grants and then we're a membership organization is how we're funded. So we have about 300 members, 19 municipal members, Harrison-Galveston County, the port, the airport system. It's really how do you get the leaders of a region to work together to advance what we're doing here. Chris: Wow, I mean that's it sounds like it's easier to say and harder to do coordinating that many organizations and trying to get everybody pulling the same direction. Brian: Yeah, it's a lot of fun and we get to work with a lot of great folks. That's how we met Chris, is that, you know, through some of our mutual connections. But yeah, you know, it's really when you can get generally like-minded folks thinking about what the future of a region will look like and pretty aligned and working towards that effort, it's more of a well, it's just fun and you can create a lot of impact and we're seeing that and I'll be happy to dive into some of the specific projects we're working down here. But I mean, you guys do it too at Boyer Miller. Y'all are working with clients all over the spectrum of types of industry and you have to adapt to what's coming up, what's at you, and be ready for that kind of stuff. Chris: Yeah, no doubt. So yeah let's jump into some stuff. Let's talk first, because when I think of your area, obviously the first thing that comes to mind is NASA and all that's going on around that, and that leads me to technology and innovation. So what are some of the emerging technologies or trends that you're seeing that are kind of helping shape the future of Texas and kind of the business opportunities, at least in your region and for Texas? Brian: Yeah, so I call it kind of the big five on the industry cluster. So everybody thinks about this area for NASA, which we love right, because it really is a crown jewel out here, but I call it the big five right Maritime and all the associated logistics with the port aerospace and aviation, so nasa, but also the great work that the airport system is doing with ellington and hobby, tourism and recreation, health care and all the hospitals that have campuses down here, and then specialty and petrochemical and the energy industry partners and every one of those ecosystem has a ton of stuff going on. So I'm happy to talk about some of those more granular. But a couple of observations. One is that often overlooked in this community and really an asset to the greater Houston region is Ellington Field, ellington Airport, the Spaceport and, if you haven't seen or heard about it, the work that's going on at the Spaceport. They have three new beautiful buildings. One is occupied by Intuitive Machines who just put the first commercial lander payload on the surface of the moon. One is occupied by a company called Axiom that's building the next generation of commercial spacesuits and the next generation space station, and Collins who do spacesuit design in our building and maintaining the current spacesuits. They've set up huge facilities down there and so new stuff coming on. But I'm equally excited about just across the runway is the 147th Reserve Group. So there's a reserve unit out there, a reserve base, and the defense opportunities are pretty exciting. So that's highlighted by the 147th. But almost every branch has a reserve unit out there, save the Space Force, and we're working on that. And so the opportunities with defense manufacturing to come out to do more work in Houston and some of their innovation units and, as mundane as it sounds, some of the procurement opportunities, because when it comes to contracting, having a group of folks here would be a great opportunity for Houston businesses to then pipeline the work that they're doing into the broader defense industry, which can be really exciting. One other thing I'll mention, chris, is if you just look at the path of predictable growth for Houston, right, it keeps going out and we see that on our freeways every day. So there are growing pains that come with that, but for our region it's that steady march down Interstate 45. And so while Clear Lake Lake City are starting to get to fully built out and we're looking at what is the next generation of building look like, what's redevelopment look like For communities Dickinson, hitchcock, santa Fe, to some extent Texas City. Although they've got quite an industrial complex too, there's still space, and so it really brings up the opportunity of we can handle big projects, and whether they're industrial or tourism, there's a lot of opportunity that comes with that. And so, as folks you know, as we get built out further and further, those cities that were, they've always been important cities for the regional ecosystem, but they become major players, and so it's exciting to be able to work with them on that stuff. Chris: Sounds like a lot of opportunity for real estate development. Both residential, retail, commercial, industrial kind of all sectors are going to be playing a big part in that ongoing development in your region. Brian: Exactly right, and part of the the fun part is, you know, every municipality has different targets of what they view their economic development to look like, and so we get to work with all those cities where some may be really focused on industrial, some may want to be bedroom communities and be focused on residential. Our task is to support those municipalities in this region and identifying good players to bring to the table. So who are people that we do want to partner with that can follow through on the projects that can complete them and make them successful? Chris: That's great. I think I saw recently in the news the state of Texas, I think it's had something along these lines, but it's like a fund for the space-related projects and I know I don't know the name and you'll help me with that, but I seem to recall the governor being in town and making some big announcement right after the first of the year. Tell us a little more about that. Brian: Recall the governor being in town and making some big announcement right after the first of the year. Tell us a little more about that, exactly, right? So last legislative session, primarily spearheaded by State Representative Greg Bonin, who's also a Princewood resident he's a neurosurgeon by day and State Representative Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee during the legislative session he had this kind of vision of how does the state become a major player in the aerospace community. That's been primarily a federal and private industry ecosystem and so under his vision and with support of the state legislature and certainly the governor, they put a bill that kind of outlined a direction for the state to engage and the resources behind it. It does a couple of things. One was it allocated about $200 million that would go to Texas A&M to build this A&M Space Institute, and they've actually located that property. It will be built on the edge of the campus of Johnson Space Center, so for those familiar with this area, right on Saturn Lane. $200 million building and, as A&M's laid it out, it will have a giant lunar rock yard and a giant Mars rock yard, with the idea that everybody who's going to be doing hardware testing to send vehicles to the moon or Mars is trying to figure out where they're going to do that testing. And it's very expensive to build, obviously. And so companies are making the decision whether they're going to build that themselves and own it or go lease it somewhere. And if they're going to lease it, where do you go to find a giant brockyard to simulate the surface of the moon? And well, the state of Texas answered that question. So what was so unique about that vision was that everybody who's in that ecosystem now wants to come through Houston Texas to do that work. And so with that comes the. You know they'll be have their lab space there, but they may need offices, they're going to be hiring people, and so you know it really is an exciting project. They had their groundbreaking right at the end of last year. I've seen surveyors out there and they think they're going to have it open in 2026. So an aggressive timeline to get that bill. The other part to that bill was they appropriated $150 million for a grant program to incentivize sort of space leadership projects in the state of Texas, and so they have to set up a whole, basically administration portion of this. So they selected nine individuals to serve on the Texas Space Commission who will review those proposals and evaluate them and make awards. Who will review those proposals and evaluate them and make awards, and then they'll also help advise the state on how they can keep their leadership position in the space industry. The first of those awards about 20 million were released a little over a week ago. A couple of them were studies for best use for really cool stuff hypersonic corridors where to be landing sites. And then another one that is to build assets and capabilities for the Space Force in El Paso to have more of a Space Force presence in the state of Texas, which is pretty exciting. So I'm optimistic about what's to come for them. Chris: Yeah, that sounds very exciting, especially the concept of the $200 million grant to A&M and what that will do to attract other businesses that might relocate somewhere else and bring them here, and then all the ancillary things around hiring and jobs et cetera. So that's very exciting news and I think it'll be just around the corner. Let's maybe talk a little bit about. You mentioned Maritime and the port, and most Houstonians People know the Houston port is a significant asset for our area. Anything going on there that's new and exciting, any kind of innovation that you see when you're working with those entities and, I guess, the port authority itself. Brian: Yeah, well, maybe the first thing when you talk about the port is you're absolutely right just how important they are to this well, to all of Houston, but to the country I mean. The scale of the port is hard to appreciate when you just look at the numbers. But the numbers are just staggering. The amount of capability that comes through there and the innovation really is on the logistics and management for how they move, whether it's container, you know, container containers, the container terminal organization and how that whole orchestra is operated, and the capabilities from there is that the crane's getting stuff unloaded, then onto the trucks or rail or whatever. The mechanism to get it out and then get it distributed to wherever it's going is pretty incredible, and so we're fortunate to have them. We just hosted the new port CEO, charlie Jenkins, who's a phenomenal leader, has a career in service of the port, is the right guy to lead that organization into their next chapter. But he made this comment kind of in passing that the port's operations are about a $3 billion a day operation, you know, and you just go like a day of economic impact that go into that. The scale is really something impressive and that's all the trickle out and secondary effects. But it's amazing, the big thing that's going on with them right now is Project 11. That's the deepening and widening of the channel that'll allow additional capacity to go in there, and it's really writing the story for what the next chapter of the port's future is and Houston as a trading hub is, and so it'll allow for larger ships to come through. The additional investments they're making will allow faster turn and movement of all the goods that are on there. So a lot of good stuff going on. I guess the last thing I'll say is anybody who's driven 225 sees all those trucks and I drive it pretty regularly and see that too and as much as nobody likes driving next to a giant 18 wheeler, every one of those trucks is jobs and prosperity for our region, and so the next time you're driving there and you see a hundred trucks going down 225, that's our economic prosperity moving around our region and, candidly, around the country. It's good stuff. Chris: It's a good point. Yeah, I mean it's. You wouldn't want the roads to be empty and no trucks moving. I mean that's not a good sign. So feel blessed that we have all that you know in our area and driving all kinds of different prospects and opportunities for people. So when you are working with, let's talk a little bit about these member organizations and all the different moving parts you know what are you doing? How do you, I guess, keep things organized and people kind of moving in the same direction? Just, I would think that in itself is a full-time job. Brian: Yeah, it's a lot, but you know it's good stuff. I guess I'll start with a phrase that I kind of live by, which is we have a lot of stuff going on and so we'll find something to get on about. Right, we can always find something to work together on, and so, if you kind of start with that attitude, there's a lot of common issues that really require a lot of work but you can get maybe not perfect alignment, but general directional alignment. And so you know, one of the big issues we're working with right now is insurance. Right, we're all dealing with it. I'm sure you've gotten your insurance bill, but whether it's home or your business insurance, all those things, and so you can find a lot of commonality and ideas about hey, how can we work with our state leaders, potentially our federal leaders, with the insurance companies themselves, to try to manage the cost of doing that and find ways could it be grouping, doing kind of what they do in medical where you can have these larger groups or other mechanisms to try and help mitigate some of the costs? For that I'm getting a little granular, but you can find these little pockets where you can go move the ball down the field and get general alignment and so we spend a lot of time doing that. But we are very fortunate that our membership and generally this is kind of a Texan spirit type thing is hey, how do we go get some stuff done? Right, we want to go work on some stuff we want to go work on together. Generally it's a rising tide mentality and I spent a good portion of my career in industry and there are times where we compete like crazy and that's fun and, you know, makes great products and great opportunities for our customers. There are a lot of times where we need the tide to rise and finding alignment about that we try to be an outlet for that and keep things running. Right Is that we have not a big staff but a staff that can help make sure that. You know, our members are doing a lot of this stuff as volunteers, right, but they're bringing ideas to the table. So how can we make sure that they're staying engaged, that we're checking in on them, that we're helping carry these things and that we're creating a forum to have the right discussions and bring leaders together so we can invite in elected officials over relevant stuff, the right industry players, and bring them to the table and figure out what we can do, and then I guess the last thing I'll say is that manifests itself. We have a very active state legislative agenda. That we're going to be spending a fair amount of time in Austin, federal priorities. That we work with our congressional delegation and then very on the ground working with our municipalities and all the companies that are out down here to make movement. Probably talk all day about little one-offs. Advert Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom. And thanks for listening to the show at boyermillercom. And thanks for listening to the show. Chris: Well it is. You know legislature is in session, so I know that creates a busy time for you. You talked a lot about some of the opportunities and I hope we can talk some more about that, but I do want to ask you at this point what are some of the headwinds that you see you know this region and specifically kind of where you are. You know that could be out there. That you see you know this region and specifically kind of where you are. You know that could be out there that you've got to try to deal with, to get ahead of or navigate through. Brian: I'll start with. It's a great time down here. Just the way that each one of those big five industry clusters is going about is that it's a. You know they're all doing well and have a lot of opportunity that's on the horizon or that they're in the midst of right now, but certainly you know, a few headwinds. One of the things that we're always worried about and we work actively is just natural disaster flood mitigation and storm surge and making sure that we're resilient and prepared for the future, and so the risk from some incident happening. I'm more excited to talk about, when it comes to that, all the things that we're doing to mitigate that. In terms of flood mitigation, the coastal barrier protection work that we've been spending a lot of time on. That's the Ike Dike. It has a lot of names, but most commonly known is that but a system to protect us from storm surge. So one is the risk of natural disaster I don't like it, but it's a real thing, right? The second is that we're in the you know how do we have responsible development? And so when you have a project that comes online, there are, you know, reasonable concerns from citizens saying, hey, is this the best thing to be doing with this piece of land, and so anytime you're talking about a development that's going to take a field and turn it into a thing, people get concerned about that and that's perfectly reasonable for them to be concerned and want to do that. And so part of what I spend time doing is addressing like, hey, here's why this is worthwhile, here's why this funds your local municipality and build more parks so we can have the resources and the tax base that justify expenditures that come elsewhere and make through that. But just the ability for the public's ability to impact development, as it happens, is important. But for them to do that knowing all the ground truth, knowing what the trades are and understanding that, so that if they are concerned about something that they come with that from an educated knowledge base and so that's out there. And then I certainly don't want to get political, but anytime there's an administration change, there's just priorities that get changed. And so we're still waiting to understand all of those. We're kind of watching how things are shaken out in Washington DC and we'll adapt and make sure that we're doing everything we can to put our region in a great posture with whatever those priorities are at the end of the day. Chris: So yeah, to that last point where you're kind of right in throws that change. Right now that's happening pretty fast, so you got to stay on your toes. Let me take you back to the Ike Dike, because that you know something to get after Harvey. Hurricane Harvey got talked about a lot. You don't hear much about it anymore. Any kind of updates for the listeners. That might be curious. Is it really going to happen and, if so, what's really going on down there to make sure it doesn't happen? Brian: And if so, what's really going on down there to make sure it doesn't happen? Yeah, so it's still moving along, you know, and with some enthusiasm. So a couple of big milestones. One is that in December of 22, it became a formal project of the US Army Corps of Engineers. It was authorized by Congress as a project, so that says, you know, they can now go focus on that. And so the next big question becomes how do we pay for it? To answer that, the state stepped up in a big way in the last legislative session and they had previously formed what's called the Gulf Coast Protection District. That is the local entity for that project. That will work with the US Army Corps of Engineers. So that group exists and has monthly meetings. They actually have an office in our suite. We lease an office to them them and they have their meeting in our conference room two out of every three months and then they do a rotation on that. Third, and they've been funded to the tune of about a half a billion dollars from the state of Texas. So they're ready to take significant action. We've been working with our federal partners about identifying where the big dollars come from for that project. It's going to be expensive and it's going to take a long time, but it will be likely done in phases and so that allows it. Where you don't need this one giant tranche of money all at once, you can do it sort of in a series and address the most important aspects of that, like the gates, some of the initial most highly populated areas, in phases. But we got to get federal appropriations for it. So in addition to the state entity being in our office, actually the US Army Corps of Engineers is on the fourth floor of this building and so all of the players for that project are in one building in our area right here, so that when what I'm hopeful for is if Corps moved in about six months ago, anytime an elected leader wants to come down and meet, they'll get every leader for that project in the same building and often meeting in our conference room or one of the core conference rooms. But a lot more can get done. There's sort of the opportunity for water cooler conversations between the state and the fed folks, and so I'm optimistic that the cadence just from that proximity will be helpful to that effort. Chris: Very good, that's good to hear. Let's change conversation a little bit. So, as I said, you're the president of BHEP. You mentioned your staff. Let's talk a little about leadership. How would you describe your leadership style and how do you think that's evolved kind of as you've been in this role? Brian: Yeah, well, I don't know that I can quantify terribly well, but I'm a kind of hey, all hands on deck and let's all just lean into wherever we're going. Right, and I kind of have that expectation of our team that we're have a clear set of priorities generally around the growth of this region and the projects that we're undertaking and that we're just leaning into them all the time and focusing. That I've been. You know I love getting down and into projects and so that's as I've been on this journey. That's been one of the big focus points to me is that you know you need a team to get this amount of stuff done and the size of these projects and the scope and so the ability to trust in the team and lean on them and let them go run with the ball is really important. I've been extremely fortunate that we have a great staff and we have a great membership base that we can lean on to help go bring those things to fruition. But it's a lot of fun coming to work. I think the team has a great time and enjoy the work that we do and you can see the difference that we make because there are buildings. We can point to that, wouldn't, you know, if not for the work of us and the leaders in this community wouldn't be there, and I'm looking forward to seeing that one on Saturn Lane with giant Texas A&M buildings sticking out of it coming through. Chris: It sounds like it's going to be impressive with the rockyards and all. But, you know, it made me think, though your team has a lot on its plate, I would think at times it may feel overwhelming. So, you know, what do you do to kind of help keep the motivation and keep the energy level up for a team that probably, at some points is, you know, starting to get to the end of the rope or run out of gas? Brian: Yeah, diversity of projects and lots of different stuff to work on. I'm guessing and actually I'd kind of turn that question on you, chris, because I can only imagine the type of stress that you guys live under, especially working big cases and big projects. There's one part that is, hey, we're just all in this together, right, and the esprit de corps that comes with. We're tackling big projects and that's just part of what comes with it. But there's another part where you just need to shift gears for a little bit and work on something different and give yourself a little recharge time. But how do you guys deal with it? I'm curious how? Chris: Boyer Miller, yeah that's a fair question to turn around on me. I would say it's similar. I think it's. You know to me that you can't underestimate the power of a team and if you have the right people on the team, there's some self-motivation just within that group, Right. And then I think it is the. We are fortunate to have very diverse type projects. We practice in all industries. So we may be doing a, a deal or a project, but it's in a different industry and there's different nuances that make it exciting. And at the end of the day I think it's the one point you highlighted on you can point to something and we're helping clients achieve their goals. So we can, you know, point to a deal that's been done or, you know, maybe it's a merger of two companies, or one that's grown and now has a new building and doing whatever. But you can point to those successes that you, where you've helped the client achieve, you know something really big for them and their business and their life. And so I think all of that continues the motivation. Yes, sometimes at the end of a big deal, you need just a little bit of a breather, but you just jump right back in and get going. So it makes it fun. Brian: Well, if you'll let me share. So you and I first met in person, had an opportunity to meet at one of your big forums, and that was a bunch of your customers and clients were there, and I love meeting new folks, as you probably saw, and I you know, walking around just saying, hey, I'm Brian, what do you do? And almost every one of them I would ask like, hey. So how do you know Chris, how do you know this group? You know, have you worked with them? And they all had a story. That was exactly that. You know, whatever thing it was that you helped them. We did XYZ project and it was awesome. We use them all the time for all these things. It was just very striking how passionate your customers, your clients, are with the help they've gotten from you guys, and so, anyway, that is extremely commendable and what I've seen from your team has just been amazing. Chris: Well, I appreciate the feedback. It's always good to get that, especially from different sources. So you know, like I think, we're always trying to create raving fans so that they'll keep coming back and tell their friends. So you get a unique seat and I think it's similar. You kind of analogize back to us. I think we get a unique seat to work with Texas entrepreneurs, and that's a pretty cool thing to do, in my view. What's, what would you or how would you describe the Texas entrepreneurial spirit if you could, based on your experience? Brian: Yeah well, I'm a native Texan. I have this hypothesis that part of the reason we're such a proud bunch is that when you go through I don't know if you grew up in Texas, chris but then also this sense of like we can do big things and big audacious things and we can make big asks and ask big questions and go get it done. And so we see a lot of that down here. And so you know, if you were sitting in I'll make this up Iowa and you said you know I want to have a space business and we want to go put hardware on the moon, and you know your neighbors would look at you and kind of scratch their head and in Texas they'd go oh yeah, that's intuitive machines and they're down the street, you should go. You know, go talk to them. They'd love to work with you. So that kind of spirit is really something special. When I was in industry I traveled all over the country working projects. There's something very special about this region, this community, this state, and that translates into why people want to come here. You know we keep Texas and Houston keep winning all these awards for business, new businesses coming here, people moving here, and that's not by accident, it's not by coincidence. It's because we have a great, great story to tell, whether that's workforce and the capabilities, the affordability of being here, the caliber of people you can work with and who your competitors are, and the level of intensity in the game that we play here is high and that creates the right ingredients for a really thriving community, for entrepreneurs, but also for industry any size. Chris: Right, very good. So what advice would you give to entrepreneurs out there that might be looking to start a business, let's say specifically, kind of within your region? If not, maybe beyond that in Houston? What's? Some of the advice you might give them if they wanted to get involved in some of the all the things you've been talking about. Brian: Yeah, dive in. It's a great community and a great ecosystem and there's a reason people are investing here and making a great run at it. We try to make that as easy as it can be. Now it is not easy. There's no illusions that starting a company you know scaling and growing a company all those things are very challenging. So the question I find myself asking I don't know that I'm in a position to give you know this immense amount of wisdom about these things, but what can we as a community and we as an organization be doing to help that entrepreneur? How do we help them build a relationship so that if they're having trouble with a permit, they know who to go ask, who to go talk to If they have a big idea, who might be good partners If they want to bounce something off, a retired executive who they might go talk to about that has the right skillset, so that we can create the conditions for them to be successful? And so that's really how we find ourselves interfacing that ecosystem is how do we put the right players together to go make things happen? Chris: Very good. So the other thing I'm curious to know is what do you see? You mentioned your five big industries. What have you observed of those industries working together to create innovative ideas to help each other? You got to move forward. Brian: Yeah, there's been a lot of. So workforce has been one of the biggest, especially over the last few years, where there's been this really high intensity competition amongst folks. And I wouldn't be surprised if you have been in some of that with, you know, recruiting and retaining high talent attorneys, right Is that? That's been, and so we've spent a lot of time and I've observed a lot of our members in this community go with that as a spirit of, hey, we're not really doing anybody any good If we're just poaching each other's people and you know, and creating pain points and friction between senior executives and those kinds of things. Let's go look at other communities and go figure out hey, what are the best universities and how do we get the professors that are training the students in it to send resumes to our area, right, and that we have a coalition of companies, not just one company has a relationship with one professor and that company benefits from that it's. How do we build that relationship as a community and say to them hey, we have a very strong demand signal, let's work together on things like that and so feeding that workforce pipeline so we're not divvying up the pie, we're growing it. And so, on the workforce side. I hate to be cliche because everybody's talking about AI, but we've had a couple of membership meetings about it. We've been working with partners about integration of it. We've adopted different technologies that have come out of it. But that stuff really, I mean it's the wave that we're living in right now, and so the integration of that into systems, both the how to do it and the mitigation of risk. I think I saw over the weekend that the new DeepSeek had a big not terribly surprised, but had a giant data leak and compromise, and so when you know when you're using that, I can only imagine, chris, I'd be curious how y'all are integrating it. But you know everything you put in there. You got to assume that at some point, somebody you don't want to have access will at least have the opportunity to have access to it, and so you have to be quite careful about how you integrate it. I, just as an aside, how are you guys using it much? Have you all banished it? What's the? Chris: Well, I'd say it's a little bit of both. I mean, we are definitely looking at and finding ways to integrate it. We've adopted a policy, but it starts with, as you mentioned, with us. It starts and stops with maintaining client confidentiality. So there's some systems out there through recognized kind of legal researchers. So Westlaw comes to mind, where they developed AI tool that is solely within their database. So it's secure, it's, it's all legal. You don't have to worry about we were still spot. You still have to check things right the human element of that. But if you're searching, for example, using the AI tool within Westlaw, you don't have to worry about the fake cases you've seen in the news. But our attorneys, you know, if you're going to use it, it has to be approved through the firm which are only a handful. You can't use anything outside and everything has to be double checked by a person to make sure for accuracy, etc. But so it is. I mean, the confidentiality side is a real concern, not just for law firms, for everybody, any company using it, and unfortunately that's just gonna be more and more what we see right. The more that we're moving everything to cloud, you're going to have people coming after it to try to. You know, on the bad side of that and certain countries it's not illegal to be a hacker. So it's just, you know, that's the world we live in now. Yeah Well, you know, brian, this has been a very interesting conversation and the you know, the last time we spoke I came away with the same feeling, and that is, we talked a lot about a lot of opportunity going on in the three to six o'clock region of greater Houston and we didn't even scratch the surface, I'm sure. But my takeaways have been it doesn't matter what industry again, I said earlier, you always kind of automatically think of space and NASA, but it's every type of business you could think of. An industry you could think of Sounds like you've got ample opportunity for businesses and entrepreneurs to start, grow, expand and be there and thrive. Brian: Well, perfectly said, and I think we get a recording. I may use that in some of our promotional material. Chris, that's exactly right. Great time, great place to be and welcome folks to reach out to us to help however we can if they're interested in looking at opportunities down here for that Before I lose you. Chris, one of the favorite questions that you had sent over that I wanted to ask you that you didn't get a chance to ask is what your favorite recreation vacation spot in the state of Texas is. Chris: Well, I'll answer that. I was about to ask you that. I would say if it's kind of a vacation spot in Texas, it would probably be anywhere along the Texas coast to relax a little bit and get some fishing in. Brian: Perfect. Chris: How about you? Brian: We are huge campers, like we love going camping. My kids are eight and 11 and we have state parks pass, and so any day I'm in a state park is a good day for me. But Inks Lake is one of my favorites and McKinney Falls between the two of those. Those are my top two right now, but we've probably been to Keene and we're just checking off the box to hit them all, and maybe we'll upgrade to National Parks as we get a little bit older. But I love our visiting our state park system. They're just absolutely wonderful. Chris: That's great. Okay, last question You're native Texan, so do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Brian: Oh, I feel like that question is going to get me in trouble, but if you made me choose, I'd pick barbecue. I'll eat it all day, every day, as it shows how about you, how about you? Chris: I think it's a tough one, so I've had some guests. You know, it depends on the day. I probably lean Tex-Mex more than barbecue. But I love the restaurants now that are combining the two, so brisket tacos or brisket nachos or something like that. It's a great combination. Brian: Yeah, there should be an answer all of the above there. Chris: So we're getting close to the rodeo time in Houston, so I have to go with barbecue for now and then back to Tex-Mex, I guess. Brian: Well, I look forward to seeing you at the kickoff event, where we get to go sample a little everything. Deal, that sounds good. Well, I look forward to seeing you at the kickoff event, where we get to go sample a little everything. Chris: Deal. That sounds good. Brian, thanks again for taking the time. Really appreciate your friendship and definitely appreciate what you and your team are doing for all the things business down in the Bay Area. Brian: Well, right back at you, Chris. Thanks for your leadership and all the great work you're doing with your team. Appreciate the opportunity to visit with you today. Thank you. Special Guest: Brian Freedman.
Due to overwhelming demand (>15x applications:slots), we are closing CFPs for AI Engineer Summit NYC today. Last call! Thanks, we'll be reaching out to all shortly!The world's top AI blogger and friend of every pod, Simon Willison, dropped a monster 2024 recap: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024. Brian of the excellent TechMeme Ride Home pinged us for a connection and a special crossover episode, our first in 2025. The target audience for this podcast is a tech-literate, but non-technical one. You can see Simon's notes for AI Engineers in his World's Fair Keynote.Timestamp* 00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome* 01:06 State of AI in 2025* 01:43 Advancements in AI Models* 03:59 Cost Efficiency in AI* 06:16 Challenges and Competition in AI* 17:15 AI Agents and Their Limitations* 26:12 Multimodal AI and Future Prospects* 35:29 Exploring Video Avatar Companies* 36:24 AI Influencers and Their Future* 37:12 Simplifying Content Creation with AI* 38:30 The Importance of Credibility in AI* 41:36 The Future of LLM User Interfaces* 48:58 Local LLMs: A Growing Interest* 01:07:22 AI Wearables: The Next Big Thing* 01:10:16 Wrapping Up and Final ThoughtsTranscript[00:00:00] Introduction and Guest Welcome[00:00:00] Brian: Welcome to the first bonus episode of the Tech Meme Write Home for the year 2025. I'm your host as always, Brian McCullough. Listeners to the pod over the last year know that I have made a habit of quoting from Simon Willison when new stuff happens in AI from his blog. Simon has been, become a go to for many folks in terms of, you know, Analyzing things, criticizing things in the AI space.[00:00:33] Brian: I've wanted to talk to you for a long time, Simon. So thank you for coming on the show. No, it's a privilege to be here. And the person that made this connection happen is our friend Swyx, who has been on the show back, even going back to the, the Twitter Spaces days but also an AI guru in, in their own right Swyx, thanks for coming on the show also.[00:00:54] swyx (2): Thanks. I'm happy to be on and have been a regular listener, so just happy to [00:01:00] contribute as well.[00:01:00] Brian: And a good friend of the pod, as they say. Alright, let's go right into it.[00:01:06] State of AI in 2025[00:01:06] Brian: Simon, I'm going to do the most unfair, broad question first, so let's get it out of the way. The year 2025. Broadly, what is the state of AI as we begin this year?[00:01:20] Brian: Whatever you want to say, I don't want to lead the witness.[00:01:22] Simon: Wow. So many things, right? I mean, the big thing is everything's got really good and fast and cheap. Like, that was the trend throughout all of 2024. The good models got so much cheaper, they got so much faster, they got multimodal, right? The image stuff isn't even a surprise anymore.[00:01:39] Simon: They're growing video, all of that kind of stuff. So that's all really exciting.[00:01:43] Advancements in AI Models[00:01:43] Simon: At the same time, they didn't get massively better than GPT 4, which was a bit of a surprise. So that's sort of one of the open questions is, are we going to see huge, but I kind of feel like that's a bit of a distraction because GPT 4, but way cheaper, much larger context lengths, and it [00:02:00] can do multimodal.[00:02:01] Simon: is better, right? That's a better model, even if it's not.[00:02:05] Brian: What people were expecting or hoping, maybe not expecting is not the right word, but hoping that we would see another step change, right? Right. From like GPT 2 to 3 to 4, we were expecting or hoping that maybe we were going to see the next evolution in that sort of, yeah.[00:02:21] Brian: We[00:02:21] Simon: did see that, but not in the way we expected. We thought the model was just going to get smarter, and instead we got. Massive drops in, drops in price. We got all of these new capabilities. You can talk to the things now, right? They can do simulated audio input, all of that kind of stuff. And so it's kind of, it's interesting to me that the models improved in all of these ways we weren't necessarily expecting.[00:02:43] Simon: I didn't know it would be able to do an impersonation of Santa Claus, like a, you know, Talked to it through my phone and show it what I was seeing by the end of 2024. But yeah, we didn't get that GPT 5 step. And that's one of the big open questions is, is that actually just around the corner and we'll have a bunch of GPT 5 class models drop in the [00:03:00] next few months?[00:03:00] Simon: Or is there a limit?[00:03:03] Brian: If you were a betting man and wanted to put money on it, do you expect to see a phase change, step change in 2025?[00:03:11] Simon: I don't particularly for that, like, the models, but smarter. I think all of the trends we're seeing right now are going to keep on going, especially the inference time compute, right?[00:03:21] Simon: The trick that O1 and O3 are doing, which means that you can solve harder problems, but they cost more and it churns away for longer. I think that's going to happen because that's already proven to work. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe there will be a step change to a GPT 5 level, but honestly, I'd be completely happy if we got what we've got right now.[00:03:41] Simon: But cheaper and faster and more capabilities and longer contexts and so forth. That would be thrilling to me.[00:03:46] Brian: Digging into what you've just said one of the things that, by the way, I hope to link in the show notes to Simon's year end post about what, what things we learned about LLMs in 2024. Look for that in the show notes.[00:03:59] Cost Efficiency in AI[00:03:59] Brian: One of the things that you [00:04:00] did say that you alluded to even right there was that in the last year, you felt like the GPT 4 barrier was broken, like IE. Other models, even open source ones are now regularly matching sort of the state of the art.[00:04:13] Simon: Well, it's interesting, right? So the GPT 4 barrier was a year ago, the best available model was OpenAI's GPT 4 and nobody else had even come close to it.[00:04:22] Simon: And they'd been at the, in the lead for like nine months, right? That thing came out in what, February, March of, of 2023. And for the rest of 2023, nobody else came close. And so at the start of last year, like a year ago, the big question was, Why has nobody beaten them yet? Like, what do they know that the rest of the industry doesn't know?[00:04:40] Simon: And today, that I've counted 18 organizations other than GPT 4 who've put out a model which clearly beats that GPT 4 from a year ago thing. Like, maybe they're not better than GPT 4. 0, but that's, that, that, that barrier got completely smashed. And yeah, a few of those I've run on my laptop, which is wild to me.[00:04:59] Simon: Like, [00:05:00] it was very, very wild. It felt very clear to me a year ago that if you want GPT 4, you need a rack of 40, 000 GPUs just to run the thing. And that turned out not to be true. Like the, the, this is that big trend from last year of the models getting more efficient, cheaper to run, just as capable with smaller weights and so forth.[00:05:20] Simon: And I ran another GPT 4 model on my laptop this morning, right? Microsoft 5. 4 just came out. And that, if you look at the benchmarks, it's definitely, it's up there with GPT 4. 0. It's probably not as good when you actually get into the vibes of the thing, but it, it runs on my, it's a 14 gigabyte download and I can run it on a MacBook Pro.[00:05:38] Simon: Like who saw that coming? The most exciting, like the close of the year on Christmas day, just a few weeks ago, was when DeepSeek dropped their DeepSeek v3 model on Hugging Face without even a readme file. It was just like a giant binary blob that I can't run on my laptop. It's too big. But in all of the benchmarks, it's now by far the best available [00:06:00] open, open weights model.[00:06:01] Simon: Like it's, it's, it's beating the, the metalamas and so forth. And that was trained for five and a half million dollars, which is a tenth of the price that people thought it costs to train these things. So everything's trending smaller and faster and more efficient.[00:06:15] Brian: Well, okay.[00:06:16] Challenges and Competition in AI[00:06:16] Brian: I, I kind of was going to get to that later, but let's, let's combine this with what I was going to ask you next, which is, you know, you're talking, you know, Also in the piece about the LLM prices crashing, which I've even seen in projects that I'm working on, but explain Explain that to a general audience, because we hear all the time that LLMs are eye wateringly expensive to run, but what we're suggesting, and we'll come back to the cheap Chinese LLM, but first of all, for the end user, what you're suggesting is that we're starting to see the cost come down sort of in the traditional technology way of Of costs coming down over time,[00:06:49] Simon: yes, but very aggressively.[00:06:51] Simon: I mean, my favorite thing, the example here is if you look at GPT-3, so open AI's g, PT three, which was the best, a developed model in [00:07:00] 2022 and through most of 20 2023. That, the models that we have today, the OpenAI models are a hundred times cheaper. So there was a 100x drop in price for OpenAI from their best available model, like two and a half years ago to today.[00:07:13] Simon: And[00:07:14] Brian: just to be clear, not to train the model, but for the use of tokens and things. Exactly,[00:07:20] Simon: for running prompts through them. And then When you look at the, the really, the top tier model providers right now, I think, are OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. And there are a bunch of others that I could list there as well.[00:07:32] Simon: Mistral are very good. The, the DeepSeq and Quen models have got great. There's a whole bunch of providers serving really good models. But even if you just look at the sort of big brand name providers, they all offer models now that are A fraction of the price of the, the, of the models we were using last year.[00:07:49] Simon: I think I've got some numbers that I threw into my blog entry here. Yeah. Like Gemini 1. 5 flash, that's Google's fast high quality model is [00:08:00] how much is that? It's 0. 075 dollars per million tokens. Like these numbers are getting, So we just do cents per million now,[00:08:09] swyx (2): cents per million,[00:08:10] Simon: cents per million makes, makes a lot more sense.[00:08:12] Simon: Yeah they have one model 1. 5 flash 8B, the absolute cheapest of the Google models, is 27 times cheaper than GPT 3. 5 turbo was a year ago. That's it. And GPT 3. 5 turbo, that was the cheap model, right? Now we've got something 27 times cheaper, and the Google, this Google one can do image recognition, it can do million token context, all of those tricks.[00:08:36] Simon: But it's, it's, it's very, it's, it really is startling how inexpensive some of this stuff has got.[00:08:41] Brian: Now, are we assuming that this, that happening is directly the result of competition? Because again, you know, OpenAI, and probably they're doing this for their own almost political reasons, strategic reasons, keeps saying, we're losing money on everything, even the 200.[00:08:56] Brian: So they probably wouldn't, the prices wouldn't be [00:09:00] coming down if there wasn't intense competition in this space.[00:09:04] Simon: The competition is absolutely part of it, but I have it on good authority from sources I trust that Google Gemini is not operating at a loss. Like, the amount of electricity to run a prompt is less than they charge you.[00:09:16] Simon: And the same thing for Amazon Nova. Like, somebody found an Amazon executive and got them to say, Yeah, we're not losing money on this. I don't know about Anthropic and OpenAI, but clearly that demonstrates it is possible to run these things at these ludicrously low prices and still not be running at a loss if you discount the Army of PhDs and the, the training costs and all of that kind of stuff.[00:09:36] Brian: One, one more for me before I let Swyx jump in here. To, to come back to DeepSeek and this idea that you could train, you know, a cutting edge model for 6 million. I, I was saying on the show, like six months ago, that if we are getting to the point where each new model It would cost a billion, ten billion, a hundred billion to train that.[00:09:54] Brian: At some point it would almost, only nation states would be able to train the new models. Do you [00:10:00] expect what DeepSeek and maybe others are proving to sort of blow that up? Or is there like some sort of a parallel track here that maybe I'm not technically, I don't have the mouse to understand the difference.[00:10:11] Brian: Is the model, are the models going to go, you know, Up to a hundred billion dollars or can we get them down? Sort of like DeepSeek has proven[00:10:18] Simon: so I'm the wrong person to answer that because I don't work in the lab training these models. So I can give you my completely uninformed opinion, which is, I felt like the DeepSeek thing.[00:10:27] Simon: That was a bomb shell. That was an absolute bombshell when they came out and said, Hey, look, we've trained. One of the best available models and it cost us six, five and a half million dollars to do it. I feel, and they, the reason, one of the reasons it's so efficient is that we put all of these export controls in to stop Chinese companies from giant buying GPUs.[00:10:44] Simon: So they've, were forced to be, go as efficient as possible. And yet the fact that they've demonstrated that that's possible to do. I think it does completely tear apart this, this, this mental model we had before that yeah, the training runs just keep on getting more and more expensive and the number of [00:11:00] organizations that can afford to run these training runs keeps on shrinking.[00:11:03] Simon: That, that's been blown out of the water. So yeah, that's, again, this was our Christmas gift. This was the thing they dropped on Christmas day. Yeah, it makes me really optimistic that we can, there are, It feels like there was so much low hanging fruit in terms of the efficiency of both inference and training and we spent a whole bunch of last year exploring that and getting results from it.[00:11:22] Simon: I think there's probably a lot left. I think there's probably, well, I would not be surprised to see even better models trained spending even less money over the next six months.[00:11:31] swyx (2): Yeah. So I, I think there's a unspoken angle here on what exactly the Chinese labs are trying to do because DeepSea made a lot of noise.[00:11:41] swyx (2): so much for joining us for around the fact that they train their model for six million dollars and nobody quite quite believes them. Like it's very, very rare for a lab to trumpet the fact that they're doing it for so cheap. They're not trying to get anyone to buy them. So why [00:12:00] are they doing this? They make it very, very obvious.[00:12:05] swyx (2): Deepseek is about 150 employees. It's an order of magnitude smaller than at least Anthropic and maybe, maybe more so for OpenAI. And so what's, what's the end game here? Are they, are they just trying to show that the Chinese are better than us?[00:12:21] Simon: So Deepseek, it's the arm of a hedge, it's a, it's a quant fund, right?[00:12:25] Simon: It's an algorithmic quant trading thing. So I, I, I would love to get more insight into how that organization works. My assumption from what I've seen is it looks like they're basically just flexing. They're like, hey, look at how utterly brilliant we are with this amazing thing that we've done. And it's, it's working, right?[00:12:43] Simon: They but, and so is that it? Are they, is this just their kind of like, this is, this is why our company is so amazing. Look at this thing that we've done, or? I don't know. I'd, I'd love to get Some insight from, from within that industry as to, as to how that's all playing out.[00:12:57] swyx (2): The, the prevailing theory among the Local Llama [00:13:00] crew and the Twitter crew that I indexed for my newsletter is that there is some amount of copying going on.[00:13:06] swyx (2): It's like Sam Altman you know, tweet, tweeting about how they're being copied. And then also there's this, there, there are other sort of opening eye employees that have said, Stuff that is similar that DeepSeek's rate of progress is how U. S. intelligence estimates the number of foreign spies embedded in top labs.[00:13:22] swyx (2): Because a lot of these ideas do spread around, but they surprisingly have a very high density of them in the DeepSeek v3 technical report. So it's, it's interesting. We don't know how much, how many, how much tokens. I think that, you know, people have run analysis on how often DeepSeek thinks it is cloud or thinks it is opening GPC 4.[00:13:40] swyx (2): Thanks for watching! And we don't, we don't know. We don't know. I think for me, like, yeah, we'll, we'll, we basically will never know as, as external commentators. I think what's interesting is how, where does this go? Is there a logical floor or bottom by my estimations for the same amount of ELO started last year to the end of last year cost went down by a thousand X for the [00:14:00] GPT, for, for GPT 4 intelligence.[00:14:02] swyx (2): Would, do they go down a thousand X this year?[00:14:04] Simon: That's a fascinating question. Yeah.[00:14:06] swyx (2): Is there a Moore's law going on, or did we just get a one off benefit last year for some weird reason?[00:14:14] Simon: My uninformed hunch is low hanging fruit. I feel like up until a year ago, people haven't been focusing on efficiency at all. You know, it was all about, what can we get these weird shaped things to do?[00:14:24] Simon: And now once we've sort of hit that, okay, we know that we can get them to do what GPT 4 can do, When thousands of researchers around the world all focus on, okay, how do we make this more efficient? What are the most important, like, how do we strip out all of the weights that have stuff in that doesn't really matter?[00:14:39] Simon: All of that kind of thing. So yeah, maybe that was it. Maybe 2024 was a freak year of all of the low hanging fruit coming out at once. And we'll actually see a reduction in the, in that rate of improvement in terms of efficiency. I wonder, I mean, I think we'll know for sure in about three months time if that trend's going to continue or not.[00:14:58] swyx (2): I agree. You know, I [00:15:00] think the other thing that you mentioned that DeepSeq v3 was the gift that was given from DeepSeq over Christmas, but I feel like the other thing that might be underrated was DeepSeq R1,[00:15:11] Speaker 4: which is[00:15:13] swyx (2): a reasoning model you can run on your laptop. And I think that's something that a lot of people are looking ahead to this year.[00:15:18] swyx (2): Oh, did they[00:15:18] Simon: release the weights for that one?[00:15:20] swyx (2): Yeah.[00:15:21] Simon: Oh my goodness, I missed that. I've been playing with the quen. So the other great, the other big Chinese AI app is Alibaba's quen. Actually, yeah, I, sorry, R1 is an API available. Yeah. Exactly. When that's really cool. So Alibaba's Quen have released two reasoning models that I've run on my laptop.[00:15:38] Simon: Now there was, the first one was Q, Q, WQ. And then the second one was QVQ because the second one's a vision model. So you can like give it vision puzzles and a prompt that these things, they are so much fun to run. Because they think out loud. It's like the OpenAR 01 sort of hides its thinking process. The Query ones don't.[00:15:59] Simon: They just, they [00:16:00] just churn away. And so you'll give it a problem and it will output literally dozens of paragraphs of text about how it's thinking. My favorite thing that happened with QWQ is I asked it to draw me a pelican on a bicycle in SVG. That's like my standard stupid prompt. And for some reason it thought in Chinese.[00:16:18] Simon: It spat out a whole bunch of like Chinese text onto my terminal on my laptop, and then at the end it gave me quite a good sort of artistic pelican on a bicycle. And I ran it all through Google Translate, and yeah, it was like, it was contemplating the nature of SVG files as a starting point. And the fact that my laptop can think in Chinese now is so delightful.[00:16:40] Simon: It's so much fun watching you do that.[00:16:43] swyx (2): Yeah, I think Andrej Karpathy was saying, you know, we, we know that we have achieved proper reasoning inside of these models when they stop thinking in English, and perhaps the best form of thought is in Chinese. But yeah, for listeners who don't know Simon's blog he always, whenever a new model comes out, you, I don't know how you do it, but [00:17:00] you're always the first to run Pelican Bench on these models.[00:17:02] swyx (2): I just did it for 5.[00:17:05] Simon: Yeah.[00:17:07] swyx (2): So I really appreciate that. You should check it out. These are not theoretical. Simon's blog actually shows them.[00:17:12] Brian: Let me put on the investor hat for a second.[00:17:15] AI Agents and Their Limitations[00:17:15] Brian: Because from the investor side of things, a lot of the, the VCs that I know are really hot on agents, and this is the year of agents, but last year was supposed to be the year of agents as well. Lots of money flowing towards, And Gentic startups.[00:17:32] Brian: But in in your piece that again, we're hopefully going to have linked in the show notes, you sort of suggest there's a fundamental flaw in AI agents as they exist right now. Let me let me quote you. And then I'd love to dive into this. You said, I remain skeptical as to their ability based once again, on the Challenge of gullibility.[00:17:49] Brian: LLMs believe anything you tell them, any systems that attempt to make meaningful decisions on your behalf, will run into the same roadblock. How good is a travel agent, or a digital assistant, or even a research tool, if it [00:18:00] can't distinguish truth from fiction? So, essentially, what you're suggesting is that the state of the art now that allows agents is still, it's still that sort of 90 percent problem, the edge problem, getting to the Or, or, or is there a deeper flaw?[00:18:14] Brian: What are you, what are you saying there?[00:18:16] Simon: So this is the fundamental challenge here and honestly my frustration with agents is mainly around definitions Like any if you ask anyone who says they're working on agents to define agents You will get a subtly different definition from each person But everyone always assumes that their definition is the one true one that everyone else understands So I feel like a lot of these agent conversations, people talking past each other because one person's talking about the, the sort of travel agent idea of something that books things on your behalf.[00:18:41] Simon: Somebody else is talking about LLMs with tools running in a loop with a cron job somewhere and all of these different things. You, you ask academics and they'll laugh at you because they've been debating what agents mean for over 30 years at this point. It's like this, this long running, almost sort of an in joke in that community.[00:18:57] Simon: But if we assume that for this purpose of this conversation, an [00:19:00] agent is something that, Which you can give a job and it goes off and it does that thing for you like, like booking travel or things like that. The fundamental challenge is, it's the reliability thing, which comes from this gullibility problem.[00:19:12] Simon: And a lot of my, my interest in this originally came from when I was thinking about prompt injections as a source of this form of attack against LLM systems where you deliberately lay traps out there for this LLM to stumble across,[00:19:24] Brian: and which I should say you have been banging this drum that no one's gotten any far, at least on solving this, that I'm aware of, right.[00:19:31] Brian: Like that's still an open problem. The two years.[00:19:33] Simon: Yeah. Right. We've been talking about this problem and like, a great illustration of this was Claude so Anthropic released Claude computer use a few months ago. Fantastic demo. You could fire up a Docker container and you could literally tell it to do something and watch it open a web browser and navigate to a webpage and click around and so forth.[00:19:51] Simon: Really, really, really interesting and fun to play with. And then, um. One of the first demos somebody tried was, what if you give it a web page that says download and run this [00:20:00] executable, and it did, and the executable was malware that added it to a botnet. So the, the very first most obvious dumb trick that you could play on this thing just worked, right?[00:20:10] Simon: So that's obviously a really big problem. If I'm going to send something out to book travel on my behalf, I mean, it's hard enough for me to figure out which airlines are trying to scam me and which ones aren't. Do I really trust a language model that believes the literal truth of anything that's presented to it to go out and do those things?[00:20:29] swyx (2): Yeah I definitely think there's, it's interesting to see Anthropic doing this because they used to be the safety arm of OpenAI that split out and said, you know, we're worried about letting this thing out in the wild and here they are enabling computer use for agents. Thanks. The, it feels like things have merged.[00:20:49] swyx (2): You know, I'm, I'm also fairly skeptical about, you know, this always being the, the year of Linux on the desktop. And this is the equivalent of this being the year of agents that people [00:21:00] are not predicting so much as wishfully thinking and hoping and praying for their companies and agents to work.[00:21:05] swyx (2): But I, I feel like things are. Coming along a little bit. It's to me, it's kind of like self driving. I remember in 2014 saying that self driving was just around the corner. And I mean, it kind of is, you know, like in, in, in the Bay area. You[00:21:17] Simon: get in a Waymo and you're like, Oh, this works. Yeah, but it's a slow[00:21:21] swyx (2): cook.[00:21:21] swyx (2): It's a slow cook over the next 10 years. We're going to hammer out these things and the cynical people can just point to all the flaws, but like, there are measurable or concrete progress steps that are being made by these builders.[00:21:33] Simon: There is one form of agent that I believe in. I believe, mostly believe in the research assistant form of agents.[00:21:39] Simon: The thing where you've got a difficult problem and, and I've got like, I'm, I'm on the beta for the, the Google Gemini 1. 5 pro with deep research. I think it's called like these names, these names. Right. But. I've been using that. It's good, right? You can give it a difficult problem and it tells you, okay, I'm going to look at 56 different websites [00:22:00] and it goes away and it dumps everything to its context and it comes up with a report for you.[00:22:04] Simon: And it's not, it won't work against adversarial websites, right? If there are websites with deliberate lies in them, it might well get caught out. Most things don't have that as a problem. And so I've had some answers from that which were genuinely really valuable to me. And that feels to me like, I can see how given existing LLM tech, especially with Google Gemini with its like million token contacts and Google with their crawl of the entire web and their, they've got like search, they've got search and cache, they've got a cache of every page and so forth.[00:22:35] Simon: That makes sense to me. And that what they've got right now, I don't think it's, it's not as good as it can be, obviously, but it's, it's, it's, it's a real useful thing, which they're going to start rolling out. So, you know, Perplexity have been building the same thing for a couple of years. That, that I believe in.[00:22:50] Simon: You know, if you tell me that you're going to have an agent that's a research assistant agent, great. The coding agents I mean, chat gpt code interpreter, Nearly two years [00:23:00] ago, that thing started writing Python code, executing the code, getting errors, rewriting it to fix the errors. That pattern obviously works.[00:23:07] Simon: That works really, really well. So, yeah, coding agents that do that sort of error message loop thing, those are proven to work. And they're going to keep on getting better, and that's going to be great. The research assistant agents are just beginning to get there. The things I'm critical of are the ones where you trust, you trust this thing to go out and act autonomously on your behalf, and make decisions on your behalf, especially involving spending money, like that.[00:23:31] Simon: I don't see that working for a very long time. That feels to me like an AGI level problem.[00:23:37] swyx (2): It's it's funny because I think Stripe actually released an agent toolkit which is one of the, the things I featured that is trying to enable these agents each to have a wallet that they can go and spend and have, basically, it's a virtual card.[00:23:49] swyx (2): It's not that, not that difficult with modern infrastructure. can[00:23:51] Simon: stick a 50 cap on it, then at least it's an honor. Can't lose more than 50.[00:23:56] Brian: You know I don't, I don't know if either of you know Rafat Ali [00:24:00] he runs Skift, which is a, a travel news vertical. And he, he, he constantly laughs at the fact that every agent thing is, we're gonna get rid of booking a, a plane flight for you, you know?[00:24:11] Brian: And, and I would point out that, like, historically, when the web started, the first thing everyone talked about is, You can go online and book a trip, right? So it's funny for each generation of like technological advance. The thing they always want to kill is the travel agent. And now they want to kill the webpage travel agent.[00:24:29] Simon: Like it's like I use Google flight search. It's great, right? If you gave me an agent to do that for me, it would save me, I mean, maybe 15 seconds of typing in my things, but I still want to see what my options are and go, yeah, I'm not flying on that airline, no matter how cheap they are.[00:24:44] swyx (2): Yeah. For listeners, go ahead.[00:24:47] swyx (2): For listeners, I think, you know, I think both of you are pretty positive on NotebookLM. And you know, we, we actually interviewed the NotebookLM creators, and there are actually two internal agents going on internally. The reason it takes so long is because they're running an agent loop [00:25:00] inside that is fairly autonomous, which is kind of interesting.[00:25:01] swyx (2): For one,[00:25:02] Simon: for a definition of agent loop, if you picked that particularly well. For one definition. And you're talking about the podcast side of this, right?[00:25:07] swyx (2): Yeah, the podcast side of things. They have a there's, there's going to be a new version coming out that, that we'll be featuring at our, at our conference.[00:25:14] Simon: That one's fascinating to me. Like NotebookLM, I think it's two products, right? On the one hand, it's actually a very good rag product, right? You dump a bunch of things in, you can run searches, that, that, it does a good job of. And then, and then they added the, the podcast thing. It's a bit of a, it's a total gimmick, right?[00:25:30] Simon: But that gimmick got them attention, because they had a great product that nobody paid any attention to at all. And then you add the unfeasibly good voice synthesis of the podcast. Like, it's just, it's, it's, it's the lesson.[00:25:43] Brian: It's the lesson of mid journey and stuff like that. If you can create something that people can post on socials, you don't have to lift a finger again to do any marketing for what you're doing.[00:25:53] Brian: Let me dig into Notebook LLM just for a second as a podcaster. As a [00:26:00] gimmick, it makes sense, and then obviously, you know, you dig into it, it sort of has problems around the edges. It's like, it does the thing that all sort of LLMs kind of do, where it's like, oh, we want to Wrap up with a conclusion.[00:26:12] Multimodal AI and Future Prospects[00:26:12] Brian: I always call that like the the eighth grade book report paper problem where it has to have an intro and then, you know But that's sort of a thing where because I think you spoke about this again in your piece at the year end About how things are going multimodal and how things are that you didn't expect like, you know vision and especially audio I think So that's another thing where, at least over the last year, there's been progress made that maybe you, you didn't think was coming as quick as it came.[00:26:43] Simon: I don't know. I mean, a year ago, we had one really good vision model. We had GPT 4 vision, was, was, was very impressive. And Google Gemini had just dropped Gemini 1. 0, which had vision, but nobody had really played with it yet. Like Google hadn't. People weren't taking Gemini [00:27:00] seriously at that point. I feel like it was 1.[00:27:02] Simon: 5 Pro when it became apparent that actually they were, they, they got over their hump and they were building really good models. And yeah, and they, to be honest, the video models are mostly still using the same trick. The thing where you divide the video up into one image per second and you dump that all into the context.[00:27:16] Simon: So maybe it shouldn't have been so surprising to us that long context models plus vision meant that the video was, was starting to be solved. Of course, it didn't. Not being, you, what you really want with videos, you want to be able to do the audio and the images at the same time. And I think the models are beginning to do that now.[00:27:33] Simon: Like, originally, Gemini 1. 5 Pro originally ignored the audio. It just did the, the, like, one frame per second video trick. As far as I can tell, the most recent ones are actually doing pure multimodal. But the things that opens up are just extraordinary. Like, the the ChatGPT iPhone app feature that they shipped as one of their 12 days of, of OpenAI, I really can be having a conversation and just turn on my video camera and go, Hey, what kind of tree is [00:28:00] this?[00:28:00] Simon: And so forth. And it works. And for all I know, that's just snapping a like picture once a second and feeding it into the model. The, the, the things that you can do with that as an end user are extraordinary. Like that, that to me, I don't think most people have cottoned onto the fact that you can now stream video directly into a model because it, it's only a few weeks old.[00:28:22] Simon: Wow. That's a, that's a, that's a, that's Big boost in terms of what kinds of things you can do with this stuff. Yeah. For[00:28:30] swyx (2): people who are not that close I think Gemini Flashes free tier allows you to do something like capture a photo, one photo every second or a minute and leave it on 24, seven, and you can prompt it to do whatever.[00:28:45] swyx (2): And so you can effectively have your own camera app or monitoring app that that you just prompt and it detects where it changes. It detects for, you know, alerts or anything like that, or describes your day. You know, and, and, and the fact that this is free I think [00:29:00] it's also leads into the previous point of it being the prices haven't come down a lot.[00:29:05] Simon: And even if you're paying for this stuff, like a thing that I put in my blog entry is I ran a calculation on what it would cost to process 68, 000 photographs in my photo collection, and for each one just generate a caption, and using Gemini 1. 5 Flash 8B, it would cost me 1. 68 to process 68, 000 images, which is, I mean, that, that doesn't make sense.[00:29:28] Simon: None of that makes sense. Like it's, it's a, for one four hundredth of a cent per image to generate captions now. So you can see why feeding in a day's worth of video just isn't even very expensive to process.[00:29:40] swyx (2): Yeah, I'll tell you what is expensive. It's the other direction. So we're here, we're talking about consuming video.[00:29:46] swyx (2): And this year, we also had a lot of progress, like probably one of the most excited, excited, anticipated launches of the year was Sora. We actually got Sora. And less exciting.[00:29:55] Simon: We did, and then VO2, Google's Sora, came out like three [00:30:00] days later and upstaged it. Like, Sora was exciting until VO2 landed, which was just better.[00:30:05] swyx (2): In general, I feel the media, or the social media, has been very unfair to Sora. Because what was released to the world, generally available, was Sora Lite. It's the distilled version of Sora, right? So you're, I did not[00:30:16] Simon: realize that you're absolutely comparing[00:30:18] swyx (2): the, the most cherry picked version of VO two, the one that they published on the marketing page to the, the most embarrassing version of the soa.[00:30:25] swyx (2): So of course it's gonna look bad, so, well, I got[00:30:27] Simon: access to the VO two I'm in the VO two beta and I've been poking around with it and. Getting it to generate pelicans on bicycles and stuff. I would absolutely[00:30:34] swyx (2): believe that[00:30:35] Simon: VL2 is actually better. Is Sora, so is full fat Sora coming soon? Do you know, when, when do we get to play with that one?[00:30:42] Simon: No one's[00:30:43] swyx (2): mentioned anything. I think basically the strategy is let people play around with Sora Lite and get info there. But the, the, keep developing Sora with the Hollywood studios. That's what they actually care about. Gotcha. Like the rest of us. Don't really know what to do with the video anyway. Right.[00:30:59] Simon: I mean, [00:31:00] that's my thing is I realized that for generative images and images and video like images We've had for a few years and I don't feel like they've broken out into the talented artist community yet Like lots of people are having fun with them and doing and producing stuff. That's kind of cool to look at but what I want you know that that movie everything everywhere all at once, right?[00:31:20] Simon: One, one ton of Oscars, utterly amazing film. The VFX team for that were five people, some of whom were watching YouTube videos to figure out what to do. My big question for, for Sora and and and Midjourney and stuff, what happens when a creative team like that starts using these tools? I want the creative geniuses behind everything, everywhere all at once.[00:31:40] Simon: What are they going to be able to do with this stuff in like a few years time? Because that's really exciting to me. That's where you take artists who are at the very peak of their game. Give them these new capabilities and see, see what they can do with them.[00:31:52] swyx (2): I should, I know a little bit here. So it should mention that, that team actually used RunwayML.[00:31:57] swyx (2): So there was, there was,[00:31:57] Simon: yeah.[00:31:59] swyx (2): I don't know how [00:32:00] much I don't. So, you know, it's possible to overstate this, but there are people integrating it. Generated video within their workflow, even pre SORA. Right, because[00:32:09] Brian: it's not, it's not the thing where it's like, okay, tomorrow we'll be able to do a full two hour movie that you prompt with three sentences.[00:32:15] Brian: It is like, for the very first part of, of, you know video effects in film, it's like, if you can get that three second clip, if you can get that 20 second thing that they did in the matrix that blew everyone's minds and took a million dollars or whatever to do, like, it's the, it's the little bits and pieces that they can fill in now that it's probably already there.[00:32:34] swyx (2): Yeah, it's like, I think actually having a layered view of what assets people need and letting AI fill in the low value assets. Right, like the background video, the background music and, you know, sometimes the sound effects. That, that maybe, maybe more palatable maybe also changes the, the way that you evaluate the stuff that's coming out.[00:32:57] swyx (2): Because people tend to, in social media, try to [00:33:00] emphasize foreground stuff, main character stuff. So you really care about consistency, and you, you really are bothered when, like, for example, Sorad. Botch's image generation of a gymnast doing flips, which is horrible. It's horrible. But for background crowds, like, who cares?[00:33:18] Brian: And by the way, again, I was, I was a film major way, way back in the day, like, that's how it started. Like things like Braveheart, where they filmed 10 people on a field, and then the computer could turn it into 1000 people on a field. Like, that's always been the way it's around the margins and in the background that first comes in.[00:33:36] Brian: The[00:33:36] Simon: Lord of the Rings movies were over 20 years ago. Although they have those giant battle sequences, which were very early, like, I mean, you could almost call it a generative AI approach, right? They were using very sophisticated, like, algorithms to model out those different battles and all of that kind of stuff.[00:33:52] Simon: Yeah, I know very little. I know basically nothing about film production, so I try not to commentate on it. But I am fascinated to [00:34:00] see what happens when, when these tools start being used by the real, the people at the top of their game.[00:34:05] swyx (2): I would say like there's a cultural war that is more that being fought here than a technology war.[00:34:11] swyx (2): Most of the Hollywood people are against any form of AI anyway, so they're busy Fighting that battle instead of thinking about how to adopt it and it's, it's very fringe. I participated here in San Francisco, one generative AI video creative hackathon where the AI positive artists actually met with technologists like myself and then we collaborated together to build short films and that was really nice and I think, you know, I'll be hosting some of those in my events going forward.[00:34:38] swyx (2): One thing that I think like I want to leave it. Give people a sense of it's like this is a recap of last year But then sometimes it's useful to walk away as well with like what can we expect in the future? I don't know if you got anything. I would also call out that the Chinese models here have made a lot of progress Hyde Law and Kling and God knows who like who else in the video arena [00:35:00] Also making a lot of progress like surprising him like I think maybe actually Chinese China is surprisingly ahead with regards to Open8 at least, but also just like specific forms of video generation.[00:35:12] Simon: Wouldn't it be interesting if a film industry sprung up in a country that we don't normally think of having a really strong film industry that was using these tools? Like, that would be a fascinating sort of angle on this. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.[00:35:25] swyx (2): Agreed. I, I, I Oh, sorry. Go ahead.[00:35:29] Exploring Video Avatar Companies[00:35:29] swyx (2): Just for people's Just to put it on people's radar as well, Hey Jen, there's like there's a category of video avatar companies that don't specifically, don't specialize in general video.[00:35:41] swyx (2): They only do talking heads, let's just say. And HeyGen sings very well.[00:35:45] Brian: Swyx, you know that that's what I've been using, right? Like, have, have I, yeah, right. So, if you see some of my recent YouTube videos and things like that, where, because the beauty part of the HeyGen thing is, I, I, I don't want to use the robot voice, so [00:36:00] I record the mp3 file for my computer, And then I put that into HeyGen with the avatar that I've trained it on, and all it does is the lip sync.[00:36:09] Brian: So it looks, it's not 100 percent uncanny valley beatable, but it's good enough that if you weren't looking for it, it's just me sitting there doing one of my clips from the show. And, yeah, so, by the way, HeyGen. Shout out to them.[00:36:24] AI Influencers and Their Future[00:36:24] swyx (2): So I would, you know, in terms of like the look ahead going, like, looking, reviewing 2024, looking at trends for 2025, I would, they basically call this out.[00:36:33] swyx (2): Meta tried to introduce AI influencers and failed horribly because they were just bad at it. But at some point that there will be more and more basically AI influencers Not in a way that Simon is but in a way that they are not human.[00:36:50] Simon: Like the few of those that have done well, I always feel like they're doing well because it's a gimmick, right?[00:36:54] Simon: It's a it's it's novel and fun to like Like that, the AI Seinfeld thing [00:37:00] from last year, the Twitch stream, you know, like those, if you're the only one or one of just a few doing that, you'll get, you'll attract an audience because it's an interesting new thing. But I just, I don't know if that's going to be sustainable longer term or not.[00:37:11] Simon: Like,[00:37:12] Simplifying Content Creation with AI[00:37:12] Brian: I'm going to tell you, Because I've had discussions, I can't name the companies or whatever, but, so think about the workflow for this, like, now we all know that on TikTok and Instagram, like, holding up a phone to your face, and doing like, in my car video, or walking, a walk and talk, you know, that's, that's very common, but also, if you want to do a professional sort of talking head video, you still have to sit in front of a camera, you still have to do the lighting, you still have to do the video editing, versus, if you can just record, what I'm saying right now, the last 30 seconds, If you clip that out as an mp3 and you have a good enough avatar, then you can put that avatar in front of Times Square, on a beach, or whatever.[00:37:50] Brian: So, like, again for creators, the reason I think Simon, we're on the verge of something, it, it just, it's not going to, I think it's not, oh, we're going to have [00:38:00] AI avatars take over, it'll be one of those things where it takes another piece of the workflow out and simplifies it. I'm all[00:38:07] Simon: for that. I, I always love this stuff.[00:38:08] Simon: I like tools. Tools that help human beings do more. Do more ambitious things. I'm always in favor of, like, that, that, that's what excites me about this entire field.[00:38:17] swyx (2): Yeah. We're, we're looking into basically creating one for my podcast. We have this guy Charlie, he's Australian. He's, he's not real, but he pre, he opens every show and we are gonna have him present all the shorts.[00:38:29] Simon: Yeah, go ahead.[00:38:30] The Importance of Credibility in AI[00:38:30] Simon: The thing that I keep coming back to is this idea of credibility like in a world that is full of like AI generated everything and so forth It becomes even more important that people find the sources of information that they trust and find people and find Sources that are credible and I feel like that's the one thing that LLMs and AI can never have is credibility, right?[00:38:49] Simon: ChatGPT can never stake its reputation on telling you something useful and interesting because That means nothing, right? It's a matrix multiplication. It depends on who prompted it and so forth. So [00:39:00] I'm always, and this is when I'm blogging as well, I'm always looking for, okay, who are the reliable people who will tell me useful, interesting information who aren't just going to tell me whatever somebody's paying them to tell, tell them, who aren't going to, like, type a one sentence prompt into an LLM and spit out an essay and stick it online.[00:39:16] Simon: And that, that to me, Like, earning that credibility is really important. That's why a lot of my ethics around the way that I publish are based on the idea that I want people to trust me. I want to do things that, that gain credibility in people's eyes so they will come to me for information as a trustworthy source.[00:39:32] Simon: And it's the same for the sources that I'm, I'm consulting as well. So that's something I've, I've been thinking a lot about that sort of credibility focus on this thing for a while now.[00:39:40] swyx (2): Yeah, you can layer or structure credibility or decompose it like so one thing I would put in front of you I'm not saying that you should Agree with this or accept this at all is that you can use AI to generate different Variations and then and you pick you as the final sort of last mile person that you pick The last output and [00:40:00] you put your stamp of credibility behind that like that everything's human reviewed instead of human origin[00:40:04] Simon: Yeah, if you publish something you need to be able to put it on the ground Publishing it.[00:40:08] Simon: You need to say, I will put my name to this. I will attach my credibility to this thing. And if you're willing to do that, then, then that's great.[00:40:16] swyx (2): For creators, this is huge because there's a fundamental asymmetry between starting with a blank slate versus choosing from five different variations.[00:40:23] Brian: Right.[00:40:24] Brian: And also the key thing that you just said is like, if everything that I do, if all of the words were generated by an LLM, if the voice is generated by an LLM. If the video is also generated by the LLM, then I haven't done anything, right? But if, if one or two of those, you take a shortcut, but it's still, I'm willing to sign off on it.[00:40:47] Brian: Like, I feel like that's where I feel like people are coming around to like, this is maybe acceptable, sort of.[00:40:53] Simon: This is where I've been pushing the definition. I love the term slop. Where I've been pushing the definition of slop as AI generated [00:41:00] content that is both unrequested and unreviewed and the unreviewed thing is really important like that's the thing that elevates something from slop to not slop is if A human being has reviewed it and said, you know what, this is actually worth other people's time.[00:41:12] Simon: And again, I'm willing to attach my credibility to it and say, hey, this is worthwhile.[00:41:16] Brian: It's, it's, it's the cura curational, curatorial and editorial part of it that no matter what the tools are to do shortcuts, to do, as, as Swyx is saying choose between different edits or different cuts, but in the end, if there's a curatorial mind, Or editorial mind behind it.[00:41:32] Brian: Let me I want to wedge this in before we start to close.[00:41:36] The Future of LLM User Interfaces[00:41:36] Brian: One of the things coming back to your year end piece that has been a something that I've been banging the drum about is when you're talking about LLMs. Getting harder to use. You said most users are thrown in at the deep end.[00:41:48] Brian: The default LLM chat UI is like taking brand new computer users, dropping them into a Linux terminal and expecting them to figure it all out. I mean, it's, it's literally going back to the command line. The command line was defeated [00:42:00] by the GUI interface. And this is what I've been banging the drum about is like, this cannot be.[00:42:05] Brian: The user interface, what we have now cannot be the end result. Do you see any hints or seeds of a GUI moment for LLM interfaces?[00:42:17] Simon: I mean, it has to happen. It absolutely has to happen. The the, the, the, the usability of these things is turning into a bit of a crisis. And we are at least seeing some really interesting innovation in little directions.[00:42:28] Simon: Just like OpenAI's chat GPT canvas thing that they just launched. That is at least. Going a little bit more interesting than just chat, chats and responses. You know, you can, they're exploring that space where you're collaborating with an LLM. You're both working in the, on the same document. That makes a lot of sense to me.[00:42:44] Simon: Like that, that feels really smart. The one of the best things is still who was it who did the, the UI where you could, they had a drawing UI where you draw an interface and click a button. TL draw would then make it real thing. That was spectacular, [00:43:00] absolutely spectacular, like, alternative vision of how you'd interact with these models.[00:43:05] Simon: Because yeah, the and that's, you know, so I feel like there is so much scope for innovation there and it is beginning to happen. Like, like, I, I feel like most people do understand that we need to do better in terms of interfaces that both help explain what's going on and give people better tools for working with models.[00:43:23] Simon: I was going to say, I want to[00:43:25] Brian: dig a little deeper into this because think of the conceptual idea behind the GUI, which is instead of typing into a command line open word. exe, it's, you, you click an icon, right? So that's abstracting away sort of the, again, the programming stuff that like, you know, it's, it's a, a, a child can tap on an iPad and, and make a program open, right?[00:43:47] Brian: The problem it seems to me right now with how we're interacting with LLMs is it's sort of like you know a dumb robot where it's like you poke it and it goes over here, but no, I want it, I want to go over here so you poke it this way and you can't get it exactly [00:44:00] right, like, what can we abstract away from the From the current, what's going on that, that makes it more fine tuned and easier to get more precise.[00:44:12] Brian: You see what I'm saying?[00:44:13] Simon: Yes. And the this is the other trend that I've been following from the last year, which I think is super interesting. It's the, the prompt driven UI development thing. Basically, this is the pattern where Claude Artifacts was the first thing to do this really well. You type in a prompt and it goes, Oh, I should answer that by writing a custom HTML and JavaScript application for you that does a certain thing.[00:44:35] Simon: And when you think about that take and since then it turns out This is easy, right? Every decent LLM can produce HTML and JavaScript that does something useful. So we've actually got this alternative way of interacting where they can respond to your prompt with an interactive custom interface that you can work with.[00:44:54] Simon: People haven't quite wired those back up again. Like, ideally, I'd want the LLM ask me a [00:45:00] question where it builds me a custom little UI, For that question, and then it gets to see how I interacted with that. I don't know why, but that's like just such a small step from where we are right now. But that feels like such an obvious next step.[00:45:12] Simon: Like an LLM, why should it, why should you just be communicating with, with text when it can build interfaces on the fly that let you select a point on a map or or move like sliders up and down. It's gonna create knobs and dials. I keep saying knobs and dials. right. We can do that. And the LLMs can build, and Claude artifacts will build you a knobs and dials interface.[00:45:34] Simon: But at the moment they haven't closed the loop. When you twiddle those knobs, Claude doesn't see what you were doing. They're going to close that loop. I'm, I'm shocked that they haven't done it yet. So yeah, I think there's so much scope for innovation and there's so much scope for doing interesting stuff with that model where the LLM, anything you can represent in SVG, which is almost everything, can now be part of that ongoing conversation.[00:45:59] swyx (2): Yeah, [00:46:00] I would say the best executed version of this I've seen so far is Bolt where you can literally type in, make a Spotify clone, make an Airbnb clone, and it actually just does that for you zero shot with a nice design.[00:46:14] Simon: There's a benchmark for that now. The LMRena people now have a benchmark that is zero shot app, app generation, because all of the models can do it.[00:46:22] Simon: Like it's, it's, I've started figuring out. I'm building my own version of this for my own project, because I think within six months. I think it'll just be an expected feature. Like if you have a web application, why don't you have a thing where, oh, look, the, you can add a custom, like, so for my dataset data exploration project, I want you to be able to do things like conjure up a dashboard, just via a prompt.[00:46:43] Simon: You say, oh, I need a pie chart and a bar chart and put them next to each other, and then have a form where submitting the form inserts a row into my database table. And this is all suddenly feasible. It's, it's, it's not even particularly difficult to do, which is great. Utterly bizarre that these things are now easy.[00:47:00][00:47:00] swyx (2): I think for a general audience, that is what I would highlight, that software creation is becoming easier and easier. Gemini is now available in Gmail and Google Sheets. I don't write my own Google Sheets formulas anymore, I just tell Gemini to do it. And so I think those are, I almost wanted to basically somewhat disagree with, with your assertion that LMS got harder to use.[00:47:22] swyx (2): Like, yes, we, we expose more capabilities, but they're, they're in minor forms, like using canvas, like web search in, in in chat GPT and like Gemini being in, in Excel sheets or in Google sheets, like, yeah, we're getting, no,[00:47:37] Simon: no, no, no. Those are the things that make it harder, because the problem is that for each of those features, they're amazing.[00:47:43] Simon: If you understand the edges of the feature, if you're like, okay, so in Google, Gemini, Excel formulas, I can get it to do a certain amount of things, but I can't get it to go and read a web. You probably can't get it to read a webpage, right? But you know, there are, there are things that it can do and things that it can't do, which are completely undocumented.[00:47:58] Simon: If you ask it what it [00:48:00] can and can't do, they're terrible at answering questions about that. So like my favorite example is Claude artifacts. You can't build a Claude artifact that can hit an API somewhere else. Because the cause headers on that iframe prevents accessing anything outside of CDNJS. So, good luck learning cause headers as an end user in order to understand why Like, I've seen people saying, oh, this is rubbish.[00:48:26] Simon: I tried building an artifact that would run a prompt and it couldn't because Claude didn't expose an API with cause headers that all of this stuff is so weird and complicated. And yeah, like that, that, the more that with the more tools we add, the more expertise you need to really, To understand the full scope of what you can do.[00:48:44] Simon: And so it's, it's, I wouldn't say it's, it's, it's, it's like, the question really comes down to what does it take to understand the full extent of what's possible? And honestly, that, that's just getting more and more involved over time.[00:48:58] Local LLMs: A Growing Interest[00:48:58] swyx (2): I have one more topic that I, I [00:49:00] think you, you're kind of a champion of and we've touched on it a little bit, which is local LLMs.[00:49:05] swyx (2): And running AI applications on your desktop, I feel like you are an early adopter of many, many things.[00:49:12] Simon: I had an interesting experience with that over the past year. Six months ago, I almost completely lost interest. And the reason is that six months ago, the best local models you could run, There was no point in using them at all, because the best hosted models were so much better.[00:49:26] Simon: Like, there was no point at which I'd choose to run a model on my laptop if I had API access to Cloud 3. 5 SONNET. They just, they weren't even comparable. And that changed, basically, in the past three months, as the local models had this step changing capability, where now I can run some of these local models, and they're not as good as Cloud 3.[00:49:45] Simon: 5 SONNET, but they're not so far away that It's not worth me even using them. The other, the, the, the, the continuing problem is I've only got 64 gigabytes of RAM, and if you run, like, LLAMA370B, it's not going to work. Most of my RAM is gone. So now I have to shut down my Firefox tabs [00:50:00] and, and my Chrome and my VS Code windows in order to run it.[00:50:03] Simon: But it's got me interested again. Like, like the, the efficiency improvements are such that now, if you were to like stick me on a desert island with my laptop, I'd be very productive using those local models. And that's, that's pretty exciting. And if those trends continue, and also, like, I think my next laptop, if when I buy one is going to have twice the amount of RAM, At which point, maybe I can run the, almost the top tier, like open weights models and still be able to use it as a computer as well.[00:50:32] Simon: NVIDIA just announced their 3, 000 128 gigabyte monstrosity. That's pretty good price. You know, that's that's, if you're going to buy it,[00:50:42] swyx (2): custom OS and all.[00:50:46] Simon: If I get a job, if I, if, if, if I have enough of an income that I can justify blowing $3,000 on it, then yes.[00:50:52] swyx (2): Okay, let's do a GoFundMe to get Simon one it.[00:50:54] swyx (2): Come on. You know, you can get a job anytime you want. Is this, this is just purely discretionary .[00:50:59] Simon: I want, [00:51:00] I want a job that pays me to do exactly what I'm doing already and doesn't tell me what else to do. That's, thats the challenge.[00:51:06] swyx (2): I think Ethan Molik does pretty well. Whatever, whatever it is he's doing.[00:51:11] swyx (2): But yeah, basically I was trying to bring in also, you know, not just local models, but Apple intelligence is on every Mac machine. You're, you're, you seem skeptical. It's rubbish.[00:51:21] Simon: Apple intelligence is so bad. It's like, it does one thing well.[00:51:25] swyx (2): Oh yeah, what's that? It summarizes notifications. And sometimes it's humorous.[00:51:29] Brian: Are you sure it does that well? And also, by the way, the other, again, from a sort of a normie point of view. There's no indication from Apple of when to use it. Like, everybody upgrades their thing and it's like, okay, now you have Apple Intelligence, and you never know when to use it ever again.[00:51:47] swyx (2): Oh, yeah, you consult the Apple docs, which is MKBHD.[00:51:49] swyx (2): The[00:51:51] Simon: one thing, the one thing I'll say about Apple Intelligence is, One of the reasons it's so disappointing is that the models are just weak, but now, like, Llama 3b [00:52:00] is Such a good model in a 2 gigabyte file I think give Apple six months and hopefully they'll catch up to the state of the art on the small models And then maybe it'll start being a lot more interesting.[00:52:10] swyx (2): Yeah. Anyway, I like This was year one And and you know just like our first year of iPhone maybe maybe not that much of a hit and then year three They had the App Store so Hey I would say give it some time, and you know, I think Chrome also shipping Gemini Nano I think this year in Chrome, which means that every app, every web app will have for free access to a local model that just ships in the browser, which is kind of interesting.[00:52:38] swyx (2): And then I, I think I also wanted to just open the floor for any, like, you know, any of us what are the apps that, you know, AI applications that we've adopted that have, that we really recommend because these are all, you know, apps that are running on our browser that like, or apps that are running locally that we should be, that, that other people should be trying.[00:52:55] swyx (2): Right? Like, I, I feel like that's, that's one always one thing that is helpful at the start of the [00:53:00] year.[00:53:00] Simon: Okay. So for running local models. My top picks, firstly, on the iPhone, there's this thing called MLC Chat, which works, and it's easy to install, and it runs Llama 3B, and it's so much fun. Like, it's not necessarily a capable enough novel that I use it for real things, but my party trick right now is I get my phone to write a Netflix Christmas movie plot outline where, like, a bunch of Jeweller falls in love with the King of Sweden or whatever.[00:53:25] Simon: And it does a good job and it comes up with pun names for the movies. And that's, that's deeply entertaining. On my laptop, most recently, I've been getting heavy into, into Olama because the Olama team are very, very good at finding the good models and patching them up and making them work well. It gives you an API.[00:53:42] Simon: My little LLM command line tool that has a plugin that talks to Olama, which works really well. So that's my, my Olama is. I think the easiest on ramp to to running models locally, if you want a nice user interface, LMStudio is, I think, the best user interface [00:54:00] thing at that. It's not open source. It's good.[00:54:02] Simon: It's worth playing with. The other one that I've been trying with recently, there's a thing called, what's it called? Open web UI or something. Yeah. The UI is fantastic. It, if you've got Olama running and you fire this thing up, it spots Olama and it gives you an interface onto your Olama models. And t
Dive into the world of Out-of-Home media with Rick Robinson! Learn how PJX Media brings stories to life, from bustling billboards to engaging campaigns. Get insider know-how on attracting clients, navigating industry complexities, and the art of grabbing consumer attention. All in this fascinating, info-packed session!Here are a few of the topics we'll discuss on this episode of Hard to Market Podcast.Understanding out-of-home media.The strategy behind client engagement.Impress with award-winning campaigns.Data-driven decisions in advertising.Growth-driving tips for marketers.Resources:PJX MediaPodcast ChefConnect with Rick Robinson:LinkedInConnect with our host, Brian Mattocks:LinkedInEmailQuotables:15:55 - Rick: And we have the best success. Once you start investing further and start rising the tide, so to speak, you'll need help. And that's where complexity comes in and where our value proposition really makes a difference. Brian: Yeah, you have, I mean obviously when you go from a local to a larger market, you have differentiation. You've gotta deal with, you've got all sorts of, you know, the attribution problems, like we discussed the attention mechanics. And I think it really makes a ton of sense to start to get help at the very least in that context, minimally prior to that, you're suggesting that the kinds of services you would provide at a national or large regional level would be best delivered by a local distributor.03:35 - Rick: So on the attraction side, it's, you know, doing great work for the clients. We already have nurturing and creating opportunity for those clients. So they stay with us, we can retain the business. And when they move to other agencies or brands, they're very likely to use this. So that's a very nurture, create mindset.Brian: Referral side. Yeah.Rick: And that's key. That's really the core and the foundation. And then on the promotion side, we're very active on LinkedIn with thought leadership, with expressions of work we do, examples of work we do calling out where we've been recognized for award-winning work and things like that. And then we have a new business team that's very aggressive with an email marketing formula and a lot of cold and slightly cold, barely warm outreach15:55 - Rick: I think in both cases it'll give you a good sense of the lay of the land. If you're a smaller local advertiser, it just wants to buy one billboard at a time, you know, you can work with your local billboard companies, right? And we have the best success. Once you start investing further and start rising the tide, so to speak, you'll need help. And that's where complexity comes in and where our value proposition really makes a difference.Brian: Yeah, you have, I mean obviously when you go from a local to a larger market, you have differentiation. You've gotta deal with.02:49 - Rick: You make sure you get the production organized and you get it up on, whether it's the printed panel or the screen.Brian: So you're in the middle of that doing the strategic sort of maneuvering and the project planning. Is that what I'm hearing?Rick: Yeah. Our clients come to us for really two things for expertise. 'cause as you noted, it's a very fragmented, diverse supply side and bandwidth, the energy time to organize all of it and make it happen.06:32 - And what you try to do along the way is create value. When you reach out to these folks in a more or less cold manner, you want to make sure that what you're bringing them is of interest and you've done some homework and you're providing a reward for their attention. And so that gives you a chance to engage. And then once you do, you can transform that relationship. It can, it can become a consultative relationship as opposed to a transactional moment. Connect with our host, Brian Mattocks:LinkedInEmailSchedule a Free Podcast Consult
Brian Lee, from Through Cohort and Broken to Beloved Summit interviews Tears of Eden's Founder Katherine Spearing about the Church's harmful teachings on marriage that can result in very real trauma—for single and married people. Transcript (Unedited for Typos and Misspellings)Brian: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, welcome to our session. I'm here with Katherine Spearing. Katherine is the founder of Tears of Eden, a non profit supporting survivors of spiritual abuse, and the host of Tears affiliate podcast Uncertain. She also hosts the podcast Trauma and Pop Culture, and is a certified trauma recovery coach, working primarily with clients who have survived cults, High control environments, spiritual abuse, and sexual abuse.She also provides specialized trauma informed career coaching, as folks with trauma often need extra support for interviewing and networking, which I can attest to. Catherine is the author of a historical romantic comedy, which we talked about last year, Hartford's, a novel that challenges gender roles in a patriarchal society that will appeal to fans of Jane Austen.And she's been a guest on a number of podcasts. including indoctrination, and that's so effed up. She's the author of several non fiction articles and writes regularly at katherinespearing. com and tearsofeden. org. Welcome back, welcome back. [00:01:00] Very excited, Katherine: very excited. Me too. Brian: So we're here to talk today about being single within the context of faith communities, which is a big I don't know anywhere else that I really hear about this talked about, so I'm excited to dive into it.What is it like for a single person within these communities? Katherine: Right, yeah, and I think on the subject of it not being talked about very much, I definitely looked, obviously, that's who I am. So I have looked for books on this particular topic, and they all tend to have this, like, this like, consolation prize flair to it.Like You're a single, but you didn't want this. So here's some tips for being happy despite the situation that you find yourself in as if it's like. So so sad. And so haven't haven't read a lot where I was just like, Oh, like I'm empowered. I'm inspired. I'm [00:02:00] encouraged very, very rarely. And then also just within this topic that I'm very, I'm very passionate about just living a thriving life wherever you are and being very present wherever you are, no matter.Single or not, and I think 1 of the things that I have discovered through just the work that I do with religious trauma and spiritual abuse survivors is that to say, hey, like, it's, you know, really important to live a thriving life here. Here are tools to live a thriving life to then. Ignore the systemic issues that then make it difficult to have a thriving life.It's kind of, it's just half of the story. And so there's a lot of. Messaging towards singles of just like be content and be happy within faith communities without acknowledging the things that then make it difficult to be happy. And one example is [00:03:00] I learned very, very young that it was okay for me to be single, but it was okay for me to be single only.If I was unhappy about being single and only I was actively seeking to change that status and at the same time be happy being single and so rejoice in this lot that God has given you, but then also actively seek to change it and actively. Date and actively ask for prayer for your future husband. So, it's very, very stark cognitive dissonance happening within these communities.I also, my, my vocation was ministry and the perspective that I'm coming from for this conversation is. The even growing up in the evangelical church and being in that evangelical perspective, also choosing a vocation of ministry and and being in that for almost a decade. [00:04:00] And and so I think I experienced some of this a little bit more acutely because.I was in ministry and, and happened to be in denominations that were just much more male friendly. And so having being a woman and then also being a single woman some of the stuff I experienced a little bit more acutely. So that's, that's the example that I'm, the perspective that I'm coming from and, and then we'll occasionally use just some stories and examples from clients and, and friends of mine who've also experienced this as well.And. But, yeah, so 1st of full time vocational ministry experience was on the mission field in Mexico. I'm 28 years old. I am the only single woman on this fairly large missions team. I went down. To help plant a church that was like my specific reason for going and the, there was a [00:05:00] headquarters office that I went to every day as part of my work and and, and pretty much right away things like they would have a team meeting for.The church plant, and I was not invited and I, I, I was actively a part of the missions team and would like, go to the office and work in the mission field. All the other women missionaries were. worked at home and were, you know, took care of their children and took care of their homes. They were not actively coming into the offices.They were invited to this missions team. And so right off the bat, I was like different here. Exactly. Just instantly. And in Mexico, the. The that's hierarchy of, of marriage and marital status is even more extreme, I would say, than [00:06:00] than in the, like the South, which is also pretty extreme and.And yet nobody was like, Hmm, it's weird that you're not there. It was like, there was no, and I decided not to make an issue about it, that particular thing. But I was still expected to show up, you know, to church an hour early and help set up and put the coffee on. So I was still a part of this team and help lead the Bible studies and all that sort of stuff, but not part of the planning, not offered a seat at the table.And, and it wasn't a gender thing. It was. The only thing I can think of. A singleness thing. I'm not married. And I think that that was something that I experienced constantly throughout my faith community experience was like, we not a, there's something wrong with you so much, but as a, but a, we don't know what to do with you.Like, we don't know [00:07:00] what category to put you in. Another example was, I was volunteering. Very actively, this is before I went to Mexico in the youth ministry, and I was very, very actively involved in the youth ministry again, like late 20s, considering youth ministry as a potential avenue for ministry.If I did go into full time ministry, and the church that I attended did not have like, singles groups and young marrieds and it was just kind of all adult classes and they were topical, which I think is great and. There was a parenting class, and I thought I'm gonna work. I'm working with youth. 50 percent of that is working with parents and.And then it was targeting like young marriage. Who are my peers? Like some of them are the same age as me. Mm-Hmm. . Some of them are a little bit older, some of them are a little younger. And so it made perfect sense to me that I would go [00:08:00] to this class, which I did, and a week class, I had friends who were leading this class.A married couple that was leading the class, leading the class. And so I knew them and then there was an older couple in the class who had already raised their children and they were there because they wanted to connect to younger families. And they were the only people that talked to me, nobody else talked to me.And it was so. obvious that as soon as there would be like a break or the class would end they would like huddle like so fast it was like like very very quickly just just like ah we don't don't leave us alone yeah with that one we don't Brian: we don't know what to do with her Katherine: we don't know what to do with her and so i'll always feeling that Experience and, and many years later, I worked in [00:09:00] California, which is a very different culture and and I had a very good experience as a single person in California.And I started to wonder after a few years being there, did I make that up? Was that my imagination? Like, like, maybe it wasn't as bad. Maybe it was my insecurity. Like, maybe, you know, I, I felt weird. And so that's why I thought these people were ignoring me or whatever. And then I was in in LA during the biggest part of COVID.So didn't really interact with many people and thought, Oh, maybe I just made it up. Maybe if I go into the spaces and I'm just like super confident, like, they'll be fine. Maybe it's not as bad as I thought. And, and yet, even now, when I go into certain communities, and I would say probably the biggest one right now is as extended family that is in the South.And it is a much more just like, Nuclear family focused. [00:10:00] Everything is focused on that and you get married and you have kids and then you raise the kids and they go to college and then they get married and they have kids and then they raise their kids and their kids go to college and then they get married and they have kids and that's just a cycle and rinse and repeat and I would go, go to, go to events, go to weddings, go to funerals, be around this, this community of people and It, I was like, it's still here.It's, it's still real. And, and after like three hours of talking about feeding schedules and potty training, I'm sitting there like, okay, I have a pretty cool life. A lot of cities. I started this nonprofit. I have a book out. I have a podcast. Like I'm a pretty interesting person. No questions, zero interest in my life outside of how much I can engage with their life.And so it's very, it was [00:11:00] very, it's very, very obvious in those. In certain contexts that there's this otherness and this marginalization and just like you're different and rather in engaging with that difference, we're just going to draw a distance and at best you're ignored at worst, they're actively trying to get you to change who you are and change your marital status and try to figure out what's wrong with you that you're not married.Right, that is how that is. Brian: Yeah. Thank you for sharing all that. And I'm, I'm sorry that happened to you and that's not at all alienating. Right? My goodness. Well, and I remember working at a church as a young single man. And I was the worship leader at the time, but it was just. It is a lot of that alienating feeling of, well, who can we hook you up with?When are you going to [00:12:00] get married? Let's pray for your future wife. And all these things, it's like, and there was a big part of me that wanted to get married, but there was also a big part of me. It's like, but this is kind of, I'm fine with this right now. This is the season of life I'm in. And why is there always this need to rush?People through these stages of life that may not be for them at all, because even once you're married, then it's the whole train of, oh, well, when are you going to have kids? And then once you have another one, and then it's like, some people are just never satisfied, right? There's this, there's this weird hierarchy of.Having arrived as a human and it's, I can't even imagine cause I'm not one, but I, it's so much worse for women because not only do you have to get married, but then once you are someday a wife, if you don't become a mother, then you're not really a whole woman and all these other things that I've heard that are just so harmful in these faith communities.Katherine: Absolutely. Yeah. And then, and then the difference, there is a different flavor, but I think between like a male [00:13:00] experience and a female experience. And I remember going to seminary and, and the church planting, there's like a church planting portion of the seminary that I went to and I loved church planting and I thought it was really cool.Well, I was told. You know, you'd be a really good church planter if you were a man. The men were told, don't church plant unless you're married. Like, don't do that. Like, that's, I would not advise doing that. Like, you can't do it unless you're bound to another person or you have a wife to do 50 percent of your free labor.So the pressure, like you're not fully Incubated yet. Brian: Yeah, unlike, you know, Paul or Jesus or so, you know, for all this stuff that's going on in the churches in different faith communities. Why does this stuff happening Katherine: matter? I think the biggest reason why it matters is [00:14:00] it can result in very real trauma to, to constantly feel like you don't fit.Yep. And constantly feel like You are not enough all by yourself. Mm-Hmm. . And that, that that can result in, you know, when you're, you know, supposed to, trying to embrace your life and, and be confident. And be secure and, and love who you are, where you are. And then you're surrounded by people who are looking at you like you're really strange or just like.Saying things like, well, do you even want to get married or accusing you of being too picky or, or constantly receiving this message of you're not fully. You haven't fully arrived yet. You're not a full, complete human. And, and then as you mentioned, I think that this can have just like [00:15:00] implications for just like the wider community as well, of, of people getting married when they're not ready to get married and I, it happens.I am so grateful and honored. That enough people have shared with me that they got married too soon. And enough people have shared with me that the reason they got married was because they were dating someone who wanted to marry them and they were afraid someone else wasn't going to come along. And so they locked it down and, and enough people who have admitted that, which means there's probably a lot of more people who have never.Admitted that because of how much pressure there is like a man saying, hey, you can't plan a church unless you're married. Okay. Let me just find someone to marry me. Oh, maybe in an ideal world. That would never happen. Well, it does happen. And, and there is so much [00:16:00] pressure to, and people end up in these relationships that are Not necessarily healthy because they haven't had a chance to differentiate.And the messaging around marriage and the nuclear family can lead to a lot of enmeshment in marriage and, and people who aren't able to, to create individual identities because they're so wrapped up in, in that, in that partnership for women. It results in a lot of them just surrendering their power and surrendering their agency the minute that they're in that relationship.And, and I have friends now who are in their forties and fifties who are learning about their, themselves and their identity as an individual for the very first time, because they just got married so young, they never had an opportunity to figure out who they were and what they really [00:17:00] liked and. I have friends who have told me, and this makes me very sad, that their predominant emotion once they got married Wasn't joy and wasn't excitement.It was relief. That makes me so sad that it's like, it's over like, so, so sad. And speak so loudly of the amount of pressure and the, and the. Miseries to some extent of being single in these faith communities that isn't self inflicted. A lot of times parts of it. Sure. But, but a lot of it is, is the community itself of not not having.And I have a dozen stories similar to the Mexico story of just like not having a seat at the table simply because well, part of its gender and part of it was marital status and and not being Treated as if I didn't have anything to [00:18:00] offer because, because I wasn't married. And if you are in those communities all the time, you have no other reference.You'll start to believe it. It's really hard to not believe when you're getting that inundated with that messaging, that there's something wrong with me and I don't have anything to offer. Why? Why would I want to be at the church planting meeting? I'm not married. I don't have anything to offer that that type of experience.And it's very, it doesn't just impact single people. I believe very firmly that this. This mentality impacts the wider faith community as well. And as you mentioned, just like, you know, you get married and then it's like when you're going to have kids and the same thing for child free people. Like, you're allowed to be child free, but only if you're actively seeking to change it.Right? Yet also be content with your child freeness, but also be trying to change it. And then my sister, first baby. Baby wasn't [00:19:00] even barely out of the womb and people are asking her when her second child is coming. Yeah, when's the next one? When's the next one? It's like never enough, it's never enough, never enough, never Brian: enough.Yeah, man. It just speaks to how broken these systems are and how flawed the theology is of identity, of wholeness, like you're talking about, of, of, like you're saying, the whole individuation and differentiation piece. It's like, I, you know, you tell your, that story about all the things about Mexico and all these other places.And it's like, and you know, joining these different small groups or Sunday school classes I think of that quote from Walt Whitman or Ted Lasso or whoever you want to say it's from about being curious, not judgmental, right? And so often people in these faith communities default to a position of judgment or assumption, [00:20:00] right?Oh, this poor single person, they must be miserable. Let's adopt them and then try to find every eligible. Whatever, to pair them up with. Parade them, parade them across. Yeah. Well, and then by doing that, you turn them into a thing instead of a person, right? Because they become, you become their project, which never feels good.Never. And then you, you add on the layer of what harm purity culture has done to the church through the 80s and 90s. And all these people, like you're saying, get married young out of a sense of relief to escape the trap of singleness. And then, or they just get married so they finally have sex. Which is awful because they've known nothing about it and weren't ready for it, right?And then, you know, in the 80s and 90s, there was so much vitriol and defense against divorce. And nowadays, Christians are the exact same statistic as everyone else. It's so, so Katherine: common. Yeah, and I mean, and that is one of the [00:21:00] ways that it impacts the wider community as well, is because there are so many divorced people, widowed people, they're single.And, and they're back in that, you know, phase after being married. And it's again, like, what do we do with you? Yeah. Like. Let's find you someone else to marry, like, let's say the cycle starts again and, and it's not, it's not that, it's not a guarantee that marriage A will happen or B will last and, and, and that, and that ability, as you said, to have that curiosity.A kind curiosity. Not a what's wrong with you, but a tell me about your life. Tell me how you feel about this. And, and giving, giving that space [00:22:00] for people to be different and willingness and that judgment tends to come from a place of fear. We, we fear the thing we don't understand. If someone gets married at 22.And has never known a life of singleness, they're not going to know what it's like and so it's going to be very different. It's going to be an anomaly and it's so much, it's easier to just not engage and like, and it's safer. To not engage to some extent of just, you know, I'll let her talk to her people and I'll talk to my people and, and it's very sad to me because it's a very, it can be very isolating, I think, and, and very.What's the word? Yeah, just like, just very kind of, kind of stagnant and, and [00:23:00] oppressive to, to surround ourselves with people who are just like us and in the same stage as us and can talk about all of the things that we talk about. And, and there it's, I think that it's challenging to grow when, when you are.Surrounded by people who are just like you doing all of the things that you do and and how much more vibrant and colorful life is when we can engage with people who are different than us and single people are forced to do that. Because we're often alone or marginalized in these communities. And so we're constantly seeing things from the perspective of the married person, the people with the family, we're able to engage in those conversations about feedings and, and potty training because everyone's doing it [00:24:00] and, and it does take a little more effort from that parent who has, you From that world and, and look around and see there are other people out there and there are other, there are other stories in the world.And I, I mean, I was raised in a very fundamentalist world that was very isolating and very much like feared the outside world and feared people who were different than us and didn't believe the same things that we believed. So it was not because of nurture. Unless it was rebellion, potentially that I love.Encountering people who are different than me. Like I love encountering different cultures. I love encountering people who have, you know, jobs that I've never had different, different lifestyles, different cities, country. Like I just, I love engaging with people who are different and I [00:25:00] find it to be such a fulfilling experience to have so many people that are so different from me.in my life. It's amazing. And I'm sad for extended family and in the South who cannot engage with conversation outside of their bubble. That makes me sad, you know, personally, but then also just like, you don't get to know me. Yeah. Brian: Well, and you know, microcosms of. These echo chambers where this tiny little community's behaviors become normalized and then you view everyone else like you're saying as the outsider as the other and like, well, that's weird when really it's like, actually, it's your little group that you can't see outside of right?So, so how do we break out of that? Like, what can, what can be done? Katherine: Right? Well, I would say just. Speaking to two different audiences and I would say for, I mean, I mean, really for anyone, but for [00:26:00] a single person, I would say, and I've had to do this, actively surround yourself with people who are for you and not for you, but They would prefer that something about you change specifically your marital status.And, and, and they're not constantly trying to set you up or find someone for you. There's nothing wrong with that. And I, I mean, and setups happen within the single community too. Like I. A friend of mine the other day, like, showed me two people in a dating app who are in my community. And and I just, you know, gave her my opinion.Like, this person, they are great, but I really don't think that you would enjoy them. But this person, the little that I know about them, I think that it could be a good fit. And we're not, like, hoarding all the single people. Like, I'm like, I know these two people aren't a good fit for me. They might be a good fit.I've, you know, connect friends in other [00:27:00] cities. Like, Hey, so and so lives in your city. Y'all should get coffee. Brian: Well, and I imagine the big difference is that it's invited, right? Instead of imposed. Katherine: Yes. She showed me the people on her dating app. I'm like. Asked my opinion. 100%, 100 percent that the invitation has been given.And it also within the context of actually knowing the person, not just, Hey, this person is single. Yes. That's good. Together. Yeah. You actually know what would be good for them. And, and so surrounding yourself with people who Campioning you excited for you excited for your life, and I, I have actively had to do that and have had to seek out people and fill my life with people who are on my team and cheering me on and there are some people in my life who still find it a little strange, you know, [00:28:00] my.Marital status, but they're, they, they have kind of moved to being more of a, an acquaintance simply because of, of, of that particular part of it is that it's not, I'm not fully accepted in their eyes and they're not fully able to engage with my life right now. And so that might happen. And it's challenging, but it's also absolutely 100 percent worth it to be surrounded by people who are for you.And then for just like the wider community, I think just cultivating, as you have already stated, curiosity and a interest and people who are different, and that will serve. across the board for any marginalized community of just being willing to engage and ask questions and not treat like a [00:29:00] project as you, as you mentioned, as someone that I need to fix or my token single friend.Yay! I have one. Well, the Brian: other thought I just had is like, or what I often see in churches or faith communities is that the single people get treated as free labor. Because they're single. So you must have all the free time in the world to go volunteer for this thing or take care of this thing. And it's like, can we also stop doing that, please?Katherine: Absolutely. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't mention this at the top of the conversation, but in that same church planting experience in Mexico, usually when you start a church, first thing you need is a pastor. And then the next thing you need is a worship leader. And then the next thing you need is a children's minister.And I saw it coming. I saw it coming. I was like, no, I was like, I drew, I was like, I don't care if I get fired. No . Yeah. I will not be in charge. Yep. Of Brian: children's mission. Well, and I've heard horror stories from missionaries on the field who, [00:30:00] for their team meetings or staff meetings, same kind of a thing for the single people who were there as part of the team.Fully part of the team. Mm-Hmm. don't get invited to meetings because they are expected to stay behind and babysit for all the married couples kids, it's like. What, you know, what is that Katherine: I did during the team meeting? What is Brian: that? Exactly. Yeah. And it's just, you know, and you know, you're a trauma recovery coach night.I don't think either of us are actually therapists or counselors, but, you know, when I think of not just trauma, but complex trauma, like the CPTSD part, it's, it's when these little traumas are drip by drip happening over and over and over again, over an extended period of time. And so it makes sense why.We get indoctrinated with these ideas or why it's so hard to break out of those kinds of systems or Find and surround ourselves with these people who are curious about us and for us and all those things who? Want a real identity? for our single friends [00:31:00] Or single people that we don't know that we want to become friends with.And it's like, I just want to know who you are. I don't care that you're single or not single or a wife or not a mother yet, or any of these things, like it applies to pretty much every stage of life. If we would allow people to just be people and not projects. We would go a long way. I Katherine: think. Absolutely.Yeah. Just let what? Yeah. And that just simple curiosity of just letting someone be who they are. And, and maybe they will share that they really do want to get married and, and they are sad and hold space for them in their sadness as you would hold space for anyone grieving. Yeah. And, and not necessarily, Yeah.Okay, let's fix this. Let's find someone for you. Like that's grief like any other kind of grief. Yeah. And, and let's let, let's grieve together rather than. Yeah. Seek to find [00:32:00] the thing that will take this pain away because it's, it's not going to take the pain away really. It's, there's going to be something else, you know, like we're never.We're never, and I think I learned that recently from the the speaker at the retreat con for Tours de Vida in our first in person event. And she just, she talked about thriving and she gave us this, this grid of all these different like seasons of life and stages of life and your career and then your family and then your relationships and then your friends and then your church community and like all these different, you know, bubbles of our.You know, acquaintances and, and spheres of our lives. And, and she was like, you're never going to be thriving in every single one. Yeah, and that doesn't mean you're not thriving. Yeah. Just to have a few that are not going well does not mean you're not thriving. And it was really, really helpful because I felt like I was always searching for the state of equilibrium and which [00:33:00] everything was going well.All the time. We're never going to be in that place, whether we are married or single or otherwise. And so, so being willing to hold that space for someone wherever they are in that and not try to fix it just as we would for anything else. And not treat it like it's this other thing, like we don't, this disease to some extent.So let's stay Brian: away and yeah, well, and you briefly touched on it earlier, but the idea of singleness is not just about I've never been married before or been on a date or any of those things, but it's it's also people who have been divorced or widowed or whatever those things are. And it's like when we allow them to just be people.And grieve with them in that process, if they are grieving, right? And then not jump to try to solve their problem of, Oh no, you're single and alone again. How do we set you up with someone else? It's like, no, that's not the answer. It's like, be curious, ask, like, Has anyone asked what they actually want? [00:34:00] Or are looking for?Or are they perfectly happy being single? Or is it a married couple completely happy never having kids? Yes, whatever the situation is, right? And I think there's so much that can be said for Meeting people where they are and on allowing them to be where they are in the season that Katherine: they're in. Yeah.And then I think just to kind of wrap it up of in order to be willing to accept someone where we are, we, I think we have to acknowledge some of that theology that has been ingrained into us that dictates this mentality that marriage singleness and parenthood is more ideal than. Being trialed free and, and the people who have been told that they're selfish for not wanting children or you're not a full complete human being until you're married and joined to another person those, those messages are very damaging and, and that is where that trauma comes from.So some of it's [00:35:00] just. It's cultural. I'm like just swimming in it and that's just the way it is. But some of it actually comes from really damaging messaging about deep things. And that might be something that people need to wrestle with before they can even get to that place. Of accepting someone who's different because if it's like, you're not just different.There's actually something wrong with you and you're actually doing something wrong by not having kids or you're actually doing something wrong by getting divorced or, or, or something like that, then it's going to be hard to engage. So that might be something that folks just need to. Wrestle with and yeah, figure out what they Brian: believe.Yeah, that's really good as we wrap up you mentioned your retreat con. Would you tell us more about Katherine: it? Woohoo. Yes. So tears of eden is As mentioned earlier is the non profit for survivors of spiritual abuse and from folks from the evangelical Community primarily. We had our [00:36:00] first in person event in October.And one of the things that Tears of Eden does is we do provide resources to sort of name that experience. But we do seek to be trauma informed. And one of the things that is helpful for healing trauma is, is integration between our minds and our bodies and engaging our bodies in that healing process.And so we had a speaker and she was. A phenomenal, wonderful person. And then and then we also had just very embodied workshops when normally you would go to, you know, maybe a small group and like, sit and listen again in a workshop all of these workshops are very active embodied workshops. We had yoga.We had improv. We had dance. We had a story jam, which is this live storytelling event and that Opportunity for people to tell stories and have an audience engage with them. Just a very embodied event and it was so cool. It was so fun. It was I hope everyone who is a survivor gets [00:37:00] that experience of being in person.With someone who's also had that experience. There's something extremely special about just like meeting someone and knowing instantly that they get it. It's just, there's nothing like it. It's, it's really, really cool. So yeah, everyone gets to do it Brian: sometimes. I love it. Congratulations on getting to do that.Yes, it was great. It was very exciting. Where can people find you or RetreatCon Katherine: online? So my personal website is katherinespearing. com and my main social media presence is on Instagram at katherinespearing. And Tears of Eden is tearsofeden. org. We also have a podcast and the main social media presence for Tears of Eden is the Uncertain Podcast at, at Uncertain Podcast on Instagram as well.So check it out. Brian: Awesome. We'll provide the links for everyone down in the session notes. Catherine, thank you so much for participating again and helping move toward healing Katherine: and [00:38:00] wholeness. Wonderful. Thanks for having me.
Several property managers find themselves feeling alone in their difficult market. It might feel impossible to grow after being stagnant for so long. In this episode, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull sit down with DoorGrow client Brian Bean to talk about how he grew his property management business despite the challenges he faced. You'll Learn [01:55] Getting started in property management [06:20] Making business partnerships work [09:47] Shifting from real estate to property management [18:21] What's next for your property management business? Tweetables “It's really difficult for partnerships to be successful because for most people, the ego is getting in the way.” “What you focus on is what you get.” “Until we learn how to get and find people that we feel safe with, I don't think we're supposed to trust.” “When you get really great people, it's not hard to trust them.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Brian: After 10 years of just being flat from 30 to 35 units. And then now literally doubled it last week. And that's been from following your instruction, your philosophies and you know, focusing on building this business. [00:00:15] Jason: Welcome DoorGrowers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently then you are a DoorGrower. DoorGrower, property managers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. [00:00:58] We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, Build awareness, change perception, expand the market and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow, along with Sarah Hull, co owner and COO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show. [00:01:18] So our guest today we're hanging out with Brian Bean, who is one of our clients and Brian your company is Dream Big Property Management. [00:01:28] Brian: That's right. We're in Merced, California. [00:01:30] Jason: All right. In Merced, California. So Brian welcome to the show. Oh, Riverside. You said Riverside. [00:01:37] Okay. Got it. I know this area. So yeah, I grew up in Rancho Cucamonga. So just a little bit near there. So Brian tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got into property management and then eventually how you stumbled across DoorGrow, I guess. [00:01:55] Brian: Right, so, I was a newspaper editor and reporter and I got a job, grew up in the Pacific Northwest, got a journalism degree, got a job in Palm Springs on the Daily Newspaper, and moved to California in the 80s. [00:02:11] And so I did that for 13 or 14 years toward the end I, you know, coming from an entrepreneurial background, my uncle gave me my first, second, third job when I was a kid he owned a, like, old style service station. So I grew up in that small business atmosphere. And when I went to work in newspapers, you know, I had these lofty aspirations, these utopian ideas, you know, you're getting your twenties about doing something to change the world or, you know, to have an impact. And I found out after about 10 years, that was just, it's just another corporate job. And so I was looking around for something else and I looked at a lot of different businesses. [00:02:55] And I ended up coming upon real estate and I was able to, while I was a newspaper editor, I was able to buy five, two five unit apartment buildings in Palm Spring. Nice. And that was my introduction to property management. I was pretty much doing that during the day. We were putting out newspapers in a, from like three in the afternoon to midnight, you know, the press would roll at midnight and and I did it all, you know, I, from everything from dealing with the tenants face to, you know, patch and drywall to whatever collecting rents, chasing rents, made all the mistakes. [00:03:33] And I was, it was self education trial by fire. And then a few years later, I went into real estate full time and sales. I had a partner in the apartments who was actually the listing agent on those apartments at the time, but he invited me into real estate full time in 2001. [00:03:49] And then we were off on a, and it was a run. And so I, I did property management for a while from on our own properties. And then I've just morphed into sales and we were pretty successful and very busy and then the market crashed, and you know, we just kind of moved with the market. [00:04:08] Jason: And when was that? [00:04:09] Like 2006, [00:04:11] Brian: maybe, or? [00:04:11] Yeah. So 2006 at least in our area, it was August, 2006 when we peaked sales wise. And in 2007, we had, I don't know, a dozen listings and nobody, you couldn't buy a showing, you know? And so 2007, it was the real estate market was, you know, dead man walking. It was, there was nobody really knew what was happening? Well, the masses, right? Some people knew, right? There was stuff going on obviously on wall street, but, the masses didn't know what was happening. Prices stayed up for awhile and they were, it was just like that, that hovering just before the, you know, you throw a ball in the air and it just kind of floats at the apex for a moment right before 2008 and then wow. [00:04:54] Right. Who knew? Yeah. So, You we just kind of morphed with it. I've worked, I did a lot of, I helped a lot of people with short sales, we worked in foreclosures and. And then I met my current business partner in sales working in an REO house as a buyer's agent. And we started our own company, Dream Big Real Estate, and that was 2008, 2009. [00:05:15] So from there, a couple of years later I just happened to say to my partner, you know, even though we were very busy, I said, "I really think we should launch a property management division" because at that time, my mentality was, it's a place where we can create sales listings, right? [00:05:35] And so we did that for a few years. And, you know, the interesting thing about it was that we didn't do any marketing. It was just really word of mouth, but. The day that I mentioned that to my partner, Tim, he just said, "yeah, cool, whatever." Right. he knew I was going to probably be working on it because I had the background in it, but I didn't tell anybody. [00:05:55] And the next day the phone rang and our first property management client just was calling out of the blue. Still have them, still work with them. [00:06:03] And then a week later, somebody else called. And it was the same thing, and that was our second client. Still working with them as well. And the, you know, I'm not into rubbing crystals or sleeping under pyramids, but you know, you ask the universe and the universe will provide. [00:06:19] Jason: One of the things that you mentioned, Brian, that I think's really interest is, it sounds like part of your journey, like there's this importance you've probably realized in partnerships. [00:06:28] because you've mentioned multiple times, you know, you partner with the listing agent and then eventually you partner with Tim. And so how is finding the right partners been instrumental in your growth and your progress? [00:06:41] Brian: Well, I will say this is that later on more recently, this year, they have broken out the property management business that was running as part of our real estate sales business. I've broken that out separately, and I'm now solo doing that. Right. Have had partners in the past, and I have found working with partners to be that there's advantages and disadvantages. Totally. It's hard to find, it's really difficult for partnerships to be successful because most people, the ego is getting in the way or, you know, there becomes a battle about, you know, who's doing what, who deserves this, who deserves that. [00:07:24] Yeah. Personality wise, I'm kind of roll with it person, you know? I'm more of a solution oriented person. Just what we need to get from point A to point B, what's the best way to do that? What for the good of the company, not necessarily for what's best for me personally. Yeah. So I've gone through a couple of partnerships with different people, I have been able to make that work from my point of view, because. [00:07:49] Because of my personality type, I think, but it is not for the the weak hearted, you know, I mean, it is some days are a lot harder than others. [00:07:58] Jason: I've seen some of the most successful I've seen have really healthy partnerships in some of the worst situations I've seen where they couldn't grow because one was like an anchor, not willing to move and they had just as much decision making power and until they were able to get that partner out of the business, they weren't able to progress. So it can be a boost in the positive, but it's really difficult to find a really good match. [00:08:24] Brian: Yeah, and that's the thing is like, I'm more of a behind the scenes person, just in general, I'm more like I can implement. I generally will have the ideas as well, but I'm the one that I'm kind of a control freak, quite frankly, and so one of my character flaws is right now that I'm trying to work on is feeling like I need to touch everything, you know, because that's that is a throttle in the business. [00:08:48] Jason: Well, I think we all start there. Every entrepreneur starts there, so everybody listening should be able to empathize with that because you know we want to do a good job because we care. We want to look good. We care about how we look right like whatever it is. The challenge with being a control freak is trust and until we learn how to get and find people that we feel safe with, I don't think we're supposed to trust, you know. We're not supposed to just trust blindly. We need to find people that deserve to be trusted and know how to build that team. And that's probably kind of the next level, right? Is for you maybe is to build that team of people that you trust because when you get really great people, it's not hard to trust them. [00:09:30] Yeah. But they need to match you. Like they need to be a good coach. And then it's a lot easier to trust them. And so in this journey, you split out your business and then you have a property management business. It's all yours. You're still doing real estate stuff also? You still connected to that? [00:09:47] Brian: I am, but my mentality has shifted. It's probably been more than two years since the first time I talked to someone from your company and yet we didn't start with your company until, when was it, March this year? It was a two year lag of wrapping my mind around the philosophy of, Just making the shift, right? [00:10:06] Because property management always for us was a, just a holding place for future sales listings. And now, it's the business. Property management's the business and sales is ancillary benefit. [00:10:21] Jason: So what prompted that shift? How did your brain work that out eventually? [00:10:25] Brian: I think it's a combination of a variety of things. Having now 20 plus years in the business, I've been through an up and a down and an up and a flat, right? Who knows what the next one looks like. Is it eighties, nineties, or is it two thousands downturn? Yeah. And where I am in life, right. And I mean, do I want to work forever? Just slinging, right? Do I want to be out there, you know, showing, opening doors at, you know, 68 years old? [00:10:57] Jason: And chasing deals? Yeah. [00:10:59] Brian: So mailbox money, right. Building a business that's sellable. Right now, or up until this point, I should say, it has been 100 percent every dollar that comes into our house is product of my labor, and that is a train coming down the track. [00:11:19] Right. So I needed to make some changes now that would have dramatic impacts on my future. If I wanted to change what I was doing, you know. [00:11:27] Jason: Yeah. Got it. Yeah. That switch from kind of recognizing you're kind of trading time for dollars to realizing, "Hey maybe I want to build something." [00:11:36] I mean, it's really tempting because you close one real estate deal, that can be a lot of money, but eventually I think there's a lot of real estate agents that wake up to this, that they're like, "Hey, if real estate kind of takes a nosedive or do I want to do this forever?" Maybe not. [00:11:52] Property management might be a really great business model. [00:11:55] Brian: Like I said, we did our sales under under Better Homes and Gardens now, and I don't know, did I say that? Maybe in my own head. So the property management is under my own brokerage. The sales that we do, we work under Better Homes and Gardens. [00:12:10] I, you know, Tim and I as sales agents here until this year, we've been the number one agent, like since we came here. So seven, eight years, however long it's been. I do see the changes. I have seen the changes come in and perhaps it's a little bit of you just mental scar tissue from the crash of, you know, '8, '9, '10, ' 11. Yeah. It's just, you know, because the cracks have been forming in the foundation of this real estate sales market for a few years. Right. And it's been propped up artificially by government policies. Yeah. For three, four years. Right. And so, I've been waiting for a shoe to drop quite frankly. [00:12:51] And so two years ago a guy used to work for you, Jon. I called Jon back in like February this year. "Hey, Jon, you still working over at DoorGrow?" Jon was actually the one who said to me two years ago, two and a half years ago now, " if you do this, our expectation is that you're going to change your philosophy. You're going to be a property manager who doesn't do sales." What? That took me a while to embrace. [00:13:17] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. Jon's a good friend of mine. We just went out to lunch recently. He's really sharp, dude. So, you know, I'm really curious, Brian, this journey from being a reporter for a while to real estate, to now shifting your identity into being a property manager, and that's the focus. How do you feel the reporter in you helps the property manager? [00:13:44] Brian: Yeah, perfect proving ground. It's who I am is based on education, information gathering, being an advocate for consumers, right? [00:13:56] That's what I was trained to be as a reporter and editor, as a journalist, and that just morphs perfectly into what I do now, which is to look after my client's financial well being, right? And it doesn't hurt that I tend to over explain things, right? Because that's what I do, right? Is my job is to go out and gather information and then provide it in an objective way so that people can then make the best decisions for them and their family, right? So that's being a reporter, right? It is to shine a light on the facts so that people can decide. I mean, sometimes you got to take them by the hand and lead them down the path, right, educating them along the way. Yeah, for sure. [00:14:37] Sarah: So what was the thing that made you go, "all right, I'm finally going to do this. Like I'm going to jump on board, get involved with DoorGrow and start really focusing on this property management thing? [00:14:49] Brian: Yeah. So earlier this year I had been kicking around, you know, you're looking at numbers, right? Kicking around the idea of "how much more time do I want to do this?" [00:14:59] And there were some personal things that got into it too, because you start looking at relationships and your family and looking at the things that are most important in your life. And priority wise, where have they been on your list? And so I decided I wanted to make some changes and then I lost some friends and family members just in the past year. [00:15:25] And so, one of the things that I picked up in the newspaper was Spending too much time in the office and and spending the less time seeing family and, you know, coming out of COVID and just, it's just like a combination of a lot of things all crashing together at one time. [00:15:41] Sarah: We are under attack in our house right now. [00:15:43] We have groceries being delivered. [00:15:45] Jason: Dogs are going nuts. [00:15:49] Our professional podcast, everybody, so. [00:15:53] Brian: Anyway, so that was you know, some personal stuff came up and I decided to reevaluate. Now, in the past 10 plus years, I've been doing property management. [00:16:04] providing a supply of say two to six listings a year and making that shift. I don't know, it was a conversation with my wife and you know, running numbers and trying to figure out like, is it even possible? And there's a transition period because what you focus on is what you get. Right. So if I start focusing a hundred percent on property management, and how is that going to affect my income for people? You know, because what I do today in sales, that's not income for 90 days. Right. So at some point you have to be able to make that transition. And so, you know, it was a bit of a leap of faith. [00:16:42] And so, like I said, when I called Jon to ask if he was still working with you guys, then he said, no. He called me back though, but he said no, but he then referred me over to somebody. So, but making that switch, it wasn't an overnight decision by any means. [00:16:58] I agonized over it. It was sleepless nights, some nights. But I knew that I had to do something. [00:17:04] Jason: So, well, you took a big risk then this leap of faith and then jumped on board with DoorGrow, decided to focus on property management. You feel like you made a good choice? [00:17:14] Brian: Yes. You don't know what you don't know. And so, I've been on a journey of learning what other people are doing, best practices, ancillary services to go along, you know, support type pieces of everything from other streams of income that are related that are, you know, not just management fees and placement fees, right? [00:17:37] I mean, there's a variety, but it's crazy what I've implemented just in the past six months, it's just been an insane pace and now I'm like eight days away from moving to a new, property management portal, and that will be the cherry on top, really. Most of the footwork of putting the foundation together will be mostly done, and then it's digging into processes. [00:18:02] Jason: Awesome. Yeah. So. Yeah. So you've made a lot of changes to your business and you said you've been learning it at an insane pace. So hopefully we're not making you bored with all this stuff. We've got plenty of stuff, right? It can be a bit overwhelming. We give the feedback on. So Brian, well, what's what's next for you in the future? [00:18:25] Brian: Right now I'm just trying to continue to learn from you and I'm just focusing on growing the number of doors that we manage and creating a business that will have sustainable and continuous growth and then part of the process has been, yes, putting the tools in place and doing the things that you know, I've been advised to do to create this and grow this business. [00:18:53] But when you start, you don't necessarily believe it, right? It truly is that leap of faith. And over time, my belief is starting to catch up with my activity. And so, you know, to go like when last week we literally hit the doubling point of when we started with you and after 10 years of just being flat from 30 to 35 units. And then now literally doubled it last week. And that's been from following your instruction, your philosophies and you know, focusing on building this business. [00:19:30] Jason: Yeah. Well, I'm glad that the next 30 doors didn't take 10 years. That's awesome. Doubling in four months and I think things will speed up from here. So, well, I think that's a good place to end on. I think that's really awesome. So we appreciate you as a client. It's been great seeing your progress. You know, I think there's a lot of property managers out there that are like you, they come from the real estate industry. They want to get out of the hunt and the chase. Maybe they've been doing property management for even a decade, but you know, they haven't really made progress in their growth significantly in the last year or two or three or 10, you know, and and now maybe it's time, maybe it's time. [00:20:10] So maybe some parting words, Brian, what would you say to those that like they've been watching DoorGrow for a while? What would you say to them? [00:20:17] Brian: Don't wait. You know, where would I be if I'd started two years ago? . I think about that occasionally, and then I have to stop myself because that just takes me off track. [00:20:26] And you get into that regret, you know, loop in your head. Like, no, I don't have time for that. I am where I'm now. And everybody is where they are now, right? And so you can either take action today or not, your results will reflect that. Yeah. [00:20:42] Sarah: And you're exactly where you're supposed to be in that moment. I can do that to myself too. I can go back and go, "Oh, what if I did this sooner? It could be so much farther." Right. But I think that things just tend to work out the way that they're supposed to work out and things kind of line up. And I think you were prepped, right? [00:20:59] You knew about DoorGrow. You were kind of checking it out. You weren't sure if you were going to make that jump and you did when you were ready and it paid off. [00:21:06] Jason: Yeah. So, there's a cool book called the gap and the gain. And the idea is that it's so easy for us as entrepreneurs to focus on the gap between where we should be by now. Where our dream or what we could have done. And that's not really an effective comparison psychologically. Like that, like doesn't make us feel super great about ourselves. But what is effective though, is to look at the gain. How far have we come? And I mean, four months. You've come a long way. [00:21:34] And so the next year, I think it's going to be really awesome for you. So I'm excited to see what you do, Brian. So thank you. All right. Thanks for coming on the DoorGrow show. [00:21:44] Brian: Glad to be here. Thanks. [00:21:46] Jason: Thanks again. All right. If you are a property management entrepreneur, you're wanting to grow your business. [00:21:51] Maybe you've been sitting stagnant for a while. You haven't had significant progress in the last year, maybe the year before that you might even be a really large company and you're not making progress. I've talked to several with thousands of doors in just the last week. We just got one of them on as a client and they've been struggling to figure out how to grow and they cannot even spend any more money on ads to get any more clients. [00:22:13] It's not working. If you want to figure out how to start moving your business forward significantly, we can easily help you add 100, 200, maybe even 300 doors in a year. And it's without wasting money or spending money on advertising. And that might sound ridiculous, but Brian's going to do it. [00:22:29] Like we're seeing people do it all the time. So reach out, you can check us out at doorgrow. com. We would love to help you grow your business. Talk to you soon. Bye everyone. [00:22:39] you just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow! [00:23:06] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
Dive into the world of legal marketing with Brendan Chard, Owner of The Modern Firm as he reveals the secrets to thriving in a niche that resists the usual marketing gimmicks. From his accidental beginnings to forming deep-rooted client relationships, Brendan's journey is a lesson in growing a boutique agency against all odds. Tune in for a mix of golden nuggets on business, marketing, and the art of scaling relationships – all wrapped in a bundle of canny insights and heartfelt stories.Here are a few topics we'll discuss on this episode of Hard to Market Podcast.Growth through deep client relationships.Strategies in competitive marketing niches.The power of organic growth via content.Challenges of scaling personalized service.Balancing growth with maintaining a lifestyle.Resources:The Modern FirmPodcast ChefConnect with Brendan Chard:LinkedInConnect with our host, Brian Mattocks:LinkedInEmailQuotables:14:27 - Brian: They go, oh well you know, I became a baker because I wanted to bake stuff and now I've got a business that I don't want to do the business I want to bake. Brendan: Exactly. So our role is to really to try to make their life and their job easier by taking a big chunk of the business part that they don't want to do or they don't understand and just taking it off their plate so that they can do more of the lawyering that they really want to do in that direct relationships and helping their clients.Brian: But working with lawyers it's gotta be in many ways like hurting cats right I mean there's a fair amount of they're getting paid to be right most of the time. Do they walk in the room and tell you what to do and you're like no no you can't do that cause that's crazy.Brian: Yeah, that definitely happens it's a really highly educated analytical smart group of people and they are used to you know, a lot of them are also used to arguing and getting their way so yeah, but they're also a lot of them you know they know when they're out of their lane and through educating and giving them more information they can really you know I think they grow to respect us as experts.Brian: Eventually they figure out that you're in charge of this conversation and then they go okay fine.4:49 - But the differentiator with us is the relationship, we really invest a lot in getting to know our clients on a very deep level. Like I think a lot of our clients would consider us to be friends. We know like each other's names, of each other's kids, and dogs and you know it's like a very partner-oriented deep relationship with them.25:02 - I'd say certainly have taken a lot of knocks over the years. I think one of the biggest ones, especially as your business grows to delegate, to really get comfortable with letting go. That was something that was sort of forced on me you know midway through I had a son born with some medical challenges and I really had to let go of some big parts of what I was doing in my day-to-day to make time for that and it really helped us grow over the years but I think that you know the only thing we don't get more of is time so as an owner the more that you can do to take things off your plate to be delegating to others that's just huge. And it you just got to to get comfortable with it. Somebody might not do it the same way you'd do it, they might do it better or different. It might not matter but I think that's something a lot of owners struggle with is just letting go of their way of doing things and trusting somebody to do it own way.3:54 - We've put out so much content we have so many clients in the marketplace, we have been very fortunate to have been riding the rankings in the Google wave for a long time so we get a lot of inbound traffic from people specifically looking for somebody to help them with their website. And for us, we're full service, we do websites we do content we do branding, and then you know all variety of online marketing organic local paid search, some social so it's the whole mix of services to really be like the outsourced marketing department for a small firm. But the differentiator with us is the relationship you know we really invest a lot in getting to know our clients on a very deep level.16:09 - I mean, I love it when our clients give us feedback and pushback because that helps to maybe push and evolve us and grow our thinking. But also, you know, they'll come in with an idea, but once they understand the other things that are being contemplated, for why a decision got made, it might be, you know, handicap accessibility, you know, dictates a way that we have to do a certain thing. Connect with our host, Brian Mattocks:LinkedInEmailSchedule a Free Podcast Consult
Brian Lee shares his personal story of experiencing spiritual abuse and what led him to start Broken to Beloved, an online summit and support resource for survivors. Register for the Broken to Beloved Summit January 23-26, 2024 HEREBrian Lee is a pastor, coach, and speaker. As a survivor of spiritual abuse and religious trauma, he has spent his time since leaving vocational ministry in 2021 working to provide recovery and resources for fellow victims and survivors. In 2023, he created and founded Broken to Beloved, a nonprofit organization that exists to help other victims and survivors through its Annual Summit and seasonal Cohorts, while also providing trauma awareness and safeguarding practices to pastors, leaders and churches.Based in Richmond, VA, Brian loves to go on outdoor adventures with his family, explore their neighborhood, community, and city, find good parks, enjoy good food, and have fun together. As a coffee snob and addict, he could always use another cup. Transcript (Transcript is unedited for typos or misspellings): Katherine: hey, Brian. Brian: Hey, Katherine. How's it going? Going? All right. How about you? Doing, Katherine: doing well, doing, doing okay for doing okay. Or a Tuesday. Brian: It's just for the end of the month slash year slash the world is losing its mind. Katherine: Right. I know like there's been a lot of moments this week where somebody will say something about Christmas and I'm like, Oh, that's, that's on Sunday.Yes. Okay. We are, we are still, there is still Christmas. Yes. Well, thanks for joining me. I am really excited to talk to you about your summit that you are hosting and curating in January for Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month. At the time this episode comes out, it will already be January. So I'm really excited to hear about that.I got to participate in that [00:01:00] last year. We'll be participating again this year. Great time to just connect with other people working in this spiritual abuse, recovery, religious trauma, recovery space, and also. Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month for folks who are not aware is in January. And we were talking before we started recording about when we first heard about Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month.When, when was it for listeners that you first Brian: heard about it? I just learned about it last year because, and I, but to be fair, I've only been doing this work for about a year now. I wish I knew about it sooner. And I think we were both saying it's like, we can't find who originated this thing. But it's been around for at least 20 years, which to me is crazy.Yeah. I learned about it because of Aaron hung, who's an artist who was doing that whole AZ trauma recovery series on her Instagram page. And I was like, spiritually, it'd be some awareness a month. That's a thing. And then the more I dove into it, I was like, Oh my gosh, this is absolutely a thing. And it's been around a long time.Why do we not know more about it? Katherine: Exactly. I was wondering too, when, [00:02:00] when did that book, the oldest probably. Documented writing about spiritual abuse is probably the subtle power of spiritual abuse. I Brian: think that's what I was thinking. Yep. And that was, I think it was written in the 90s. I want to say, okay, I'm going to look for a publication date because I want to be sure.But I remember reading it thinking I was like, did they just write this like a year ago? And it's like, no, it's been around for a very long time. Yeah, Katherine: yeah, yeah. And then even just like the reality that PTSD. Was not an official diagnosis until the 80s. Brian: Yes. Katherine: Yes. We're very new in this trauma world. Yes.We're all very new to this. This is a new, new territory for all of us. Did you, did you find the Brian: date? Amazon says the publication date is 2005, but that seems late to me. I feel like it was before that. It has a very nice Katherine: cover. Brian: It does! Which is why I feel like it is. So now I'm opening my Kindle to look for the actual copyright date on the inside of it.Yeah, Katherine: maybe that was the most [00:03:00] recent Brian: publication. That's what I'm wondering. Library, look for the yellow book right there. The yellow book. Yeah. That's what I call it. The yellow book. Copyright page. 1991. You were right. Boom. Boom. First time. Katherine: First time. Yeah. So I guess that's the first time that that became something Brian: that.People and for reference to me that feels like 10 years ago, but it's 32 years ago.Yes, I know that tells you how old I am feel like that long ago, but because it wasn't it wasn't Katherine: Yeah, I know because i'm like i've lived Yeah, I've lived longer in the 2000s than I lived in the, in the, in the, in the 1900s, 1900s or so. Brian: It's been a while. How dare you? Yes, we are, we are, we're getting, we're getting up there.We're getting up there. Yes, yes we are. [00:04:00] Speaking of Katherine: age, actually I have nothing. Nothing to say about it. I'm just trying to segue talking about broken to beloved, which is your summit that's coming up and to get us started. I would love to hear whatever you feel comfortable sharing about your spiritual abuse story and how can you, you said that you discovered this word, right?Or this phrase, spiritual abuse, this term fairly recently, when did you, maybe just to start out, when did you first hear the term and did you have an aha moment like many of us Brian: do? Gosh, when did I first hear the term? I honestly don't even know, but it was probably from one of the books that I started reading that validated that experience for me.It might have been K. J. Ramsey's book The Lord is My Courage, and I read it more as a, oh, maybe this will help me in a [00:05:00] dark season, and that's one of my favorite psalms anyway, so, and then I didn't realize she was going to go into their whole spiritual abuse story, and then I am a person who reads all the footnotes and then goes and finds all the primary resources and reads those, so Katherine: that's favorite reader.They were like, we put this in here for you. Brian: Yes. Well, and that's, I love footnotes. So, so because of her, I think is, is how I found the subtle power of spiritual abuse. And then from there, I went down the rabbit hole. I mean, something's not right. Redeeming Power, Church Called Tove, Try Softer, Narcissism Comes to Church, you know, all these books.And now in the last two years, I've read over 40. Five books on that topic, which seems overwhelming because it kind of is, but it all came out of my personal experience, right? So I left my last church in July of 2021. I had been there for just about three years, I think. And I walked into that church.[00:06:00] My wife and I have both moved here saying to each other it would be really nice if this works out And if it doesn't because we've already been hurt before I think we're done with ministry for a while Which feels kind of crazy to walk into a church saying that like this is the last stop Yes.Basically. Yeah. Not indefinitely, not forever, but for a while, we're going to just give this a break because we're done. And so, you know, my story goes back over 10 years now, I think I worked at a Christian college as the marketing, as the graphic designer for the marketing department. I had also attended and graduated from that college, which isn't unusual.But it was a completely different experience being a student there than it was being on staff there. And I didn't know what to do with the cognitive dissonance of looking at leaders that I respected and admired Who seemed to preach the gospel and talk about servant leadership and humility and all these things But then I would be sitting in meetings I was like I don't know who this person is who is so [00:07:00] angry and belittling and demeaning and authoritarian and all these pieces And so finally leaving that environment I need to ask you a Katherine: question, just like following up on that, because I feel like that's such a common theme of like the, what you preach and what you teach is not who you are.And I just, I just hear that all the time. And just was talking to someone about the other day about her father, who was a pastor and he. He was a pastor and he would preach these things about like parenting and then he would like not be that type of parent. And I'm just curious from the experience that you had what, what is your take on that of like, why, like, you obviously know what's right.Where, where is this disconnect happening because you can preach it enough to convince people then what's happening here. What's your Brian: [00:08:00] take on that? My take for the last two or three years now has been, it all boils down to the need for power and control. And this message is going to work and this message is going to work.And so the secondary or maybe even tertiary word that comes out of that is optics. It all comes down to optics and the way things look and appear so that I can maintain power and control. And so if I can maintain this image of, then I will continue to have power and control and influence over these people as long as they don't see behind the curtain.And if they do see behind the curtain, it doesn't matter because I control them anyway because I'm their boss, right? Or because I am their spiritual authority or leader or whatever it is. So I, it's wrecking. Man, there's so many ways I can go so the last pastor I had would often say things like when I first started.It's like you have to recognize the hats that you wear when you walk into a room. So I know that I'm the [00:09:00] pastor. So I know that there's a power dynamic. So I had to be aware that when I'm leading a conversation or that there's going to be a shift in something somewhere. But then this is the same guy who would absolutely manipulate that power dynamic.Yeah, or pretend that he was the servant or the victim or the low man on the totem pole is like you don't get it both ways. Like so. So I know that you cognitively know these things to be true. And yet I see you do the polar opposite. And then use those things to twist them to your advantage. Yes. In the way of whether ignorantly or intentionally, both are worse, harming someone else in the process.Katherine: Yeah, and that is the crux of spiritual abuse and why it is devastating and so damaging and so complex and so confusing is like these people are preaching these good messages that they are aware are quote unquote good messages, but [00:10:00] using that intentionally to manipulate and control people. So then these good messages.suddenly become infused with this thing that makes us just terrified. Brian: Poison. It's poison. Katherine: Yeah. And we're just, we're just like, I can't even engage with this, even though some of this stuff is really good, you know, that. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and yet it just causes this. Massive cavern of, of just fear and doubt and trauma.Brian: Yes, I think that's where a lot of the confusion comes from, too, is because, because so much of it is truth, right? Or is based on quote, good intentions or scripture or whatever it is, but then you see it manipulated and twisted. So now you don't know what to believe or what's true or good anymore.Right, and you can't Katherine: trust good people who are saying absolutely, it's like absolutely walk into a room and you're like, are they good or [00:11:00] not, you know, just, just being able to trust, even just what people say and like, and then you're kind of in evangelicalism and church culture, you like you walk into a church and and everyone's believing the same thing.Well, Are, are they, are they, are we, are we all on the same page here? I talked to someone the other day that like teaches their children just because someone is a pastor doesn't mean they're interpreting scripture actually accurately. And I was like, okay, that's a very wise thing to teach your child, but so sad that you're saying.has led you to teach that to your child. Brian: Yeah. Yeah. Same. Well, and I've heard, I've heard parents and other people just like, because normally we instruct our kids to pay attention or listen to the grownups. And I've heard other grown up, other adults and friends say, it's like, actually, that's not always true because grownups won't always tell you the right thing to do, or they might be wanting to hurt you in some kind of way.And it's like, I hate that we have to teach our kids that, but it's, that's [00:12:00] the way of the world today. And it's just really unfortunate and sad and grieving. Katherine: Yes. When you're allowed to be afraid of Santa Claus. Yes. Brian: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Yes. That's okay if you're afraid. So trust your gut on that one.Yeah. So anyway, so I went through that experience three times in three different environments. Three times. The first time, not necessarily in a row, but very close. So the first time at a college with an older leader, mentor, figure, admired. Second time with a, someone who very young and then I had a short break for about two years and then ended up where I was now with someone who's basically my contemporary.But it's just getting it, getting hit from all sides of it. And I had had enough. So when we left, when I left the church in July of 21, I was like, I am absolutely done for a while and I've got to figure all of this out because I don't know why it keeps happening to me, you know, a result of all the gas lighting is like, it must be my fault.So it must be something wrong in the denominator. [00:13:00] Exactly. And we had already been seeing our counselor therapist for a while. So we just kind of dove into the topic head first. It's like, I just, I'm in a tailspin. I don't know what to do. Like, I don't know which way is up right now, and I just help. Just help.And she, she is a trauma informed therapist, which was extreme. I'm grateful for, because that's not why we started going to her. But that helped to process all of this stuff and then finding these books and finding these resources and chasing the rabbit holes got me to the place was like, okay, I can name spiritual abuse.I can define it. I can name trauma and define it. And after about a year and a half. Of doing that work and processing through the trauma and the abuse. I was like, I think I might be in a place where I feel like I'm doing better and I'm not doing great, but I'm definitely better than I was. And I think I actually have a framework for how I want to help other people because everywhere around me, I see people dealing with the same thing.And I hate that we're all here. Katherine: [00:14:00] Absolutely. Did you have, when you were like doing research, did you have something that you, how are you defining it at the time? You just calling it church hurt. What were you Googling? Brian: What were the things that you? Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, I think it starts with church hurts.That's kind of the phrase that people hear. And then once I got my brain around the term spiritual abuse, I was like, Oh, okay. And then of course everyone quotes, the body keeps a score. So I forced myself through that one. And then through that one learned, learned trauma and then found books on religious trauma and started doing that whole thing.So just coming up with definitions and just kind of collecting all these in a master Google doc for my brain and figuring it out from there. Katherine: Yeah. Yeah. And then at what point did you say? Yeah. So you said that I want to help people and help make sense of this. Where did the vision for broken to beloved come from?Cause last year was the first year, right? April, wait, I guess that's this year, right? [00:15:00] Brian: Yeah, it is. Yeah. April of this year. Yeah. 20, 23 at the time. So it didn't start as broken into beloved. It started as a six week cohort, which I call through, which is based on the children's book. Going on a bear hunt because we can't go around it.Can't go over it. You just got to go through it. Right. And that came up from a friend, Amy. I was speaking at her summit. She does an Enneagram summit and I also do Enneagram coaching, but she said, what do you want to talk about? I was like, this sounds crazy, but. Do you want to talk like, can I talk about like spiritual abuse?She goes, what? We have to do that. And so it just got all my wheels turning and then that's what kind of turned into the cohort. So I, I created a framework for a six week cohort to lead people. You know, and the story of that is like, because I over identified myself as broken for so long, I literally walked into this last church interview with the pastors and elders and said, Listen, they were like, hey, why should we hire you?And my answer was, well, actually, you [00:16:00] don't want to hire me because I'm damaged goods. Let me just disqualify myself to you now because you don't want me because I'm broken and I'm really damaged. So you don't want me here. And so I recognize that I was wearing that as my identity. And so through KJ Ramsey's book, through all these other books that identified Wade Mullin, something's not right and all these other things, it's like, Oh, okay, so maybe I'm not the problem.Yeah, maybe there's stuff broken in the system and it's not to say I'm not blameless for a lot of things because I certainly am but it was Developing a framework for what does it look like to move out of my brokenness and to actually name the things that have happened to Me because we can't heal what we can't name.So naming things is really important Recognizing where I am in time and space so that I can pull myself to the present and recognize when I'm safe when I'm not When I'm triggered or activated when I'm not And then using all the polyvagal theory stuff that she includes in there. And then [00:17:00] recognizing how embodiment is so important and breath practices and mindfulness things and moving forward so that we can recognize, identify, and then embrace our belovedness as our actual identity, not our brokenness.So the cohort came first in October of 2022. It went really, really well. I did it again in January of 23, which is the beginning of the year that we're recording. And so coming out of those two cohorts, I was like, man, it seems like there's an audience for this and a need for it. And all the books that I have read have done a really great job defining terms for me.They do a good job of validating experiences and telling stories. I've read almost nothing that offers what now? Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Like, I just don't know what to do. Like, okay, great. Thanks for sharing the information, but what do I actually do now? Cause I still feel stuck. So the whole point of the broken to beloved summit, which came from the bookends of the cohort of starting broken and ending beloved [00:18:00] was to invite all the authors that I had read and the resources that I had found online, get them in one place and just say, great.What now? What now? What now? And to make it practical, right? So the whole tagline I use for everything is finding a pathway toward healing and wholeness. When Katherine: you were describing yourself as broken when you would walk into these interviews, what did that mean to you? Was that yeah, expound on what that meant and then how is that showing up for Brian: you?I don't know if I've ever been asked that question. I just felt broken. Like my whole brain was. I'm just unsure of what to believe or what was right or wrong. I'm also an Enneagram One, which is very right wrong, black white minded. I always think I have to do things the right way. So for me It was always a, well, if I was fired from this place, or if I had to leave because I was so toxic, what did I do wrong?But other people [00:19:00] loved me, and it was just this group, so maybe it was, maybe it was them, but maybe it was me, but I'm not sure, and I think I'm really good at my job. And people tell me I'm good at my job, but the pastor just told me I'm not and that he needs to replace me because the board told him so even though they've never given me feedback in any of my reviews that anything needed to change when I've been asking for them for years.So it's, it's all that kind of stuff that in your brain messes with you. It's also the the second place that we left, we were friends with. The pastor and his wife, we graduated together. We were alumni together. I was like, we thought we were friends. We hung out at each other's houses. And then to do something like that and to feel so stabbed in the back, really It was a, it was just kind of whiplash, right?It's like, what, what, what happened there? And so what's wrong with me and what's wrong with my relationships? Cause I thought we were okay, but apparently not because then this happens. So walking into this last interview to just say, Hey, I'm damaged goods. I'm broken. I mean, that's really what it was. And then I had [00:20:00] had two years at another church where I.Genuinely thrived for two years. And I was like, Oh, there's actually a different way to do things. Yeah. And I didn't realize that. And then we experienced more trauma. One of our best friends passed away tragically in a car accident. And so that threw everything into tailspin and dealing with the aftermath of that.So it was just kind of like, Hey, we're really not in a good place right now for a transition or for something to change. And yet I felt so. Bound is not the right word I'm looking for, but I'm going to use it by the whole idea of. If God wants to do something here, I don't want to close the door and say no.And I don't say that to over spiritualize anything or myself, but it's just the words that came out of my mouth at the time. So we just kind of kept going with the process. And I remember the first several weeks slash months of having started this job, just trying to be really vulnerable with people and honest, just like, listen, I, I don't come here pretending I'm perfect in any [00:21:00] way I'm really broken right now and we need help. Just so you know that, and I might have some answers or help for you, but I'm coming at it from a position of brokenness and the more I do this work, the more I recognize how okay that really is.Katherine: Yeah, and it kind of sounds like as you're describing. What brokenness was to you? It sounds like trauma, but it sounds like internalized trauma of this is somehow my fault, like these outside messages and this trauma that I'm experiencing is due to something. Brian: Yeah. Potentially. Well, and isn't that part of the toxic theology that a lot of churches teach is like that you are responsible for your sins and how they label everything as sin.So if something bad happened in your life, it must be your fault because you weren't holy enough. You didn't pray enough. You didn't whatever [00:22:00] enough. Right. And it's like not. Not taking into account any of the effects of abuse where the abused actually did nothing. It's like when a woman gets raped, Oh, what were you wearing?How did you contribute? What perfume do you have? It's like, come on, really? But that's where I was mentally, emotionally, all the things. Katherine: Yeah, and that thin layer of, like, you must be sinning or God is, like, sanctifying you and is allowing these happen, these things to happen to, like, grow your faith or, you know, and, like, getting to that place, naming, as you said, getting to that place where you just, you're just able to point out it and to say this was not okay, period.Like should never have happened. We should never should never have had to go through this like this was never an okay thing when you got to your church, the last church and you like was this the church that you were [00:23:00] saying I am broken and I am damaged goods. Yes. And then that Brian: obviously didn't go did not pan out.Was Katherine: that used against you Brian: was what part used against me? The fact that you were Katherine: open about your brokenness. Brian: Yes and no, I would say by the pastor. Yes, because I think in the kindest way I can say this possible, he's a master manipulator. So I think he knew us coming in and me saying those things up front and they pitched themselves very much as, oh, well, we are a healing church.We're a place where people come so they can just receive and sit back and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. And but then, you know, six months, two months, four months, two years later, they're saying, Oh, you're still praying for that thing. You're not healed yet. Are you not over that yet? Right? It's that kind of stuff.And so those are the major red flags that go up. It's like, maybe this is not such a great place. Katherine: Absolutely. Absolutely. So pitching themselves as a healing place and then, and then not. [00:24:00] Not so Brian: much. Yeah, maybe you used to be but not so Katherine: much today. How would you say? broken to beloved is Creating a space that you would say is just like healthier than that Like how how are you seeking to make that a healthy space for Brian: people?Mm hmm. That's a great question. Thank you I don't know cuz I'm still figuring it out. One of the first words that comes to mind is honesty and trying to be honest about Whatever it is that we are feeling or naming or experiencing because one of the things I've learned is that when we try to push away or repress any of those things, we often get ourselves in trouble because it's something is trying to be expressed there.And it doesn't mean that we. Allow rage or ranting to take place just because because there are safe places to do to do that too, but probably not within a general community, right? Within an intimate relationship, [00:25:00] maybe, but not within a an open space. So I think the honesty piece is one of them. I think the openness is another.Another word that comes to mind is kindness. I think there was an interview I did last year with David Gate, who does all that kind of typewriter poetry, which I love. And he said something that really has stuck with me ever since. And it's this idea that you can have all these progressive, or not progressive, all these fundamentalist Christians.Or conservatives or evangelicals or whatever you want to call them who go through this process of abuse and or trauma and then deconstruction and then leave the church or whatever it is, but they don't actually examine or change anything and they just switch over to progressive liberalism or progressivism or whatever it is, and they're still fundamentalists at heart.Absolutely. And I think the fundamentalist piece, the certainty that so many people carry. Doesn't make room for curiosity [00:26:00] and kindness which I think embodies a lot of what I'm trying to do is to be open and curious and kind because I also see voices online who just come across as angry all the time.It's like, I get it. There's room for that. I'm angry too. But, and there are times that I drive by the church and I'm like, can we just burn it all down? Sure. Right. I feel all that, but it doesn't, I don't feel helped or served by it. Yeah. The Psalms, when I did an interview this morning, and the Psalms are 75 to 80 percent imprecatory and lament, so there's plenty of room for honest, raw emotion, but there's also a time and place for it, and it doesn't have to be public, and I don't, actually, here's, here's a good thing, I don't need everyone to agree with me.Because your experience is your own and you need to figure out how you're going to process it. Here's how I've processed mine and I'm not going to prescribe anything to you that you should do it this way too. But I'm going to approach it with openness [00:27:00] and kindness and curiosity and hopefully safety.Yeah. Katherine: Yeah. And I think like that. Openness, kindness, curiosity can create that safety and, and, and having that space where people can come on their own journey and find their own, their own, yeah, like find their own, their own path. And, and, and that's also just sort of like, Anti the opposite of what we experienced in the church of like, only me, the person with the, you know, title can tell you what is helpful and what, what God is really saying and putting that agency back into each individual person is sweet.Not what we were taught church and we were taught not to trust ourselves in the church context. And so, yeah, I love that, that openness, openness, kindness, and curiosity. I love it. What are some of your hopes and [00:28:00] dreams for the summit?Brian: I hope that it's helpful. I hope that it feels practical for people. I hope that people walk away with a sense of, I mean, the three words I use most often are hope, healing, and wholeness. And I say that knowing that there is real harm done when others try to prescribe a timeline to your healing. That healing is not a destination, right?And I think Laura Anderson just wrote about this in her book. It's like healing is not a destination. It's not an arrival point. It's something that we are just Doing probably for the rest of our lives. So when I say that, it's not like, Hey, show up to the summit and you will be healed. Absolutely not. But I do hope it gives you really practical tools that you can walk away with and say, Oh, this thing will help me.Right. This thing will help me to take a step. And so we had 1, 200 people register last year, which blows my mind for trying something for the first time. [00:29:00] So I it would be great to have as many or more. Not because of numbers, because God knows I hate numbers because so many churches are driven by it. But the idea that people are helped.And and moved in that direction of healing and wholeness and hope, I think so many of us who go through this kind of abuse or trauma walk away feeling so isolated, broken, like you're saying, with a lack of agency or not empowered that my hope is that you walk away with a sense of hope, feeling empowered and a sense of agency to take control of something in your life because so much of it has been stripped away from you.I think those are the kinds of things I hope for. Yeah, Katherine: absolutely. And I think even just the reality that we can like walk into a space and it's, you know, 18 or whatever speakers all speaking on something similar. And so there's this awareness that like, at least all of these people have, have, have some experience with this thing.I've gone through this or understand this and that [00:30:00] validation of like, yes, oh, people are talking about this. And people see this as something that is really important and causes a lot of pain and deserves attention, deserves an entire summit. I think that that in itself is, is So validating and so helpful.What's, what is some information about this? What can you tell us about how folks can find the summit register if they're ready for it?Brian: Sure. We do have dates. We will be January 23rd through 26th. Last year was 3 days. I learned that was too short to pack that many speakers talking about trauma and abuse. So I'm spreading it out over 4 days and I'm inviting less speakers. So it's not so overwhelming every day. If you go to BrokenToBeloved. org slash subscribe, you can join my mailing list, which is where I'll probably send information first. Or you can just follow me on Instagram, which are where I post when I have time to[00:31:00] at BrokenToBeloved.Okay. All Katherine: right. I'll all of this information in the show notes Brian: so folks can read it. Thank you. Katherine: And I'm very excited to be there and to be a part of it, watch all of the speakers. And is there anything else that you want to share about broken to beloved the cohort. Your journey, Brian: anything? No, I, I mean, we are like you, a 501 C three.So if you're looking for someone to support or an organization, this is the work that we're trying to do. So you can just go to same broken to beloved. org and you can find all the stuff there. I'm super grateful for you and your work and having stumbled across you last year. I, I love and support the stuff that you're doing as well.Grateful to have you at the summit twice now. Um, And just love doing the work with you. Katherine: Yeah, so I'm glad to partner in this with you as well. Thanks so Brian: much. Thank you.
When you are creating a team in your property management business, the culture that you create will make or break your business and your ability to grow and scale. In this episode, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull sit down with property management entrepreneur and DoorGrow client Brian Mullins to talk about hiring, culture, and processes. You'll Learn [05:33] Why culture is important in a business [12:07] Importance of humility and showing gratitude as a business owner [19:48] Having processes makes everything easier! [24:18] Setting goals in your business Tweetables “If I could just clone myself, then all my hopes and dreams would come true because I would make that clone of me do all the stuff I don't want to do. Guess what? They wouldn't want to do it either.” “People that can do everything do not make great team members. They make great business owners.” “Don't be the property manager, be the property management business owner. Hire the property manager.” “Whatever we focus on with our team and are grateful for, they get better at that.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: They say pride cometh before the fall. So if you're not humble in business, usually you get your ass handed to you at some point, and then you are forced to be humbled. And so you either humble yourself or you get forced to be humbled. [00:00:12] Welcome DoorGrow property managers to the DoorGrow show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow property manager. DoorGrow property managers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management, business owners, and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. We're your hosts, property management, growth experts, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow, and Sarah Hull, co-owner and COO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show. [00:01:19] And our guest today is Brian Mullins. Brian, welcome to the show. [00:01:24] Brian: Thanks for having me. [00:01:25] Jason: Cool. So Brian, give us a little bit of background on you for those listening, how you got into property management, why you decided to do that crazy thing, and yeah, share a little bit about your journey in entrepreneurism. [00:01:39] Brian: Okay. Well, it goes back a long ways. I I'd always had an interest in real estate. I grew up in high school during the ramp up to the great recession and was fascinated by it, and graduated high school, wasn't sure exactly where I wanted to go. I was leaning towards technology or entrepreneurship, finance business, and started computer science, said, "Oh, hell no, I'm not doing this," and then switched over to finance. And in that time, I was also working for a collection law firm as my college job. So I switched to finance, fell in love with that, and then I got an opportunity to take some electives in finance, and real estate was actually one of the departments under finance. [00:02:20] And so, like, well, I can get a minor and fulfill my electives in real estate, or in finance. And so I took my first real estate class, and that was the point which I decided that this is where I wanted to be, and this would have been in 07, 08, and I set myself as a goal to go through college, graduate college, work five years for somebody else, and then start essentially a investment brokerage, doing property management acquisitions, the whole nine yards. So I went all the way through school, graduated in 2010, which is a really crappy time to find a job and I said, "I'm not going to go do some of these jobs that are actually available," and I went and got my MBA instead, graduated in 2012, worked 5 years for a regional automotive group, and I was in charge of all their real properties, and so I was doing a lot of commercial real estate at that point, building buildings, and also managing the various assets that they owned. And then after one week, should I have my five year anniversary? I quit, made a little bit of a shift. In hindsight, probably wasn't the best idea. I went more towards retail brokerage, and ran with that, never had a ton of success, survived made a decent chunk of change, but I was never super satisfied with it, recruiting agents is not my jam. [00:03:32] And so during COVID, I saw the handwriting on the wall, I knew that the market was going to collapse, you know, you can't live with interest rates as low as they were, and it's a pendulum that's going to swing the other way, and so we made the conscious shift at that point, and I took a few key members of my retail brokerage and said, we're going to go into property management, and this was in early 2021. So, at that point, I had, I owned like 17, 15, 17 doors, something like that myself. I managed a couple others, so we're at about 20 doors. And then we quickly expanded, we got up to our peak was about 150 doors that we got up to, and then that was about the time that we joined DoorGrow and we ended up firing our largest client. [00:04:14] It was an apartment complex, but it was just an absolute nightmare, and then we've been rolling ever since. And then also during this. I actually had an investor reach out to me and say, we want to grow a real estate portfolio, and so we shifted from when we originally signed on with DoorGrow to really looking for clients to more, we need the process and the culture so we can grow this business because we've got essentially, you know, a big portfolio of properties coming on and we need to be able to scale it. So that's the short story of how I got into it. I've always loved it. All my work history has led up to this. Working collections for 10 years through high school and college is a really good transition into property management because it's the same thing. [00:04:54] Yeah, it is. You're dealing with the people who don't pay their debts are a lot of mostly tenants, you know, to somebody. And so you have to deal with that type of clientele, and it's that balance. And I really appreciate my lawyer that I work for. He really taught me a lot of like, how do we balance being compassionate, but also being firm because that you can be a jerk, right? Or you can be a, you know, somebody just gets rolled over. It's like, you need to find that in between. So I learned a lot from that and working real estate from five years and then even doing, I learned a lot being on the retail brokerage side. [00:05:27] Jason: Awesome. Yeah. So it sounds like you have a lot of experience that you really can leverage to benefit your clients. So the topic we are discussing today's how process and culture can make or break your organization. So what what have you learned about process or culture related to this? What conclusions have you been arriving at? [00:05:47] Brian: So, yeah, so for me, I'm an only child. I was always raised, you know, very independent, and I can do it myself. The problem is I can't grow an organization like that. Yeah. The kind of my first real inclination of this was like when I read the book Good to Great, right? It's, you know, and then that's even on a big scale, but like, how can I be a leader to grow an organization because I can't do it all myself? I could, but I'm never going to be able to scale to where I want to. I'm always going to be capped out and I'm going to have a job and not a business. And so, you know, whenever this investor came on and we were really starting to grow, like we were at 150, we were feeling the growing pains and we noticed this like with the retail brokerage, like keeping people was harder. Like I could recruit, I'm a good salesperson. Whatever I want to do, I can get somebody in the door. But then keeping them long term because people are looking for something different than what I would be. That's one of the biggest lessons I've learned is that not everybody's like me. If I'm an employee, I don't care as much about culture. Even though I do in the background, but like, that's not my main thing. Like I'm very goal oriented enough. I'm going to get my job done, but that's not what the majority of people are looking for. And so we need to be able to set that culture. [00:06:59] And so that was the first piece that we were noticing, but we didn't really realize it. And so like when we came to DoorGrow and especially when I got this investor, it was processes too, because I, like you said, I have so much experience and all of this, and I've done this for so long. I'm a hell of a property manager. I can manage all day long. I don't like doing it necessarily, but I can't grow, I could probably manage a hundred 150 doors on my own. But then I'm tapped out. And so how do I take what I'm doing and make it a process so I can replicate it? And once I replicate it, you know, even here in this market, how it should be something I can replicate in other markets as well. [00:07:39] So that's where we've been going and we've been working really hard at getting those processes documented, getting as much automated as possible. So that way we don't have to worry about it. The system just runs on its own and, you know, and we're getting to that point now, and once we fully execute everything and we feel really confident in that, it's just going to be plug and play on grip. [00:08:01] Jason: Yeah, yeah. I think it's a big mistake that entrepreneurs make early in their journey. And it's super common to assume that people are like them, right? We all start there. A lot of times that's our goal with hiring in the beginning, I call it the clone myth. [00:08:15] It's this belief, maybe those of you listening right now are thinking this, "if I could just clone myself, then all my hopes and dreams would come true because I would make that clone of me do all the stuff I don't want to do." Guess what? They wouldn't want to do it either. [00:08:27] And so they go out hunting for a clone. They're like, "I need to find somebody like me because I can do everything. If I just had somebody amazing like me, they could do everything..." and then leave and go start their own business is the reality, right? And so, but everybody thinks this and you can wear every hat in the business. [00:08:44] Entrepreneurs generally can do that. We're very adaptable. But people that can do everything do not make great team members. They make great business owners and you don't love doing everything right? Like you just said, I don't like being a property manager, which for those listening could mean two different things, right? Your clients would probably not want to hear that, right? But when you say that, you like having a property management business. I like dealing with the owner. In which you're a property manager, but then for some, being the property manager means doing the actual property management work, which is the property manager you hire as a property management business owner. [00:09:18] Yep. Well, those are two different statements, right? And so we encourage everybody listening, like don't be the property manager, be the property management business owner. Hire the property manager. So you've gone through this journey. You started working with us and defining your culture, getting your culture materials defined, and in the beginning, you're like most entrepreneurs. They're like, "what's this culture stuff? This sounds like fluffy woo woo BS. Like I don't need this. I just, I want results. Get the job done. I pay you. Just do the effing work." So, yeah. So what conclusions have you come to then with your team and with culture? [00:09:52] How does this shift your team and, or how does this shift who you hire? Like, what have you realized? [00:09:56] Brian: So, we've been working really hard on that hiring piece. And so whenever we're looking to hire, like we've got to make sure we hire the right person. And, you know, we've had like some team players that, you know, maybe aren't the best team players. [00:10:10] And then you try to hire someone that can put up with them. Well, that's not a good option because you end up hiring somebody just like that. And then you've got two people that are like that. And you're like, we can't do this. You know, that doesn't really work in the organization and it's going to completely destroy stuff. [00:10:23] So, you know, we have to look for people who are willing to be team players. And so there's a book that I read The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni, and he mentions in the book three virtues. And I think it's a really good summation of what we're looking for when we hire. And those three are humble, hungry, and smart. We'll start at the bottom. So smart is not intelligence. It's emotional intelligence, right? It's can you handle yourself with clients? Can you handle yourself with the coworkers? Do you know how to make a smart response to things? And hunger obviously drive. You know, we don't want people that are just here to get a paycheck and go home because that's not going to succeed. [00:11:00] We're not an assembly line and this business is a 24/7 business. So I don't need someone at 5 o'clock that they fall off the face of the earth and maybe they're the only ones with an answer that we need to get ahold of. And then humble is the hardest thing to hire for and humble is where I struggle the most because naturally I am not a humble person my wife likes to make fun of me about that. But it's true. I'm not. I've always known that I'm decent at what I do and I walk and talk like it. So those three things is what we're looking for. And so we're very intentional when we're hiring now at looking for these aspects because you're right. When I first started hiring, I wanted to hire people like me, but all that would do is create tension, and they would eventually leave and start their own business and that's not a way to grow the business. I need people that fit in their role, who know their role, but also there's only so many people that can be the entrepreneurs only some people that can be the leader, right, of the organization. That's just the way the world turns. And so, like, we're hiring people on culture. We're also hiring people for the right position that fits their personality. [00:12:07] Jason: So let's talk about humility. Let's talk about this. because I think this is a challenge and there's benefits to being humble. There's significant benefits to being humble. [00:12:16] Humble means that you are teachable. It means that you are able to get new information. They say pride cometh before the fall. So if you're not humble in business, usually you get your ass handed to you at some point, and then you are forced to be humbled. And so you either humble yourself or you get forced to be humbled. [00:12:34] And so the advantage, and a lot of people think humility is debasing yourself or putting yourself down or saying that you're not great. And I don't think that's what real humility is. That's like false humility maybe. I don't think that's what humility is. I think my definition or how I define humility is that you have the ability to recognize others hand in your own success, whether it's God, whether it's your team, whether it's your mentors, just being able to recognize that other people played a part in your success is the key to humility and it's also what opens the door to you being able to be more successful because if you think it's all you, you always are limiting your ability to have more success. [00:13:20] Brian: Yeah. It's the people that are around you and that's why whenever I hire somebody, like if they think they're all that and that no one can touch them, they will never work because they lose their hunger too, right? Because they think it's all them and they lose their smart communication. They think they're all that and that they're always right with how they communicate. And that's not true. Everybody makes mistakes. I make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. And you have to be able to admit that humbly. And, you know, one of the things that we've always done, even from day one is I want to make sure the client's taken care of, and that is being willing to admit when we've effed up and take the hit, there have been real estate deals in retail time, there's been, you know, there was a tenant that we placed recently that just went completely downhill real fast and within like a month and we took the hit on that, but that's not my client's fault, right? Should we have done that? I don't know. It's a really good client but you know, we need to make it right to the client and we need to say, "hey, we shouldn't have placed this tenant in here," and I told the client that, and I told him "we'll make sure you're taken care of so and that's what we do. [00:14:32] Jason: Being transparent. I think you know, I put a lot of research into this a long time ago because, you know, I grew up in this religious culture in which you were always taught to be humble. But I was like, how do you humble yourself? Like, how do you become humble? And eventually, I had this epiphany if humility is recognizing other's hand in your success, the secret key to unlock humility and all the juicy benefits that everybody talks about that humility gives you true humility is gratitude. And so just learning to be grateful. And the way I think we can facilitate that with our team is to recognize their hand and to be grateful. So one of the things we do in almost all of our team meetings, especially our daily huddle, we do 'caught being awesome' or gratitude and like, 'what are you grateful for?' [00:15:16] And in our daily planning that we give the clients to do, we're like, what can you appreciate? And there's a double entendre there or meaning right of increasing in value, but also recognizing gratitude. And whatever we focus on with our team and are grateful for, they get better at that. [00:15:33] Brian: And for me, like it was, it's not my natural instinct to say, "Hey, you did a good job." I have forced myself to be like, "Hey, you've done a good job," and then I make sure my management team below me does the same thing with their people. We're not big enough that I don't see it, right? Like they're pulling around the office and I hear it and I will call the manager out and say, "Hey, you know, you should talk to your people and make sure they know that, you know, that they did a good job." [00:16:01] Sarah: That's one of the things we do in our team review meetings. Well, I run them. But like, I talk about like, "hey, you know, what's going well. And then are there any challenges?" And then I always just leave space at the end. Like, "do you have just any ideas?" Because maybe every day you do this thing and you're like, "Oh, it would be so much better if we could do it like this," or "it would be easier if we could do it like this." [00:16:23] Well, tell me that. And then I always want to make sure that I'm bringing out. Like, the opportunity just to be thankful for what they do. And especially because I don't have to do it. So if I didn't have you on my team, it would be me, it'd be me and Jason. So like I'm appreciative, you know, for the team members that we have and for the care that they really show our clients. [00:16:45] And that to me is big. But our team members consistently, like they just go above and beyond like all of them and they'll be like, "oh no, I already handled this" or, "oh, well, hey, I found this problem, and then I figured this, and then I just took care of it" and we're like, " okay, we weren't even involved in that. Thank you for doing that." And I think that's a really good, like the daily huddles are great. And then that one on one too is also really really important for them to just to hear that because it's always nice to hear "thank you," and especially in an industry like property management, where your tenants are not calling you going, "Hey, Brian, I just wanted to tell you how amazing you are. Thank you so much for being so great. I really appreciate everything you do. I've never had a property manager that really cares like this." They're like, " why wasn't this done? And I'm angry about this and rah!" Right? Like this is what we deal with. And this is what our front end staff deals with. So having something to counterbalance the like ball of hatred that's presented to us every day is huge in this industry. [00:17:46] Jason: Yeah. I think what's really cool when Sarah's running our meetings, what we'll see because we've led it by example, and Sarah's much better at this. She points out every team member that like, "thank you for doing this" and this sort of thing. The team now do it for each other. So when we have our little stage in our morning huddle that we do, it's, you know, caught being awesome or, you know, anyone do anything praiseworthy? Then, you know, team members now are calling out other team members. [00:18:17] "Hey, thank you for Adam getting answers to me so quickly. He's always so responsive," things like this. And so the good in that in being grateful, you're magnifying all the good. And so all my team members want to do more. They're getting rewarded. And what I find most team members want more than money. Most team members want recognition more than money once their basic needs are met. And that's weird for us. That's weird for us because we like money, right? We like money probably more than recognition. We're like, "well, let's get paid. You know, cool. I have some accolades. Get me paid, right?" Salespeople may be like that. The rest of your team probably really would just like to be recognized, but everybody likes being recognized. [00:18:58] So I'll recognize her. She runs our meetings and does an amazing job and I would not be nearly as good at this. And she facilitates this and gets everybody talking. Sometimes I don't even talk like the whole huddle was like, "Hey, everyone," you know, and I'm not as connected to a lot of the team sometimes. [00:19:16] So I can't even think of things sometimes to call people out for being awesome because I'm probably mostly interacting only with my assistant or sometimes with Sarah. And so, you know, that's it. And so my team members calling each other out creates this sort of culture of gratitude and appreciation, which increases the positivity and the positive results and that work environment, it becomes this almost like a feedback loop, a positive feedback loop. It grows my team members' skill and ability. [00:19:48] Brian: And I think with this, like, because yeah you have to have your team and you will retain your team more, but then that also goes ties into the process side of things, because if you do lose a team member, if you have your processes lined out. [00:20:00] It's not as stressful if somebody were to leave because it's plug and play, right? Like, "okay, this is your job." And we've been working on recording videos of how you do certain things. And they're short. We try not to make them, you know, an hour long videos. And that way it's like, you know, you can go find that little piece that you need instead of having to like watch hour long video, but you find that and then now it's plug and play. And so that way you can easily hire somebody that maybe they're not, they don't have the perfect skill set, but they have the humility, they have the hunger, they have the smarts, they have the right culture for your organization. [00:20:35] And then the process is there. Where if they have that culture piece, they can be trained pretty easily in the process if it's documented properly. [00:20:44] Jason: Very cool. So what's next for you in systems, process, developing your culture? What do you see on the horizon for your team? [00:20:52] Brian: So, right now, what we're working on is finalizing everything that we have been working on. I've got an intern who's been incredibly helpful and getting everything set up. And so here in the next month or so, I'm going to have him sit down and go over everything that he's built in the process. And we're going to tweak it. But we've got everything written down on paper, and we've gotten most of it into the computer systems. [00:21:14] And then we're going to have a team meeting and make sure everything is running like it should. And then from there, we're going to make sure all those videos are up and going. And then we're going to work on expanding the team. So the thing is like with my investor who wants to really push this, like he wants to get in multiple markets. [00:21:31] And so what we're going to be doing is expanding with him. And so what we're doing is we're going to be looking for acquisitions. So we're hopefully we'll start with an acquisition and somewhere in our market. Because that way it's a little easier. I don't care how huge it is, even if it's 30 to 50 doors. [00:21:48] That would be stellar because it gives us an opportunity to learn the acquisitions piece. And then the next thing is we're going to go, because we're in Oklahoma City, next thing we're going to go up to Turnpike and start looking for acquisitions in Tulsa. And then we'll essentially set up a separate base in Tulsa. [00:22:03] But once we have all of our systems here and our cultures here. You know, it's going to be pretty easy to set. It's a 90 minute drive up there. So it's not the end of the world to have to run up there. And then from there, we're going to be going into other markets out of state. And that becomes more of an issue because we have different brokerage laws and I don't sit for my broker's exam or someone who would in another state. [00:22:23] So that's where we're continuing to grow is to go regional with this. And, you know, and the side that doesn't, isn't directly related to property management is like. We're tasked with bringing on doors. And so these things, the same pieces, the culture and the process follow with any business, it's not just property management. [00:22:42] And so like me and Mallory, my operator, we are having a meeting this morning. It's like, "okay, we've got this ball rolling. We need to start looking at the next thing, which is how do we increase our acquisitions of properties?" Not of actual real estate acquisitions. And so we're taking these exact same pieces and say, "okay, we need to line out the process," and then we can hire people to do it because the two of us can do it. [00:23:06] We don't have the time to do it. We need to get the processes lined out so we can put the right person in the seat and make it happen. [00:23:12] Jason: Yeah. So we've touched on the three systems that are really needed to make the business infinitely scalable, as I say. So you need really good people. You need a good people system, need a good process system, and then the next big piece is a really good planning system. Sounds like you have a plan and getting that plan built out in DoorGrow OS so that it's no longer just your vision and you have the entire team helping you move this forward will take a lot of weight off your shoulders and allow your operator to make sure that this all happens. [00:23:44] And then you have a predictable future, which is really amazing. It's like, you can see the future and you can see the future growth of the business and your team helped make it all a reality. [00:23:54] Brian: So one of the things that I really took away from the regional automotive group that I worked for the founder of it he passed a few years ago, but I got to know him. He was essentially retired, but I got to know him. And one thing he always did, and this is obviously before computers, because this was in the 70s, or what we have today, he wrote, I think it was three to five goals, and he wrote it on a piece of paper, and those were his goals for the next year. [00:24:18] And he would accomplish them and it's easier to accomplish what you have set. I had a teacher in junior high and she told me, and it's always stuck with me. You will get further if you set your goals high and don't reach them versus setting your goals low and easily reach them. And so that's the philosophy I've taken with my whole life. [00:24:40] Like, I'm going to set these goals, and whether I get there or not, you know, I'm sure going to try, but I know I've made it further than if I set my goals really low. [00:24:48] Jason: Yeah, it's like the old quote, it's better to aim for the stars and miss than a pile of manure and hit, right? I love this idea for entrepreneurs. [00:24:58] The challenge though, a lot of times with team members, one of the things we coach on is that can sometimes demoralize the team because they have to be winning. And so I say entrepreneurs set your big hairy ass goal, keep it a private from your team. And then with your team set a goal that there's zero chance they can not hit by the end of the year, zero chance that they don't hit by the end of the quarter. [00:25:19] And that they're very likely hit by the end of the month. And it's because you want to teach them to be winning constantly. And this gives them you the ability to recognize them. And they actually increase their results because they're winning. And if they learn to lose, teams get very comfortable with losing very quickly, right? [00:25:38] They don't hit a sales goal that month. "Well, we'll get them next time," you know, and then they just get worse and worse. And so really big, I'm making sure like hit those goals, but back the goals down low enough that you'll hit it for sure by the end of the year and then see as a team, can you hit it sooner? [00:25:55] Then. Winning bigger. [00:25:56] Brian: Yeah, I think that comes to knowing your people too, because there's some people that are going to be more ambitious, right? And so you can maybe knock circles up a little bit more than you would somebody that needs that fulfillment that, "hey, I've accomplished my goal." [00:26:08] And so that all comes with knowing your people and pushing that down the line as, you know, for me as entrepreneur and owner, pushing that down the line to the rest of my team members and my management team, and they push it down. [00:26:20] Jason: Cool. Well, Brian, we appreciate you being in the program. Do you want anyone to reach out to you from this or get in touch with you or..? [00:26:27] Brian: Yeah we're in Oklahoma City Metro. If you have anybody that is looking to expand their real estate portfolio, feel free to give us a holler. You can find us in 1907investments.com and, or you can find me online. I'm all over the place. And you know, we really take pride and take care of our tenants, treat our tenants as clients, because then you're going to have a more successful business. [00:26:47] Because if you want your real clients, your owners should succeed. You got to make sure the tenants stay in and are happy. [00:26:53] Jason: Awesome. Well, Brian, you're a sharp guy. We appreciate you being in the program. Thanks for coming on the DoorGrow show. [00:26:58] Brian: Appreciate y'all. [00:26:59] Sarah: Thanks, Brian. [00:27:00] Jason: Thanks. See you. All right. [00:27:01] So if you are a property management business owner, and you are at the place where you are stressed out, you're struggling, you're frustrated, maybe you're thinking like, "what's my business worth?" Keeps coming up in your head because you're like, "maybe I should exit this." You want to get out of it. Maybe in the next two to three years is your plan because you don't really see a light at the end of the tunnel, then reach out to us at DoorGrow. We can help you get out of that, out of a business that you don't enjoy and turn it into the business of your dreams, a business that you do enjoy. Help you get the right systems installed so that it becomes easy, comfortable, and maybe even fun, right? Let's have a little fun. [00:27:39] And if you would like that, reach out to us at doorgrow, you can check us out at doorgrow.com. Bye everyone. [00:27:44] you just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow! [00:28:11] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
In this episode, Brian Mattocks and Sean Boyce dive into the vital role of precise outreach within the sales process, with a special focus on leveraging LinkedIn. They explore the unexpected drawbacks that can arise from poorly executed hunting campaigns and underscore the importance of selecting the most suitable communication channels. Moreover, the host stresses the significance of providing valuable content, like blog articles or podcasts, rather than jumping straight into sales pitches. They also shine a spotlight on the effectiveness of personalized and hybrid strategies as a way to distinguish oneself and attain superior sales outcomes.Sean Boyce has run his consultancy firm NxtStep Consulting for over 10 years but found he wasn't able to grow his network effectively and efficiently through in-person marketing or lead generation services. To solve this, Sean founded Podcast Chef, a full-service podcast management platform that helped him grow his network while making awesome content at the same time.Seeing the effectiveness of podcasting at reaching new people, Sean opened it up to others, helping people to start a podcast and delegating the management from post-production to booking guests. Here are a few of the topics we'll discuss on this episode of Hard to Market: The ineffective and spammy nature of most LinkedIn cold outreach messages The shift towards capitalistic behaviors in social media platforms as they prioritize monetization over community engagement The allure of hunting for new business opportunities, but the importance of investing in consistent and morally ethical processes Offering something of value generates a stronger response from potential customers. A hybrid approach that aligns with your interests and strengths can be effective. Generic sales messages are often ignored. Consistency and testing are necessary to find the right approach. Resources: NxtStep Consulting Podcast Chef Connect with Sean Boyce:LinkedInConnect with our host, Brian Mattocks: LinkedIn Email Quotables: 06:22 - “If you're spamming hundreds or thousands of messages a day and you're getting like random chance basically consistency back, you know what you're doing really isn't worth it. That's not what you want, is you want a process, you want a process that can produce predictable results. But at the same time, you also shouldn't be doing anything that makes you feel like dirty or gross. Like you really just shouldn't be investing in things that are trying to take advantage of people or being slimy. Really, anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, you really shouldn't be investing in those things.” 10:22 - “Farming, farming sounds attractive, but I think people struggle with how do I even get started with that? Or they haven't seen them a lot of good examples of it, and it doesn't promise immediate results. So it's, it's just, it can be more difficult for folks to get started with. And for those folks, I would say there's a hybrid approach here you may not have considered that I think is worth experimenting with. Realistically, that's what I was doing when I was looking for a better solution to the spray and pray model.” 09:26 - “But, the next thing that I want to talk about too is as you start to get in a good sort of honed in understanding of your target market, one of the things that you realize too is that not all channels, not all approaches are appropriate, right? There are tons of situations where that LinkedIn kind of approach, if you're already on LinkedIn, it might make sense as that's a place to sell LinkedIn advertising, for example, or sell something similar. But if your target market's not congregating there, if they're not doing anything on LinkedIn, you're not gonna, whatever, however successful or unsuccessful a campaign may be the right tool in the wrong place or the wrong time is never going to work.” 02:46 - “I was reading a Cory Doctorow article on this. It's, they call it, he calls it the “enshittification” of social media, basically where something starts, it's got this really great, like fa you know, fan base. People are active, engaged. It's honest in its own way. It doesn't mean it's perfect, but it's honest. And as the corporate machine tries to turn that whatever that magic is into money, it inherently defaults to the capitalistic behaviors that make being in that environment awful. You see it with Facebook, you see it with Reddit, you see it with all of these social media platforms where they're like, oh well we also need to take money. And they do that at the expense of the community that kind of built the environment.” 12:28 - Sean: “You love writing, do that, you love podcasting, do that, whatever it is, like just try to stand out from the crowd because I can't tell you how many messages I get on LinkedIn these days. It's like five to 10 probably per day for people deliberately just trying to sell me specifically lead gen, whatever. And I ignore all of it.”Brian: “Yeah, I think that gets back to the way we kind of have a magic bullet approach socially to a lot of stuff where it's like there is a single solution, and it is, you know, you can buy your way out of the problem. And there is, you know, and every marketer that hears this right now is, is going, yes, you're exactly right. There is no magic bullet solution to not knowing who you're selling to. There is no magic bullet solution to not knowing the value your solution offers.”
In this episode, Jackie Brusch, the Senior Director of Marketing at Emporos, discusses her journey in combining writing, marketing, and a love for healthcare. She highlights the challenges of marketing pharmacy commerce systems and the importance of understanding different personas. Brusch emphasizes the collaboration between sales and marketing teams, the balance between thought leadership and sales enablement content, and the focus on improving the customer experience in the pharmacy space.Jackie Brusch, the Senior Director of Marketing at Emporos, brings extensive expertise in pharmacy commerce systems and simplifying the process of delivering care as a modern-day pharmacy. With a proven track record in marketing leadership roles, including positions at OpenClinica and Mobiquity Inc., Jackie has consistently driven successful marketing initiatives and delivered meaningful results for leading healthcare and technology organizations. Here are a few of the topics we'll discuss on this episode of Hard to Market: Content marketing as a way to modernize healthcare and bridge the gap between writing, marketing, and technology. Focusing on pharmacy directors and IT professionals as the primary audiences for these systems. Utilizing face-to-face networking and digital marketing to engage with potential clients and build relationships. Integrating sales development reps (SDRs) under marketing to foster one-to-one relationships with leads. Providing tools like comparison tools and checklists to help prospects navigate the buying process. Emphasizing the importance of collaboration and communication between sales and marketing teams. Addressing challenges faced by hospitals in the outpatient pharmacy space and offering solutions. Resources: Emporos Podcast Chef Connect with Jackie Brusch:LinkedInConnect with our host, Brian Mattocks: LinkedIn Email Quotables: 12:07 - “For us as a marketing team, we're a very small organization, so the team is very small. And what we realized was we're not having trouble generating leads, we're having trouble with, okay, once we have a lead, how do we get them to a place where they're warmed up enough to pass to sales? Mm. And what we've discovered was that we really needed that person that fell between marketing and sales to take that next step.” 15:23 - “There's definitely a thought leadership side that's focused on the, the vision, right? Of where we want to go as a company, where we want to see our clients go as you know, pharmacies and, and where they're going in terms of modernizing their pharmacy.” 13:55 - “You've moved sales into marketing to help with those middle of the funnel conversations until you get to the transaction point. When you help your process prospects go through that process, there's, there's gotta be a blend, right? There's some, some of the material gets very opinionated and some of it doesn't, right? Some of it's gotta stay fairly high level and educational. How do you strike that balance and then obviously with the teams there, how are you making sure that they're getting the right tools for their job?” 15:40 - “So how do you identify what you're going to be providing in terms of enabling your teams to help folks move through the funnel and, and what sort of, what does that content look like in terms of how much of it's educational versus how much of it's opinionated?” 17:43 - Jackie: “So there's a middle ground there and I think finding out what that is and working together as a sales and marketing team to provide that thought, enabling content from top of funnel all the way down to very specific sales enablement content, that's where we're starting to really fill in those gaps so that everybody from the marketing side to the, all the way down to the sales side, down to like contracting and all that, that we have everything that spans that”... Brian: “Yeah. And I think it's, I think it's like one of the, that that decision to then roll those things together, you know, has to help with the gap analysis. It's gotta make it a lot easier to figure out like, where are we stuck? What's not working? By having those in the same area and in the same space.”
No one actually wants to waste food, right? And yet, a new national study on food waste at home shows we've become more wasteful recently. US families self-reported a 280% increase in discarded food between early 2021 and early 2022. What's more, households tossed out more food during weeks they ate out. Today, we will explore results from a national tracking study published in the Journal of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. Our guests to help us learn more about this topic are economist Kathryn Bender. Katherine studies consumer behavior and food waste at the University of Delaware. We also have Brian Roe, who is an agricultural economist from the Ohio State University. Brian's research focuses on food waste and consumer economics. Interview Summary Norbert: Kathryn, let's begin with the big-picture question. Why should we care what people do with their food once they have purchased it? Kathryn: Great question. So we know that food waste has huge environmental and economic impacts. Thirty percent of food that's produced for human consumption ends up going uneaten. When that food is wasted, we know that all the resources associated with producing it, such as land and water, are also wasted. And those resources themselves have their own cost. Decomposing food emits methane, which is a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. There's also emissions from the transportation and distribution of that food from farmer to consumer. I don't think that most people set out to waste food, nor do they feel really good about doing it. In addition, households fall at the end of the supply chain, so consequences from upstream decisions made by manufacturers and distributors, may fall on the households themselves. For example, if there's milk that has not been kept cold along the supply chain, the consumer may end up throwing it away because it starts smelling or tasting off sooner than it really should. Another example is dates placed on food packages. Producers have more information about the quality and the safety of their product than consumers do. Many individuals use those dates on the package to determine when they should throw something away. If producers are conservative in this labeling, or if that language is unclear, consumers may the discard perfectly good food based on the date alone. If we can identify policies aimed at producers to effectively communicate information about the product to the consumer, as well as methods such as strict adherence to cold chain processes, we could help reduce food waste at the household level. I think, overall, we want to develop the tools necessary to set consumers up for success in minimizing their food waste. Brenna: Kathryn, thanks so much, for laying out all the reasons why we should care about this topic. We so appreciate the work you and Brian are doing to help us better understand it. So with that, Brian, can I turn to you? Would you mind telling our listeners about the national tracking survey, what you all are hoping to learn, and some of the findings you have so far? Brian: Sure. The United States set a national food waste reduction goal back in 2015. Three different administrations from vastly different political viewpoints have all kind of gotten behind that, and really want to see that goal met. And yet, we don't have great data to track how our food waste habits are changing over time. Particularly for consumers. Some other sources of data suggest consumers are the source for 40% to 50% of wasted food that we see. We really wanted to try to start to develop some data in this area. Hence, we set up a national tracking survey. We used an online survey approach, which has some known issues with it. It tends to under report the absolute level. But we're asking the same questions over and over again - we now have seven waves of data collection between 2021 and 2023. We have a consistently asked set of questions that we can use to understand patterns and trends that might be emerging across the country among consumers as they're wasting food in their households, and this helps us get perhaps a bit more level with the United Kingdom. They have got this great survey data series that they use with consumers to track food waste going back to, I believe it's the early 2000 and teens. We really hope to learn some things from our findings, and we are seeing some interesting patterns emerge. Brenna: It's great that you are starting a tracking survey. Most of us on the podcast work on food waste, and we know that it can get literally very messy trying to measure it in other ways. There are limitations in all the ways measuring. I appreciate the work that you all are doing. So Brian, you started collecting data as Covid restrictions were lifting. Why did you choose this time to start the tracking survey? Brian: That's just kind of when we got organized. My early research portfolio was very focused on going into homes with apps and things like that to get a very granular view of food waste. But then, it kind of really struck me that we need to have data on consumers, even if it's not perfect. We need to ask those questions consistently. That's when we were able to muster our resources and begin to collect the tracking data. With the help of the National Science Foundation, we've been able to solidify that tracking approach and now we have a funding stream that will allow us to continue this for at least five years. That's very helpful. Brenna: Perfect, thanks for clarifying that. Kathryn, if we can come back to you. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, food-at-home prices rose 8.6% over the period of your study. I'm curious why consumers were actually wasting more food as food prices are going up. Kathryn: I think it really comes down to how consumers are managing their food stock at home. Two things that we noted from this study was that over that year we analyzed, food that was bought in bulk and was subsequently thrown away doubled. So increased food prices may have prompted households to purchase more food in bulk. We also found in a previous study that households really increased their cold storage capacity by buying refrigerators and freezers during lockdown. I think that the increase in cold storage capacity and purchasing more bulk food adds kind of this new dimension to food stock management that households may not have adjusted to yet. We also saw that food waste attributed to unplanned dining out events increased. This makes sense as we were able to go out more. Restaurants weren't closed down, and didn't have as many restrictions. We were able to go out more, and we had more food that was wasted because we planned on eating at home. But we took advantage of an opportunity instead to go out with friends or something like that. So as people go back to their more hectic lifestyles, I think that just food management becomes a little bit more difficult. We need to make sure that we provide support and educational campaigns to help households manage their food at home. With higher prices being at the forefront of a lot of people's minds right now, I think that highlighting food waste reduction is a great method to save money. Norbert: Kathryn, that's really interesting, and it makes me think of a couple of studies that I've done with Brenna and our colleague Linlin, and some other work that I've done, where we did see a relationship between the price of food and the predicted waste. What we saw was that there was a negative relationship. So it's interesting to hear this example of increases in the price leading to or at least associated with this increase in food waste. But, I think what's really fascinating is it may be a reduction in the per-unit cost because people were buying in larger quantities. That's a really fascinating thing. One of the things that we were looking at right when Covid started, people were reducing their food away from home significantly as we weren't allowed to go out and we weren't ordering out. So, it's interesting to see this kind of change. I look forward to seeing what subsequent rounds of the survey will show about what happens with food waste and hopefully as price inflation goes down. Brian, I want to turn back to you and ask: a 280% year over year increase in food waste is really high. Do you expect that food waste will continue to increase at this rate? Brian: Yeah, we've actually got some data in on that now. So the published data shows that 280% increase between the beginning of 2021 and the beginning of 2022. That was right after the Omicron Christmas, if we remember that, and vaccines were coming on board. What we've shown now is that behavior has retracted a bit. We're down to now merely a 200% increase from that February '21 wave to the February '23 wave two years later. So it came down from that 280% peak to a doubling of food waste between early Covid days to back-to-reality-here for many people in February 2023. I think part of that is what Kathryn talked about before. That we had probably a big purge, I would guess that spring cleaning after Omicron, right? People probably were sitting on a fair amount of money in terms of finances. Restaurants were really fully reopening. They went out unexpectedly, spur of the moment, ate out during their reporting week and that caused them to report more waste. They probably looked through their cupboards and saw all this bulk stuff they might have bought during Covid and said spring cleaning time. Maybe we need to get rid of some of that stuff as the date labels grew longer and longer in the past. Once they got that out of their system, and this is the thing, we don't know what pre-Covid was, but maybe this is kind of a return to pre-Covid level. We'll never know that because we can't reproduce data that we don't have to pre-Covid days, but perhaps that February 2021 was kind of that peak studying our fridge over and over again trying to find every last leftover and shows a very low level. The data that we're getting here in February of 2023 is kind of a return to normal. That's what's happened in the United Kingdom as well, where they do have a longer tracking survey. They found right after the onset of Covid, a pretty big drop in reported food waste; about by half in terms of their metric. And then, a kind of a slow but steady march back towards pre-Covid numbers is what they found right about the end of 2022. So a little bit different in the pattern, but not dissimilar in terms of overall trends. Norbert: Your explanation makes really good sense, and so thanks for explaining that. I'm hopeful that this is going back to a lower rate of waste. It will be important to see how subsequent surveys tell us what happens with food waste as we move forward, and hopefully without a pandemic in between. Brian: And perhaps new approaches to finding other sources of data so that can maybe validate our hypotheses here about what's going on with these trends, would also be very important. It's nice to have tracking survey data, but it's correlative, right? We're not doing any randomized experiments here to be able to understand the true links and causality. So as always, we need more research to validate this to help us understand how we can jump in, intervene and help the US meet its long-term food waste reduction goals. Bios Kathryn E. Bender, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Delaware. Her research in environmental and experimental economics focuses on consumer behavior and food waste. She has a Ph.D. in Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics from The Ohio State University. Brian Roe is the Van Buren Professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at Ohio State University. Roe attended the University of Wisconsin – Madison where he received a bachelor's degree in Agricultural Economics. Roe went on to receive a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland. Prior to his employment at Ohio State, Roe worked on policy issues surrounding food safety and health information disclosure as a Staff Fellow at the US Food and Drug Administration in Washington, DC.
Brian Douglas is the CEO of OpenSauced which helps enterprises discover the best engineers in Open Source. Victoria and Will talk to Brian about meeting as many developers as possible, setting goals, and keeping himself accountable, and what makes a successful open source project. OpenSauced (https://opensauced.pizza/) Follow OpenSauced on Twitter (https://twitter.com/saucedopen), GitHub (https://github.com/open-sauced), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/opensauced/), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/opensauced), Discord (https://discord.com/invite/U2peSNf23P), and Dev.to (https://dev.to/opensauced). Follow Brian Douglas on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianldouglas/), Twitter (https://twitter.com/bdougieYO), or visit his website (https://b.dougie.dev/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: Hey there. It's your host Victoria. And I'm here today with Dawn Delatte and Jordyn Bonds from our Ignite team. We are thrilled to announce the summer 2023 session of our new incubator program. If you have a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our 8-week program. We'll help you validate the market opportunity, experiment with messaging and product ideas, and move forward with confidence towards an MVP. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. Dawn and Jordyn, thank you for joining and sharing the news with me today. JORDYN: Thanks for having us. DAWN: Yeah, glad to be here. VICTORIA: So, tell me a little bit more about the incubator program. This will be your second session, right? JORDYN: Indeed. We are just now wrapping up the first session. We had a really great 8 weeks, and we're excited to do it again. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And I think we're going to have the person from your program on a Giant Robots episode soon. JORDYN: Wonderful. VICTORIA: Maybe you can give us a little preview. What were some of your main takeaways from this first round? JORDYN: You know, as ever with early-stage work, it's about identifying your best early adopter market and user persona, and then learning as much as you possibly can about them to inform a roadmap to a product. VICTORIA: What made you decide to start this incubator program this year with thoughtbot? DAWN: We had been doing work with early-stage products and founders, as well as some innovation leads or research and development leads in existing organizations. We had been applying a lot of these processes, like the customer discovery process, Product Design Sprint process to validate new product ideas. And we've been doing that for a really long time. And we've also been noodling on this idea of exploring how we might offer value even sooner to clients that are maybe pre-software product idea. Like many of the initiatives at thoughtbot, it was a little bit experimental for us. We decided to sort of dig into better understanding that market, and seeing how the expertise that we had could be applied in the earlier stage. It's also been a great opportunity for our team to learn and grow. We had Jordyn join our team as Director of Product Strategy. Their experience with having worked at startups and being an early-stage startup founder has been so wonderful for our team to engage with and learn from. And we've been able to offer that value to clients as well. VICTORIA: I love that. So it's for people who have identified a problem, and they think they can come up with a software solution. But they're not quite at the point of being ready to actually build something yet. Is that right? DAWN: Yeah. We've always championed the idea of doing your due diligence around validating the right thing to build. And so that's been a part of the process at thoughtbot for a really long time. But it's always been sort of in the context of building your MVP. So this is going slightly earlier with that idea and saying, what's the next right step for this business? It's really about understanding if there is a market and product opportunity, and then moving into exploring what that opportunity looks like. And then validating that and doing that through user research, and talking to customers, and applying early product and business strategy thinking to the process. VICTORIA: Great. So that probably sets you up for really building the right thing, keeping your overall investment costs lower because you're not wasting time building the wrong thing. And setting you up for that due diligence when you go to investors to say, here's how well I vetted out my idea. Here's the rigor that I applied to building the MVP. JORDYN: Exactly. It's not just about convincing external stakeholders, so that's a key part. You know, maybe it's investors, maybe it's new team members you're looking to hire after the program. It could be anyone. But it's also about convincing yourself. Really, walking down the path of pursuing a startup is not a small undertaking. And we just want to make sure folks are starting with their best foot forward. You know, like Dawn said, let's build the right thing. Let's figure out what that thing is, and then we can think about how to build it right. That's a little quote from a book I really enjoy, by the way. I cannot take credit for that. [laughs] There's this really great book about early-stage validation called The Right It by Alberto Savoia. He was an engineer at Google, started a couple of startups himself, failed in some ways, failed to validate a market opportunity before marching off into building something. And the pain of that caused him to write this book about how to quickly and cheaply validate some market opportunity, market assumptions you might have when you're first starting out. The way he frames that is let's figure out if it's the right it before we build it right. And I just love that book, and I love that framing. You know, if you don't have a market for what you're building, or if they don't understand that they have the pain point you're solving for, it doesn't matter what you build. You got to do that first. And that's really what the focus of this incubator program is. It's that phase of work. Is there a there there? Is there something worth the hard, arduous path of building some software? Is there something there worth walking that path for before you start walking it? VICTORIA: Right. I love that. Well, thank you both so much for coming on and sharing a little bit more about the program. I'm super excited to see what comes out of the first round, and then who gets selected for the second round. So I'm happy to help promote. Any other final takeaways for our listeners today? DAWN: If this sounds intriguing to you, maybe you're at the stage where you're thinking about this process, I definitely encourage people to follow along. We're trying to share as much as we can about this process and this journey for us and our founders. So you can follow along on our blog, on LinkedIn. We're doing a LinkedIn live weekly with the founder in the program. We'll continue to do that with the next founders. And we're really trying to build a community and extend the community, you know, that thoughtbot has built with early-stage founders, so please join us. We'd love to have you. VICTORIA: Wonderful. That's amazing. Thank you both so much. INTRO MUSIC: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. WILL: And I'm your host, Will WILL. And with us today is Brian Douglas, CEO of OpenSauced, helping enterprises discover best engineers in open source. Brian, thank you for joining us today. BRIAN: My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me on the podcast. VICTORIA: Just tell us a little bit more about OpenSauced. BRIAN: Yeah, it's opensauced.pizza is the URL. So I always point that out because it's easy to found. WILL: I love it. BRIAN: And OpenSauced is a platform for engineers to find their next contributions and enterprises to discover the best engineers doing open-source, so... VICTORIA: Right. So maybe tell me what led you to start this company? BRIAN: Yeah, that's a great question. Actually, if you don't mind, I'll start further back. I graduated college in 2008 during the financial crisis with a finance degree. And what I learned pretty quickly is, like, if you don't know anybody in finance, it's a little hard to get a job in a bad market. So I took a sales role instead, mainly because I just wanted to learn. I was very much introverted. I wanted to learn how to talk to people, and have conversation, and communicate. So I did that four years and then got my MBA. And then started learning how to code while building an app, which is...I mentioned before we hit record I learned about this podcast around that time, which is, like, very serendipitous to be on this podcast years later. But, fast forward, OpenSauced, like, because of the whole networking aspect of how I got my job in sales and how I was able to do sales when I learned how to engineer, I knew the connection to open source, or how I learned how to code was, like, a wealth of information. So I made it my career goal to meet as many developers as possible. And then, I was working at this company called Netlify. I was employee number three there. And my role was to basically be a front-end engineer, but where I was actually getting more adoption to the product by doing open source. Like, every time I'd do an open-source contribution, I'd add a Netlify deploy preview manually in my PR. And that would give the maintainer enough juice to review the PR sooner. And I was doing a lot of open-source contribution at the time. So I wanted to build a tool to maintain, like, all the PRs I had opened in-flight that I needed to respond back to or...because back in, like, 2016, notifications on GitHub they weren't the greatest. WILL: [laughs] BRIAN: So I built a tool just to keep up to date on what I had opened and how I can communicate back with the maintainer. And saw a need...actually, I didn't see the need. I used this thing myself, and then in 2020, I started live streaming myself, building more features on top of this, like, CRM tool, and had a few people ask, "Hey, can you add a login to this? I'd love to use this, too, with my own database and stuff like that." So I did that. I added login. And I say database, like, we actually originally started with no database. We used GitHub Issues as a tracking mechanism for tracking repos and conversations. We've since moved away from that because, now, obviously, GitHub's got way more advanced in how notifications work. But the sort of ethos of the project still lives today, and what we have in the open-source platform. So that's, like, the long tale of how we got to where we are today. And then, I spoke at GitHub Universe on OpenSauced back in 2017. And from that talk, I had GitHub employees reach out to me and ask me to work at GitHub. So I accepted, and I worked at GitHub for almost five years, sort of putting OpenSauced to the side up until last year, decided to go ahead and pursue it again. And at that point, decided to make it a company. VICTORIA: What a cool story. There are so many things in there that I want to follow up on. I'm sure, Will, you also are like -- [laughs] WILL: [laughs] Yes. VICTORIA: I have so many questions. [laughs] WILL: Wow, that's amazing just hearing the story from you [laughs] got a four-year degree in finance, 2008 happened, no job, very hard to get a job because of who you know. And then you go and changed directions to start learning to code. And I love how it's kind of guided your path to where you are here right now. Like, who knows? But would you have been the CEO of OpenSauced if 2008 would have never happened? So it's amazing to see it. So, I guess, because I love the idea of OpenSauced...because I am that developer that wants to get into open source, but it is hard. It is hard to find the issues that you can work on. It's hard to get into the community to do that. So, if you can just explain to me a little bit more as from there, and we can do it from the enterprise portion later. But, as far as a user: a developer, what does it look like for me to use OpenSauced as a developer? BRIAN: Yeah, yeah. And that's a great question, too, as well. It's funny how serendipitous the story is today, but when I was living it, it was like, oh, man, I'm never going to get a job. [laughter] Or I'm never going to learn how to code. And I think anybody listening who might be where I was ten years ago, I just want to preface, like, your story is like a guided path through experiences. And every experience is like an opportunity for that sort of one piece of, like, the sort of stepping stone to move on to, like, CEO of whatever your next startup is or senior engineer, or staff engineer, whatever it is. But, to answer your question, Will, we built a Discord, and the Discord itself is how we sort of discovered this sort of onboard ramp into open source. So today, if you sign up to OpenSauced, again, opensauced.pizza, you connect to your GitHub account, and you get on-boarded into a flow to ask a couple questions. So, like, what languages are you interested in? And then, what time zone are you in? And the reason for those two things is, one because we're going to do recommendations for projects pretty soon. Everything is open source, so you can literally see the issues that are open about recommendations; happy to take contributions and feedback on it. And then time zone is because communication is pretty key. So, like, if someone is not awake when I see their PR, I have an expectation of, like, cool, I'll write a response, and I'll wait for them to wake up and respond back to that. So the goal there is there's a lot of projects on GitHub, like, 372 million repos is the number off the top of my head. They literally announce this stuff, and they share the data. But of those repos, only 225,000 have more than five contributors. Understanding what you're looking to accomplish first out of doing open source to either share knowledge, or gain knowledge, to get exposure, to get a job, or just to enhance your current job by go try something that's not in the roadmap of what you're working on. Eventually, we'll start asking those questions around, like, what type of contributor that you want to be, so we can start recommending those types of projects. But I mentioned that 225,000 repo number because there are a lot of projects that don't have five contributors that could use their second contributor, or third, fourth. And my recommendation is always find up-and-coming, like, growth-stage projects. A lot of people want to contribute to React. You had mentioned you did React, Will. That's a really big lift to go contribute upstream to a project maintained and supported by millions of enterprises around the world. But there are tons of projects that go trending every week that have no documentation, that have no README, that have no structure and are just getting off the ground. Like, those are the best projects that we try to showcase. So, like, that's hot.opensauced.pizza is our sort of up-and-coming project list. And the way that works is like projects that are trending based on our open-source community; we surface those there. There's a lot of work we have to do on that project. That was, like, a Hack Week project we did a couple of years ago as a community. But the basis of that is they're looking to build our recommendation engine off that. So, step one is find a project that is welcoming, that needs some work done, and then find the path in. So the path usually is going to be your CONTRIBUTING.md, which is like established projects will have this. But if you don't find a CONTRIBUTING.md, but you find a project you want to use, chances are you could build that CONTRIBUTING.md and ask the question, so, like, hey, how would I contribute? Like, how can I be supportive? Actually, I did this talk a couple of years ago at Juneteenth Conf. It was a remote conference on Juneteenth, which a bunch of Black Engineers we all gave our technical expertise sponsored by Microsoft. And I was talking about the idea of open-source hospitality. The best thing you could do is be that sort of hospitable person, either you're a maintainer or a first-time contributor. Like, be that person to set it up for the next person behind you. And the idea of hospitality, you go to a hotel. Like, you know where the towels are. Like, you know where the soaps are. Like, you know exactly where everything is all the time. And, in open source, like, if we could set up our projects in a very similar fashion, like, not franchise them in a way like the Hilton or Marriott, but set the expectation that there is a way to source information and to interact and operate, so... VICTORIA: Yeah, I mean, I love, [laughs] like, hot.opensauced.pizza. That's hilarious. And I love how you have used humor to...even though it's a very serious product, we're making it more friendly and more hospitable like you're saying. And I like how you said, you know, the journey is cool looking back on it, but it was really hard to go through it. And now you're this wonderful speaker and a CEO. But you said that you weren't actually good at talking to people at first. And you specifically sought to get better at that skill. So I wonder if you would share more about that, how that's impacted your career, and why that's important as a developer to have those communication skills. BRIAN: Yeah, it's like...I have a twin brother since birth, basically. And my twin brother is very extroverted. Like, he actually used to wait tables in college. It was like he was the person that would make you feel very special as a server. Like, he's the type of person that kind of lights up the room when you walk in. His name is Brock. My entire life growing up, I was always Brock's brother. And it's like, oh, you're Brock's brother. And it's like, yeah, I'm Brock's brother. And I'm more of a person, like, if you meet me in person, like, I'm very much reserved. I'm sort of reading the room, waiting for my point to jump in. And I made it a point for me to, like, have enough comfort to speak on a podcast or speak at a conference because I knew that skill set would be valuable. Because I definitely had, in my sales career, definitely got overlooked for a lot of opportunity because folks thought, oh, I don't think Brian could do it. So coming into tech and seeing that when every time I went to a meet up...because meetups also are places where I cut my teeth and got to learn about the industry and the community. They always needed someone to speak. So I was, like, oh, there's an opportunity. I can leverage this opportunity of them always looking for speakers and me always wanting to share knowledge and learn something new to do talks. So my first-ever conference talk was in San Francisco. And I had learned React Native, but prior to React Native, I had learned Objective-C. And then, in between Objective-C and React Native, I learned Swift because React Native and Swift came out the same year. Well, React Native went public, open source, the same year as Swift. So it was like a really interesting year back in; I think it was 2017 where...actually, it might have been 2016. But, anyway, everything came out at the same time. And I was learning iOS development. So I made it a point for me to give a talk. But my pet peeve for giving talks is, a lot of times, people just go directly into the code, and there's, like, no connection to a story, or why do I care about this? So I always bring storytelling into my conversations and talks. So, like, that talk about Swift, and Objective-C, and React Native, I made the comparison of, like...it was the same year that Kanye West took the mic from Taylor Swift at the VMAs or whatever the award show was. And the correlation was React Native took the mic away from Swift because it built similar interactions for JavaScript developers to understand and build iOS applications that was not like Ionic or RubyMine or...I forgot the Ruby one. But, anyway, what I'm getting at is, I just wanted to bring story to this because usually what happens is like, you see cool things, but you never remember what the name is. You try to find that REPL again, or you try to figure out who that speaker is. And it's usually hard to find it after the fact. So, like, my goal was always to make it memorable, which is why I go by Bdougie because Bdougie is easier to Google than Brian Douglas. Shout out to Brian Douglas, who's based in Ireland who does system engineering, and has a great YouTube channel. Like, I want to be memorable. And I want to make it easy for folks to find me after. So, while at GitHub, when I was developing all this sort of like Kanye West-type speaking and stuff like that, well, literally, I would use Kanye West years ago as the example to understand storytelling. I no longer use Kanye West. I'm now a Beyoncé advocate. [laughter] So I use Beyoncé instead. But I guess what I'm getting at is, like, I just had a goal. And I knew if I could teach myself to code...and it was about 17 weeks it took me from zero to ship a Ruby on Rails app. And I felt confident enough to talk about it. I knew basically anything I could just accomplish just by putting some effort and consistency behind it. So that's the...sorry, that was a little more long-winded than expected. But I just keep accountable and set goals for myself and try to achieve enough to feel proud about at the end of the year. WILL: Yeah. It's so funny because I recently had a similar situation. At thoughtbot, we try to engage with the community, and one of the ways was writing a blog post. I've never been a writer. It just hasn't been my thing. But I was telling my boss, I was like, I'm going to do that to get outside my comfort zone and to really stretch myself. And at the same time, I was like, why a blog post? Like, I don't know, it doesn't really make sense why a blog post. Well, when I started writing the blog post, I was like, oh, you have to really know, one, what you're talking about in order to write about it. And so I had to really do some research, really had to study it. And I finished it last week. And then, now, looking back over the last couple of months it took me to write that blog post, I'm like, wow, I feel stretched. But I feel really good, and I feel really good about the topic that I did. So that's interesting that you went through that process to stretch yourself and to grow and even learning to code and get to that point. So talking about...you were at Netlify, and then you worked at GitHub. And then you're at your current one OpenSauced. How have Netlify and GitHub, the work that you did there, how has it prepared you for your position right now? BRIAN: You know, actually, that's a great question. I don't know how much thought I put into that. Like, Netlify prepared me because it gave me an opportunity. So I was employee number three, but I had a sales background. And so I got to be an engineer, but they kept always trying to ask me like, you know, business questions and strategy. And, like, I pitched them a 30-60-90 in my interview of, like, what's the growth strategy of Netlify, like day zero when I start? And I go into way more detail in other content. But that prepared me because I got to see how startups work, being so early. I got to see that startup go from seed-funded, just closed their seed round to get their series B is when I left. At GitHub, I got to see what it looked like at a bigger company, which, like, it doesn't matter how big or small you are, like, there's always chaos. Like, GitHub was, like, so much chaos, and there was a lot of good that was happening but a lot of uncertainty at the time I joined in 2018. And then, nine months later, Microsoft acquired GitHub. So then I got to learn stability and what it looks like to...for personal reasons, I always had a budget but never had extra money, even years into my engineering career. And that taught me what it looks like when success meets career. With that being said, like, the problem that I'm solving, I got to learn firsthand while being at Netlify and getting adoption and traction through open source. And then going to GitHub and seeing every single other company that looked at GitHub as a solution to their open-source collaborations and interactions. And then also seeing that there was a hole in just understanding, like, how do you survive? How do you sustain yourself as your career but also your open-source project? Like, a lot of folks want to know, like, what success looks like for open source. Like, how do you get on the trending algorithm? Like, how do you get noticed? It's more than just pushing to GitHub and hoping for the best. There are, like, other things that happen for projects to be successful. And for us to choose the next in the future technologies, it really comes down to community, marketing, and then resources. And those three things end up making projects successful. With OpenSauced, we're working to help inflate some storytelling and add some of those resources to open-source projects. VICTORIA: Great. So you were able to really get, like, the full vision of what it could be if you had a product that became successful and stable, and you knew you wanted to build it on open source. So I love that you really just...you had this problem, and that's what you built the product around. And that ended up becoming the business. What was surprising for you in those early discovery phases with OpenSauced when you were first thinking of building it? BRIAN: I guess what's really surprising is we're not, like, crazy traction today. But we've done a pretty good job of getting, like, 2,000 developers to sign up to it since December. And then the conversations with enterprises so far just by the sheer...like, basically, what was surprising is if you use proper sales technique and you're early stage as a startup, so, like, not necessarily hire salespeople, but as a founder or as a stakeholder, just go talk to your future customers and your users. Everyone says it, but that's actually super valuable. And I think in the same vein of open source, folks they see projects die on the vine, but then you see projects succeed. And I think it also comes down to how often the maintainer of the project is talking to the contributors and the users and also that distinction as well. There are folks who want to contribute code to the codebase, but then there are folks who want to use the codebase. And, like, how do you interact between the two? And how do you cross the chasm for those folks as well? And, a lot of times, it's just fascinating just, like, just by trying, and just by showing up, that's half. It's all cliché stuff, like, I could say, but it's all true. Like, showing up is, like, it's, like, step one. Just show up, do the thing, do the work. And then talk to people is, like, step two. And it's hard to say, like, okay, yeah, because we are not a multibillion-dollar company, like, we're just getting started. So I can't say, like, yeah, we're super successful. But we've survived the year. And we've survived the year based on those two steps, the showing up and then talking to people. Because a lot of times, we could get lost in the sauce, per se, of just shipping code and never talking to anybody and never coming up for air. And I think what I learned, going back to what I learned from GitHub and Netlify, is talking to people and getting that feedback loop going is the best thing you could do for any product. Any early project, any feature you're working on, talk to people about it and see if it's actually valuable for somebody that after you ship it, something will happen. WILL: You're talking about communication is a big thing for a successful project. Have you noticed any other trends that make a successful open-source project? BRIAN: Yeah, that's...Any other trends? Yeah. I mean, AI, [laughs] just kidding. WILL: [laughs] BRIAN: No, I mean, but it also it is true, like, having a trend not sort of following the herd, but catching the herd earlier is extremely valuable. Like, at Netlify, we caught the trend of React. So, basically, Netlify built essentially GitHub Pages but a product and a company. And that was, like, the original project of Netlify. It's expanded so much further from that. But at that time, when I joined, I joined three months before Create React App was developed. So, like, it was a CLI tool to build React apps easy. And, prior to that, React was, like, super complicated to get up and running. Like, you had to know Webpack. You had to know, Babel. You had to make all that glue happen together. And then there wasn't an easy process to go host it somewhere. So the prevalence of build tools like Grunt, and Gulp, and Browserify, they all made it easier to build a static output from React. And that trend is what took Netlify to where it is today. It's like, people needed a place to deploy these static applications. GitHub Pages was like the solution for a lot of folks. Because Heroku, like, why pay $7 for something you could host on S3 for free? But the challenge was S3 it requires way more thought in how you host and take it down and deploy, and then it becomes like a Kubernetes nightmare. So the trend there was, like, people just wanted to have a better developer experience. When it comes to, like, open source, the developer experience in JavaScript has improved so much more. But folks are now looking at the next thing like a Zig, or a Rust, or all these other new languages and server renderings and stuff like that. So I guess when I take a step back, when I look at how I chose things I wanted to work on, and communities I wanted to hang out in...before committing to React...I'm based out here in Oakland, so San Francisco, basically. By seeing the sheer number of RSVPs to the React meetup, it made me confident that React would be something I should pay attention to. When you look at the RSVPs of now all these AI meetups that are happening in San Francisco, like, every single weekend is a hackathon. Highly confident that if you're engineering today, you probably want to know what embeddings are and know how OpenAI works. Not that you necessarily have to build AI stuff, but it is going to be the thing that people are going to be using. So just like we had to learn build tools, and servers, and CDNs prior, now it's all trivial stuff that you can sort of use Cloudflare for free. Like, AI is going to be very similar, and it's probably going to happen much quicker. But, in the time being, the trend right now is, like, you should probably understand whatever the players are in that space so that way you're able to talk confidently about it. WILL: That's really good advice, yep. VICTORIA: Absolutely. And, you know, in my role as Managing Director of Mission Control, or, like, DevOps, SRE platform, I spend a lot of time looking at trends, more on the engineering side. So I think my question is, [laughs] as someone who hires people to work on open-source projects, and who actively maintains and contributes to open-source projects, what should I be thinking about how to use OpenSauced as in my role? BRIAN: For hiring and sourcing skilled folks, we're actually working on a tool right now to make it more discoverable. So, today, when you onboard as an individual developer, you can check a box in your settings to say, like, if you want to collaborate with other folks, you have to opt into it. So if you want to be discovered on OpenSauced, it's in the settings. We'll probably expose that and share more about that in the future, like, in the next month or so. But for, in particular, our user flow today for folks looking to find other people to contribute alongside their project is, you add your project to what we call an Insight Page. You click on the tab on the top and create a page with your project. And then, you can see contributions in your project in the last 30 days. And then you can also add other projects like your project, so you can see who else is contributing. So, that way, you can start discovering folks who are making contributions consistently and start to get some stories of, like, if they're interested in collaborating, they'll check that box; if they're not, the box won't be checked. But at least you know the sort of scope of the ecosystem. As an individual developer, we have the onboarding flow, but then we also have highlights. So, eventually, we'll do recommendations to get you to make contributions. But, for now, if you're already making contributions, you can highlight the contributions you've made so that way, you're more discoverable on the platform. And the highlights are very much like a LinkedIn post or a tweet. You just drop in a PR, and then we'll either generate that description for you, or you write a description: I did a thing. This is what it was. This was the experience. And then, now you're attached to the project through not just a code contribution but also a discovery mechanism, which is a highlight. And then, eventually, we'll start doing blog posts, and guides, and stuff like that, as they're written. Like, if you want to attribute your career, and your journey to your participation to, like, documentation updates and stuff like that, those will also be highlights coming soon. WILL: I love, love, love that. MID-ROLL AD: Now that you have funding, it's time to design, build and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Lift Off brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we'll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today's new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow, today. Get in touch at: thoughtbot.com/liftoff WILL: I hear you saying that you have some things that's coming soon. In a high, high level, what are some of the things that you have coming? And what does success look like, six months, a year? What does that look like? Because it sounds like you have some really good ideas that you're working on. BRIAN: Yeah, yeah. So, like, six months to the end of the year, what we want to do is actually start getting more deeper insights to what's happening in open source. What we're doing right now is building the individual developer profile and experience so that way, they're able to be discovered, find projects to work on. And then what's next is there are tons of enterprises and companies that are maintaining open-source projects, SDKs. And what we're seeing right now is we're seeing massive layoffs happening currently in the industry. So like, as of today, I think Facebook laid off 4,000 people, ESPN laid off, like, 7,000 Disney employees as well. And some of those employees are around the Disney+ place. It's a lot of technical engineering stuff. So I guess what I'm getting at is there...we want to be able to see the trends of places that activity is happening and start recommending people to that. But also, we want to give an opportunity for folks who...companies...sorry, I'm avoiding trying to name specific companies because nothing is in contract yet. But certain companies, like, you, don't think of as an open-source powerhouse. So, like, a company we're now talking to right now is walgreens.com. And Walgreens they have tech. They've got open source that they participated. But they're not thought of as a place like, oh, I want to go work at Walgreens and go work on some cloud infrastructure stuff. So, how does Walgreens get exposure? And, like, hey, we're involved in the kubectl, and the Kubernetes platform and stuff like that, like, be aware that there's opportunity here. So we're going to start driving that connection to folks. So, as you develop your career doing open source, you can also be noticed, and folks can reach out to you. And also, I want to stand on the notion of open source is not for everybody. But I also want to point out, like, my entire career in open source has not been nights and weekends. It's always been finding a company that supports my interest to do open-source at work. Part of my story is, like, I was getting an MBA. My first kid, who's nine years old now he, was born 11 weeks early. And he's the reason why I built an app because I wanted to build an app to solve a pain point that I had, and ended up building that in 17 weeks. And that turned into opportunity. So I guess what I'm getting at is, like, folks being laid off right now, you might have some extra free time. You might be submitting like 100 applications a day. Consider taking that down to 50 applications a day, and then try to contribute to a couple of open-source projects a month. So that way, there's some more story to be shared as you're in the job market. VICTORIA: I love that you created that app when you had your son and you had that need. And for developers wanting to get noticed and wanting to get their next leg up or maybe even negotiate for higher salaries, what's the traditional way people do that now to kind of highlight themselves? BRIAN: The traditional way what people are doing is they're tweeting. They're speaking at conferences. They're sharing their stories. It's like zero to I'm an influencer in the open-source space. There's no real clear guide and steps to get to that point, which is why we have highlights today. Like, we want to make it low effort for folks to write 200 characters about something they contributed to. We're actually working on something to generate pull request descriptions because I think that's another missed opportunity. Like, when you open a PR in an open-source project, and it says no description added, like, that's a missed opportunity. Like, there's an opportunity for you to share what you've learned, what Stack Overflow questions you looked at, like, how you got to the problem, and why this is the right solution. All should be in the pull request description. And then that pull request should be in your cover letter for your resume so that people can go back and say, "Oh, wow, you did some real work." I can go see the history of your contributions because perhaps the job you got let go from you only worked in private repos. You couldn't really showcase your skills. That now gives you a competitive edge. And I guess when I look into this, like, going back to my original onboard ramp into engineering, I graduated with a finance degree with no network. I had one internship at an insurance company, but that wasn't enough. Like, everyone who I interned with, like, the guy who got a job at the internship, like, his dad was a client, was a big client at that firm. And another guy he worked at a golf course, and he'd be the caddy for all these big finance folks where I went to school. So, once I learned that there's an opportunity to get a job by just knowing people, that changed my entire path. Like, when I got to sales, like, oh, or when I got to engineering, I just knew go and meet people. Go have conversations. Go to meetups. What I'm trying to do with OpenSauced is make that step closer for folks, so they could look up and be like, you know, I've made all these contributions, or I don't know where to start. Let me just look at people who I know and follow in the industry and see where they're contributing, and make that connection. So, like, we've kind of closed that gap without the need of, again, you don't need 100,000 Twitter followers to get noticed. Just make some contributions or show up and ask questions. And, hopefully, that's the first step to establishing your career. VICTORIA: Well, that sounds great for both people who are looking to get hired, but also, as someone who hires people, [laughter] I know that there's a lot of amazing developers who are never going to do a conference talk, or they're not going to post on Twitter. So I love that that's available, and that's something you're working on. BRIAN: Yeah, it's just coming out of my own pain of, like, I was saying, like, looking at the story now, it sounds great. [laughs] But part of that story was like, hey, I was getting severely underpaid as an engineer in San Francisco, living in a one-bedroom apartment with two kids. Like, all that part of the story is like nothing I dwell on. But it's like, all that opportunity and knowledge-sharing that I ended up benefiting from, it's like what I constantly try to give. I pay it forward with folks. And I'm more than happy to talk with folks on Twitter and in OpenSauced Discord and other places because I think there's a lot of opportunity in open source. And if anybody's willing to listen, I'm willing to show them the path. WILL: I'm so glad you brought that up because this is one of my favorite questions I ask on the podcast: So, knowing where you're at right now and your story, you've gone the ups, the downs, all of it. If you can go back in time and know what you know now, what advice would you give yourself at the beginning? BRIAN: Honestly, I would say write it down. Like, one thing that I did is I did a blog post, and that's part of the reason why I was able to find my first job in engineering is I started a blog, which was really for myself to learn what I did yesterday. I tell everyone who I mentor it takes two hours every time you want to sit and learn something new because one hour is to remember what you did yesterday, and then one hour is to do something new. And so, I usually write it down and then make it a blog post just to solve that problem. I wish I did more with that, like, you know, wrote a book, or created a YouTube channel, or something because all that knowledge and that sort of sharing is actually what got me to level up faster. I was asked by one of my close friends, like, "Hey, how do you do it? How do you accomplish everything you've done in the last, like, 9-10 years?" And I didn't know what the answer was then. But the answer today for my friend, and I'll share this with them, is it's because I wrote it down. I was able to go back and see what I did. And then, at the end of six months, I was able to go back six months and see what I did. It's like the idea of relativity with, like, Einstein. Relativity is the idea of motion and the perception. Like, if you're in a train, it feels like you're just going slow. But you might be going 100 miles per hour, but you don't feel that. And when you're going on your journey, you could be going 100 miles per hour, but you're thinking, oh, man, I failed yesterday. I could have solved a problem. But yeah, you solved six problems while trying to solve for one. It's that situation. So advice for myself, in the beginning, write it down and then share it way more than I did when I started. Because a lot of the stuff I'm like, even in this conversation, I'm thinking, oh yeah, this, this, and this. And I never shared that before, and I wish I did. So yeah. WILL: I love that. Because yeah, I feel like that's development, like, you have some weeks that you're shipping out multiple features. And then other weeks, you're like, I barely got one out, or I barely fixed this one bug that I've been trying to...struggling with the last couple of weeks. So yeah, I like that advice. Write it down. And remember where you've been, remember. I just love the example you used, too, because it does seem like I haven't made any movement. But when you look back, you're like, no, you actually made a lot of movement. And you were very successful with what you did. So that's great advice. VICTORIA: I sometimes write things, and then I go back maybe six months later and read them. And I'm like, who wrote this? [laughter] I don't remember learning this stuff. Oh yeah, I guess I did, right, yeah. [laughs] No, that's so cool. What questions do you have for us, Brian? BRIAN: I'm curious in, like, how do thoughtbot folks stay up to date? Like, what does your involvement in open source look like today? VICTORIA: Yeah, so we are known for being active maintainers of a lot of very popular Ruby on Rails gems. So we're a consulting agency. So we're able to structure our time with our clients so that we can build in what we call investment days, which is typically Fridays, so that people can contribute to open-source projects. They can write blog posts. They can do trainings. And so that gives us the structure to be able to actually allow our employees to contribute to open source, and it's a huge part of our business as well. So if you have a Ruby on Rails project, you're probably using one of our gems. [laughs] And so, when there's other crises or other things happening in an organization, and they want to bring in an expert, they know that that's who thoughtbot is. Of course, we've expanded, and we do React, and now we're doing platform engineering. And we have some open-source TerraForm modules that we use to migrate people onto AWS and operate at that enterprise level with a mix of managed products from AWS as well. And that continues to be, like, how we talk to people [laughs] and get that buzzword out there is, like, okay, there's this cool open-source project. Like, one I'm excited about now is OpenTelemetry. And so we're digging into that and figuring out how we can contribute. And can we make a big impact here? And that just opens the door to conversations in a way that is less salesy, right? [laughs] And people know us as the contributors and maintainers, and that creates a level of trust that goes a long way. And also, it really speaks to how we operate as a company as well, where the code is open and when we give it back to the customers, it's not. Some organizations will build stuff and then never give it to you. [laughs] BRIAN: Yeah. So it sounds like folks at thoughtbot could probably benefit from things like OpenSauced for discoverability. And I get a lot of conversation around in OpenSauced as like, how do I get connected to maintainer of X or maintainer of Y? And the first step is like, how do I even know who the maintainer is? Because when you go to GitHub, you could sort this by last commit date, which not a lot of people know. You can sort the contributors by most frequently and stuff like that. But it's challenging to find out who to reach out to when it comes to packages, especially when people move on. Like, someone created a thing. They have tons of commits. And then they look like they're the number one committer for the past ten years, but they left five years ago. Those are things that we're trying to make more discoverable to solve that problem. But then, going into that thoughtbot thing, is like being able to reach out to thoughtbot and be like, oh, who can I reach out to about this gem? And, say, I have an idea, or we have an issue; how can we get unblocked because we're using this in our product? And I imagine with consulting, there's an opportunity to say, hey thoughtbot...which, honestly, at Netlify, we used thoughtbot to solve some harder problems for us. We were just like, yeah, we don't have the bandwidth to go down this path. Let's go to consulting to unblock us in this arena. VICTORIA: Right. And that was really important to me in making the decision to join thoughtbot last year is that it was built around open source. And that ethos really spoke to me as, like, this is a place where I want to work. [laughs] And you can think of, like, if you're looking for vendors, like, oh, I want to work with people who have that same ethos. So yeah, OpenSauced seems like a really cool product. I'd be curious about how we can leverage it more at thoughtbot. BRIAN: We just shipped a feature called Teams, which it's self-explanatory. But, basically, when you build an insight page, you're able to build a team to help the discover process of what's happening in contributions. You get details and reporting on OpenSauced. The goal is basically to unblock teams who are involved in open source together and make it more discoverable for folks who want to find maintainers and collaborate with them. VICTORIA: Will, I know we're running close on time. But I had one more question about what you said around making open source more hospitable. And, you know, you mentioned going to Juneteenth Conf. And I'm curious if you have a perspective on if open source is equitably accessible to everyone or if there are things we can be doing as a community to be more inclusive. BRIAN: Yeah, it's a great question. So the first answer is quick, it's no. The reason why it's no is because we have to admit [laughs] where there are inequitable situations. And as much as we want to set this up of, like, I want to say that there's opportunity for everyone to contribute based on no matter where their background, but just by your time zone, makes it inequitable of, like, whether you can contribute to open source. Because if you look at the data and zoom out, most open source happens in the West Coast U.S., so from San Francisco to Seattle. Like, majority of contributions are there. There are reasons for that. Like, California has a very, very expressive clause of like where you can contribute. And, technically, your employer can block you on doing open-source contributions. Unless you sign...like, at Apple, you sign away your rights to be able to do that in your employee offer letter. Sorry, [laughs] not to be a dig against Apple. Apple buy lots of open source. But what I'm getting at is that the opportunity is there, but it's the awareness thing. I'm part of an organization called DevColor. It's an organization of Black engineers in tech. We have squads and monthly meetings where we just talk about our career, and growth, and stuff like that. And I attribute a lot of that interactions to my success is, like, talking to other folks who are years ahead of me and have a lot more experience. But I say this because the majority of the folks that I interact with at DevColor they don't do open source because they all...to be a Black engineer at a level of like senior engineer at Netlify, or a staff engineer, or a manager...sorry, I meant, like, Netflix but Netlify too. You basically had a career path of, like, you probably went to school at a decent engineering school, or you figured out how to get a job at Facebook or Google. And, like, that's pretty much it. And, like, this is a blanket statement. I totally understand there are outliers. But the majority of the folks I interact with at DevColor they have a job. They have a great job. And they're doing the thing, and they're being very successful. But there's less community interaction. And that's what DevColor exists for is to encourage that community interaction and participation. So, at the end of the day, like, there's opportunity to make it more equitable. So things like, every time there's a release cut for a major open-source project, why not go to Black Girls CODE and have them build something with it? And, again, very specific, like, React 19 that's currently being tested, why not go to all these other underrepresented organizations and partner with them to show them how to use this project? Because the assumption is everyone in open source, you got to be senior enough to participate, or if it's too hot, get out of the kitchen. But if we set up a place for people to interact and level up, in three or four years from now, you'll see the open-source ecosystem of that project be completely different as far as diversity. But it takes that investment to have that onboard ramp to even have that connection or conversation about testing early releases with underrepresented groups in engineering. That's where we have to start, and that's what we're trying to do at OpenSauced. We want to make that connection. I have a whole plan for it. I'll share in a blog post. I also mentioned that a lot of these thoughts are on our blog as well. I've been writing blog posts around these conversations. So opensauced.pizza/blog if you're interested. VICTORIA: Very cool. Thank you for that. WILL: I'm just processing on the whole conversation. It has just been great. VICTORIA: Yes. Thank you so much for sharing with us. And I wonder, do you have any final takeaways for our listeners today, Brian? BRIAN: Yeah, final takeaways. Like, if anything at all resonated in this conversation, please reach out, bdougie on GitHub. I'm pretty active with my notifications. So if you @ mention me in a random project, I'll probably jump back in and respond to you. But also Twitter @bdougieYO. And then, I mentioned our blog. We also have a newsletter. So, if you're interested in any of this OpenSauced journey, please join us there, and keep in touch. VICTORIA: Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your story. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you could find me @will23larry This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Brian Douglas.
Brian Feretic is the Founder of Blossm, a community marketplace to buy, sell, and trade plants. Victoria talks to Brian about how coming up with the concept happened, getting started in a very scrappy way and then filling in gaps, and opening up the app to have full marketplace functionality with buying, selling, and trading capabilities. Blossm (https://blossm.garden/) Follow Blossm on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/blossm-plant-marketplace/), Twitter (https://twitter.com/blossmllc), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/blossmplantswap/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/blossmplantswap) or TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@blossmplantswap). Follow Brian Feretic on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-feretic-3b2b337a/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido or Tori. And with me today is Brian Feretic, Founder of Blossm, a community marketplace to buy, sell, and trade plants. Brian, thank you for joining us. BRIAN: Hey, it's great to be here, Tori. VICTORIA: Great. I'm excited to hear more about Blossm. Why don't you just tell me a little bit more about the concept? BRIAN: The concept actually happened at the end of 2019, and I'd already been a plant enthusiast for a couple of years. I was actually just going on my way to surf in my town of Ocean Beach, San Diego, and I stopped by this garage sale. And when I came back to pay my neighbor, I brought this rubber plant that are propagated just as a neighborly gift. She flipped out. She was ecstatic. She's like, "Oh my God, I'm such a huge plant person. Thank you so much. Why don't you come into my backyard, and I'll give you a plant tour, and you can pick something out." And what was cool about this was it wasn't just like a simple exchange. It was like this hour-long interaction with someone that lived four blocks from me that happened to be this big plant nerd like me. And I got her whole story. She went through all these different species I didn't know about. And then, she helped me pick one out, which I still have to this day. It's this crassula succulent. When I was walking home with my new plant, I was like, oh wow, I got to go download the app for this. I would have never known this person that lives four houses away was a big plant person like me. And when I got home, I searched the App Store. I did a Google search. I just couldn't find what I was looking for, which was basically this plant-swapping plant-connecting platform where I could find fellow plant nerds in my neighborhood. And so that kind of set me off on this path. I did some more research and decided...I was like, you know what? I'm going to commit to this and make this happen for myself and for my community. VICTORIA: Well, what do you think makes someone a plant person [laughs] or like a...how did you describe yourself? A plant nerd? What sets that user apart? BRIAN: We'll say it's like on a spectrum where people can shift along the spectrum. But I'd say when people start treating their plants more than objects and more what they are. They are these living things. They're beautiful. They bring people joy. I find it therapeutic to take care of them. And then the beautiful thing about it is that these plants grow, and you can propagate them and share them with your friends. And I think that is a critical aspect of this whole plant person thing. VICTORIA: So the plants have become a little more like pets, and you can grow them in a way that creates a community around your friendship and your local area. BRIAN: Yeah, exactly. That was actually the early signal about this whole plant world is that I saw people creating plant-dedicated Instagram accounts as if it was your dog or cat. And that was something that I realized this is a different type of person. This is a very passionate person willing to, like, they're so proud of their plant babies, we call them. [laughter] VICTORIA: Right. And it's funny, you say, plant babies. When I think of people I know who I would consider plant people, they do talk to their plants like their babies. They're like, "Oh, it's so cute." [laughs] Or they're like, "Oh, he's not feeling so well." So I think that's great. And so you started to do some research into this community, into this group. What surprised you about your early findings? BRIAN: This was actually something that I didn't realize until I dug deeper was that I thought that it was only going to be a local thing. People wanted to experience what I did with Sondra, who's the neighbor I swapped with, this in-person connection, swapping, checking each other's gardens out and houseplants. But I learned very quickly that people ship plants to each other not only within your own state but across the country, and this is global. And I was just like, how do people ship plants? Turns out I do it all the time, almost weekly now, for years. That aspect was critical to realize, all right; this plant community doesn't necessarily have to be bound by physical in-person distance. It can connect online, and people share all over via shipping. VICTORIA: That's really cool. So you decided that there's a whole international community. So is that when you decided to really start building something like an application to help people? BRIAN: I remember just throwing this idea out to a lot of different friends, like, various backgrounds. And I was like, "Hey, what do you think of this idea about connecting people through this shared love?" And there is not one person who thought it was a terrible idea. And then I remember talking about it with a roommate at the time, and basically the same thing. I was like, "Hey, man, imagine people connecting through the shared passion. Who knows? Maybe even love can blossom." And he was like, "Dude, that's what you should call it." I was like, oh, that's a great name. It's about three and a half years now, and it's stuck ever since. VICTORIA: I love that, [laughter] about sharing love, and how the name came about, and just starting with your friends and people you knew and bouncing ideas off of them. But your background is not specifically in technology. So what about your background applied? And what did you have to learn new to take along this journey? BRIAN: So my whole career, I've been involved within the science sector. I actually moved to San Diego to pursue graduate school in neuroscience. I was very curious about kind of full neural networks and how those contribute to behavior. Actually, the Ph.D. program I wanted to get into at UCSD, there's a specific lab doing this really cool research with this new innovative imaging technique. And I applied twice, and I didn't get in. And so I went into biotech. But I would say probably two things helped me. I realize now going through this entrepreneur path, things that helped train me for this, was definitely a graduate school where you're pretty much broke the whole time. My lab didn't have too much funding, so you had to be really resourceful and creative to figure stuff out with minimal resources. And that's perfectly summed up the last couple of years, just like figuring stuff out. We have no money. How do we get awareness of our product when we can't spend, you know, we don't have ad spend or marketing budget? And it just kind of requires you to get creative and think outside the box and just really think, all right, what do I do here? And I came up with some hacky-type strategies that have been very effective. [laughs] VICTORIA: Well, very cool. It sounds like you found your team now to start working with you on this in a very scrappy way. So how did you fill in those gaps, maybe in your knowledge or your background on how to get this done by the people that you grew around you? BRIAN: For me, it wasn't too difficult. Well, one, my background. I was very naive with tech at the time and just programming in general. So my first task, I laid out three options. It was like, one, I can learn how to code. I dabbled in it for a week, and I was like, man, there's no way. [laughter] Two, I was like, I can outsource it, maybe somewhat cheaply, but I don't want to spend all my savings on it. But more, I knew that, you know, say you come out of MVP product, the product always is growing, adapting, evolving, or you encounter bugs. And I could just see how full of friction the process would be if I had to, like, all right, we have found a bug, send the contract out. They have to accept the contract. And I just knew progress would be too slow to operate in that fashion. And the third option was, like, find a technical co-founder and pursue this dream with, you know, a buddy. I was like, all right, who do I know that is in the computer stuff? And that was my thought. And my first guy I pitched it to was a friend I went to college with at Bucknell University. And he was like, I think, "This is a good idea." But he's like, "I'm going to retire probably in five years, and this is going to be a very lengthy thing." He's like, "I'm not interested." The second guy was extremely down for it, but it turns out he didn't know how to do any mobile app development. He uses a consultant. [laughs] And so the third and who I ended up working with was my surfing and climbing buddy Nick Mitchell. I just knew he did computer-type stuff. I pitched him the idea, and he was like, "What's up with this plant thing?" VICTORIA: [laughs] BRIAN: And I was like, "Oh, dude, this is a rapidly growing market. I know the ins and outs really well. I know this audience. I'm one of them." He wasn't sold until he heard an NPR piece talking about the houseplant boom. And then his father sent him an article from the New York Times saying how millennials are embracing houseplants and driving this new houseplant market. And so I think this was maybe end of December, now in 2019. And he hit me up, and of course, he's like, "Oh, dude, I want in. Let's do it." But I also wanted to make sure I knew he could actually do what was the task at hand. [laughter] So I had my other first friend vet his GitHub and stuff just to make sure. [laughs] VICTORIA: Oh, cool. [laughs] BRIAN: And he was like, "Yeah, you know, he looks good. Worth a shot." And it turns out Nick is excellent. He did all the front end, back end. He built this whole app basically from scratch. It's pretty amazing what he's capable of. So I got it right on the third try. [laughs] VICTORIA: That's funny. And I'm not surprised it came from networking in the climbing community, either. BRIAN: Right. There's a lot of smart...definitely a lot of smart people in the climbing community. And those are like my closest friends now. So it was kind of cool to find someone in that place. VICTORIA: And I've been climbing with friends before, and you're talking about work or whatever. And they're like, "Oh, yeah, I'm also like an Azure architect," [laughs] like some specific skill that's related to what you need. And I think it's a similar cultural mindset of people you want to be working with too. Maybe that's just me. So, okay, so you found your partner. You had someone who had all the skills that you needed to make this happen. How long did it take until you really had something you were proud of? BRIAN: So, for me, I was laid off in August of 2019. I was working at Celgene, and they got acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb for like 72 billion, so massive merger. And I was kind of getting over the field. And so I was already basically unemployed. Nick, when we started actually working together in...we'll just call it January 2020. We started working on it casually, and then the pandemic happened. And then he got laid off. And he did about a three-month stint before he got another job at ServiceNow. But within those three months, he really cranked out like a full MVP. And then I had about probably at least 60 or 70 people I knew beta test the product for feedback and just initial thoughts. And so that was like a very critical time where we were all locked down. We have this cool idea. Let's just crank this out. So we had an MVP pretty quick. And then we actually launched it in June 2020. And I was already very stoked about the product. As long as it did its core thing, which is connecting people through this shared love, I knew it was like a proper test, a good enough test to see if this is a worthy endeavor. VICTORIA: That's really cool. So was there any surprising feedback that you got from that initial beta testing? BRIAN: Yeah. [laughs] So the initial concept was essentially like a Tinder for plants. [laughter] And I was just thinking about this idea, like, if people could just swipe on plants they've uploaded, and then if both people liked a particular plant and they swiped on each other, and they matched, it would open up a chat that would connect them. And it took the...one of the issues with bartering, in general, is people are like, "Oh, I'd love to swap that with you." And they're like, "Oh, what do you want to swap? What do you have?" And a lot of times, people don't align with what they have and what they want to swap. So I figured that would get this kind of friction out of there, but still, the core was connecting people. And then, very quickly, people found it fun. And this is still a feature right now on Blossm, which we've moved to the homepage. And it got a lot of engagement and interactions on it. But one of the simple changes was like, all right, maybe this is not the optimal way to present these plants people are uploading. Nick actually drew a lot of inspiration from OfferUp. And he was like, "Oh, this is very simple. This is a very clean way to present these things." So we started getting inspiration from OfferUp, and we changed that kind of swipe card functionality just to a scrollable grid. And that was a great insight on his part, and some of that has been core to the product from that point on. VICTORIA: That's so cool. So I can just go in the app and see a whole list of plants that people are willing to trade. BRIAN: Right. Actually, I would say another thing that happened very early on, too, was, once again, bartering is not the most efficient way to exchange things with each other. And within weeks, we're seeing people being like, "Oh, well, what do you want to swap?" And then people are like, "Oh, well, I don't want to swap for that. I already have that." And then other people are like, "Hey, I don't want to swap anything. I just want to buy it." And then other people are like, "Hey, I don't have anything. but how do I get stuff for you?" So right away, we opened it up to full marketplace kind of functionality with buying, selling, and trading. And we didn't have necessarily any payment system to facilitate that. We would just connect people. And then they would use Venmo, or Paypal, or Cash App, or things like that. VICTORIA: That makes sense. MID-ROLL AD: Now that you have funding, it's time to design, build, and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Liftoff brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we'll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today's new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow today. Get in touch at thoughtbot.com/liftoff. VICTORIA: Now you kind of got your core features figured out, and you see people engaging with the app. What are you the most excited about on the horizon in your roadmap? BRIAN: We're about to actually finish the TechStars accelerator next week. Next week is our demo day. It's been such a great experience, and I feel blessed. But during this time, we're really figuring out, like, what's our big vision with Blossm? And we kind of went back to really harp on, like, we're more than just an e-commerce or marketplace. We're like this special passionate community where people can do this buying, and selling, and trading. One of the things that's been the trend for years now is instead of just photos; we're about to integrate some video functionality. This is a lead in to the bigger goal. And the idea is creating this...we're calling this full plant experience focused around live video where people can engage with each other on this totally different intimate level and can really showcase their plant collection and give each other a plant tour. How do you take care of this plant? Is another big topic that always comes up. It's just hard to really decipher what's wrong with something just from ecstatic images. And we imagine we could have live plant help. And then people can just show their plant up to the camera and showing a really holistic view of what's going on. And so this vision of live with video and creating a more complete plant experience centered around really using the community as this way to promote that and really build that even further. VICTORIA: That's very cool. I think I've talked to you a little bit before about this giant fiddle fig I have in my office. [laughs] It's going to the ceiling. And I got it from Home Depot, so it may not be the highest quality. And I've asked you about, like, is it alive? It keeps dropping leaves. So if I had a video and I could just show you around and show you where the leaves are browning a little bit and where it's not growing, I could see the value in having that interaction like that. BRIAN: Yeah, exactly. No one's doing that. And definitely, we want to keep innovating the space. We were first to market many years ago. And then, actually, we have some direct competitors that are blatantly just copying us, like copying email templates, features. And on one hand, it's flattering, but also we realize we have to be careful about positioning and making sure we stay ahead of the curve. And we think this is going to be the future and something that delivers really extreme value to this demographic. VICTORIA: Absolutely. And you mentioned you're a part of a tech accelerator. Could you tell me a little bit more about choosing which program you went to and how that's affected your overall approach to your app? BRIAN: Yeah. So last year, we added two more team members, so actually Nick's younger brother, Calvin, we poached from Amazon, which felt really good. [laughter] And then we had another friend, Ari Olmos, who we knew had experience in the startup world. He started, or I think he was, co-founder or CEO of a few other social mission startups. So he understood just the fundraising process was probably the most critical trait we're looking for, just someone that can help refine our systems, our processes, things like that. So now we're a team of four. And we were like, all right; we need money if we want to keep this alive. And I've been full-time since the idea conception. Ari joined full-time. Nick and Calvin both had jobs. But we just knew it's critical for a high-potential startup like ours to really grow; we needed some sort of fundraising. And it seemed logical. We gave our shot at proper fundraising with some angels and VCs last year. There were very encouraging signs, but didn't necessarily translate to any checks being written for us. And then we applied to a bunch of accelerators; Y Combinator and TechStars were our top two. We got a few rounds of interviews from TechStars, and the director, Ryan Kuder, who's great; he's actually based in San Diego. And I credit him to definitely being a key component here because I knew he really liked us. He saw the really good complementary team we built. We had a pretty mature product with traction and an active user base. And we accepted, and it did a lot of things for us. It was our first proper fundraising beyond a Kickstarter. So Nick and Calvin became full-time once we got in. And then we just had this, like, you have access to this massive network and get this really detailed one on one mentorship. We had almost six or seven mentors that we met with weekly. They're always available to help. And probably the coolest thing about it is they're just there to help you. There's no two-sided, like, I'll help you if you can help me. We are here to help you build, grow, accelerate your business. And they gave us really good insights on direction, really formalizing how to build in systems that will last much longer than the three month-program that essentially just mimicked a lot of stuff we've done on the program within our own team, like hosting little daily stand-ups every day. We've always done weekly meetings but using that time more efficiently, knowing how to test and measure more effectively. They've really just refined our company to be a proper business instead of four dudes trying to make this cool plant app. VICTORIA: That's really cool. And I wonder now, like, after you've had this experience, what advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time to when this all started? BRIAN: First thing that popped in my head was...and I kind of knew this going into it, like, this is a big project that needs time. Things that prevent startups usually is, one, you don't execute, or you just don't start it at all, or you give up too soon. And I guess I would tell myself, hey, things are going to be all right. Like, just keep sticking with it. And you're getting all the signals; this is something substantial and worthwhile. Just be patient, stick with it. Survive those valleys, and there are peaks on the way. And getting into TechStars was the ultimate validation. Yeah, I feel extremely blessed to be in it. And I think we're poised to do big things this year. VICTORIA: That's very cool. So you've mentioned those peaks and valleys and how much time you have to spend on this type of starting a company [laughs] and building an app. How do you balance that with also having a regular life and going surfing and climbing? BRIAN: It's tough to find your specific balance and especially during the accelerator where I didn't want to waste any opportunity. So there were a lot of times...I think January was a month straight no days off. And actually, I was injured so I couldn't surf, climb, or even play piano, so all my outlets. But just be okay with setting aside time to where you don't think about work at all. And it took me a few months to reach that point. And I found that as long as I have one activity or some exercise per day, either I surf or climb, I'm good. I don't mind working 12-plus hour days if I do one of those. And then just to allocate one day of the week where I am like, I do a couple of hours in the morning. But one mostly day of don't think about work, just enjoy life. And that has been enough for me to feel refreshed going into next week. And so I think I got a good rhythm, and I got a good formula for what works for me. It might be different for other people, but it's important to set aside time where you don't think about it. VICTORIA: Right. Yeah, just to turn off your brain. Sometimes I find, like, you know, you mentioned surfing and climbing helps you do that because you really just can't be on your phone [laughs] when you're out there sometimes. BRIAN: Right. It's kind of funny because I'll almost say it's a catch-22. But sometimes, those things can be distracting, but they're also necessary for you to be focused if that makes sense. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, totally. Let me bring it back to plants. What is your favorite house plant that you have right now? BRIAN: Man, it's changed over the years, but I do have one. It's like the most popular high-in-demand one; it's the Monstera albo. Its common counterpart is the Monstera deliciosa, which is all green. This one has white variegation on the leaves. They're just inherently beautiful plants. And anyone that sees it can be like, "Wow, that is gorgeous." But I have one specific one, and why it's my favorite is that years ago, I was telling a climbing friend about the app, and I guess the app is out by now, but telling her about it. And she's like, "Oh, my grandmother was a huge plant person. My mom now takes care of them. I think she has one of those Monstera plants with the white on it. It was my grandma's though." And I was like, no way. I have to see this. And when I get there, she has this massive one, incredibly mature and old. I think she said it was almost 50 years old. I can't even believe this. VICTORIA: Wow. BRIAN: And then I asked her. I was like, "Hey," [laughs] I was like, "Can I have a little bit of that?" [laughs] And she was like, "Oh yeah, just go ahead. This is a plant. I'll grow it back." And I felt a little bad because I took a nice big cutting like multiple leave cutting. And she absolutely did not care and just was so happy. Turns out she had three of these like big mother plants. There's one cutting that had very low variegation, so it showed barely any white on it. Over time, I grew it out. Every subsequent leaf kept showing more and more white. And now it's just so beautiful. I check up on it every day, and every new leaf is just more beautiful than the next. And it's a special one. And it was gifted to me by my friend's mother. It started off like you can say a lowly variegated plant, and now it's just thriving and beautiful. So it has some history, and it came from a friend. So without a doubt, that's my favorite one. [laughs] VICTORIA: That's very cool. Yeah, I know those Monsteras that you're talking about. They're really interesting-looking plants. I kept one alive for a short time, and I'm very proud of myself for it. [laughs] So I'm interested in using Blossm to keep my plants alive possibly. But that's awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. What else can I ask you? Is there anything that I should ask you that I haven't yet? BRIAN: Well, we could actually segue from what you just said. This is an interesting thing. So I think everybody who's been through this has gone through this exact process. So they have a couple of plants. They're like, what's wrong with my plant? How do I take care of this? And they go down the Google rabbit hole, or they happen to buy one of these plant ID plant care apps. Usually, they're like freemium. You get a couple of free tries, and then you have to buy a subscription or whatever. I also did this. And I was like, you know what? These apps suck. They just don't work, or they're too general. The best plant advice you can get is from other plant people because there are so many variables. Like, which growing zone are you in? What kind of light do you have? What's your ambient humidity, temperature? All these factors come into play on how to properly care for your plant and what could be wrong. And the best advice I've gotten was from other plant people. And so we have, like, beyond the marketplace grid, we have this fully functioning community forum essentially like a Facebook group in a way where people can post questions about what's wrong with my plant, or what plant is this? Or share memes and just nerd out. And it's been such a critical component I think of Blossm to cultivate this community. But it's also just very functional and effective because really the only way to get that advice and care information is by interacting with other people. That's something we want to build upon in the future too with that whole live and video capabilities. VICTORIA: Yeah, that makes sense. Just a funny story, sometimes I'll call my mom who's a big plant person, and ask her questions, and she's like, "Well, you should go check that book I got you." [laughter] It's like, it's not helpful at all. [laughs] But yeah, no, I think that's right. I think people get excited about AI and image recognition. But sometimes it's still easier to get a real effective answer from a human. BRIAN: Yeah, I'd be curious with the whole AI getting its spotlight right now. And without a doubt, I could see applications there for it. Right now, I don't think that exists, but I'm very curious and excited to see what happens with all of it. It's going to be cool. VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, that's awesome. And I am excited that what Blossm does is really create this community around plants and learning about them and with the people around you. Do you have any final takeaways for our listeners? BRIAN: Hmm, final takeaways, you know, shameless self-promotion; if you love plants or you're getting into plants, Blossm is tailored for the plant person, which is what I think makes it special. And more general, I never intended to be the entrepreneur. I never intended for Blossm to be like, oh, this big tech company. I just had something I was super passionate about and wanted to see come alive for myself and for other people. Without a doubt, that passion paired with perseverance, I think, are critical attributes to follow any idea to the end or to some level of success. So don't be afraid to take that leap. By no means has it been easy. It's been the most difficult thing I've ever done but also the most rewarding. It's been really fun too. So if you got a cool idea, maybe try to build it out, find a good co-founder, a good team. Give it a go and create something for everyone. VICTORIA: Well, I really loved your story, Brian. I think you've found your niche. You built something. You took advantage of the time you had when you had it, and look where you are now. [laughs] I'm very excited to see what comes next. BRIAN: Cool. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This has been lovely, and yeah, stoked to listen to the next episodes too. VICTORIA: Excellent. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Brian Feretic.
About BrianBrian leads the Google Cloud Product and Industry Marketing team. This team is focused on accelerating the growth of Google Cloud by establishing thought leadership, increasing demand and usage, enabling their sales teams and partners to tell their product stories with excellence, and helping their customers be the best advocates for them.Before joining Google, Brian spent over 25 years in product marketing or engineering in different forms. He started his career at Microsoft and had a very non-traditional path for 20 years. Brian worked in every product division except for cloud. He did marketing, product management, and engineering roles. And, early on, he was the first speech writer for Steve Ballmer and worked on Bill Gates' speeches too. His last role was building up the Microsoft Surface business from scratch as VP of the hardware businesses. After Microsoft, Brian spent a year as CEO at a hardware startup called Doppler Labs, where they made a run at transforming hearing, and then spent two years as VP at Amazon Web Services leading product marketing, developer advocacy, and a bunch more marketing teams.Brian has three kids still at home, Barty, Noli, and Alder, who are all named after trees in different ways. His wife Edie and him met right at the beginning of their first year at Yale University, where Brian studied math, econ, and philosophy and was the captain of the Swim and Dive team his senior year. Edie has a PhD in forestry and runs a sustainability and forestry consulting firm she started, that is aptly named “Three Trees Consulting”. As a family they love the outdoors, tennis, running, and adventures in Brian's 1986 Volkswagen Van, which is his first and only car, that he can't bring himself to get rid of.Links Referenced: Google Cloud: https://cloud.google.com @isforat: https://twitter.com/IsForAt LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brhall/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is brought to us by our friends at Pinecone. They believe that all anyone really wants is to be understood, and that includes your users. AI models combined with the Pinecone vector database let your applications understand and act on what your users want… without making them spell it out. Make your search application find results by meaning instead of just keywords, your personalization system make picks based on relevance instead of just tags, and your security applications match threats by resemblance instead of just regular expressions. Pinecone provides the cloud infrastructure that makes this easy, fast, and scalable. Thanks to my friends at Pinecone for sponsoring this episode. Visit Pinecone.io to understand more.Corey: This episode is brought to you in part by our friends at Veeam. Do you care about backups? Of course you don't. Nobody cares about backups. Stop lying to yourselves! You care about restores, usually right after you didn't care enough about backups. If you're tired of the vulnerabilities, costs, and slow recoveries when using snapshots to restore your data, assuming you even have them at all living in AWS-land, there is an alternative for you. Check out Veeam, that's V-E-E-A-M for secure, zero-fuss AWS backup that won't leave you high and dry when it's time to restore. Stop taking chances with your data. Talk to Veeam. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This episode is brought to us by our friends at Google Cloud and, as a part of that, they have given me someone to, basically, harass for the next half hour. Brian Hall is the VP of Product Marketing over at Google Cloud. Brian, welcome back.Brian: Hello, Corey. It's good to be here, and technically, we've given you time to harass me by speaking with me because you never don't have the time to harass me on Twitter and other places, and you're very good at it.Corey: Well, thank you. Again, we first met back when you were doing, effectively, the same role over at AWS. And before that, you spent only 20 years or so at Microsoft. So, you've now worked at all three of the large hyperscale cloud providers. You probably have some interesting perspectives on how the industry has evolved over that time. So, at the time of this recording, it is after Google Next and before re:Invent. There was also a Microsoft event there that I didn't pay much attention to. Where are we as a culture, as an industry, when it comes to cloud?Brian: Well, I'll start with it is amazing how early days it still is. I don't want to be put on my former Amazon cap too much, and I think it'd be pushing it a little bit to say it's complete and total day one with the cloud. But there's no question that there is a ton of evolution still to come. I mean, if you look at it, you can kind of break it into three eras so far. And roll with me here, and happy to take any dissent from you.But there was kind of a first era that was very much led by Amazon. We can call it the VM era or the component era, but being able to get compute on-demand, get nearly unlimited or actually unlimited storage with S3 was just remarkable. And it happened pretty quickly that startups, new tech companies, had to—like, it would be just wild to not start with AWS and actually start ordering servers and all that kind of stuff. And so, I look at that as kind of the first phase. And it was remarkable how long Amazon had a run really as the only player there. And maybe eight years ago—six years ago—we could argue on timeframes, things shifted a little bit because the enterprises, the big companies, and the governments finally realized, “Holy crow. This thing has gotten far enough that it's not just for these startups.”Corey: Yeah. There was a real change. There was an eye-opening moment there where it isn't just, “I want to go and sell things online.” It's, “And I also want to be a bank. Can we do that with you?” And, “Huh.”Brian: My SAP—like I don't know big that darn thing is going to get. Could I put it in your cloud? And, “Oh, by the way, CapEx forecasting stinks. Can you get me out of that?” And so, it became like the traditional IT infrastructure. All of the sudden, the IT guys showed up at the party, which I know is—it sounds fun to me, but that doesn't sound like the best addition to a party for many people. And so essentially, old-school IT infrastructure finally came to the cloud and Microsoft couldn't miss that happening when it did. But it was a major boon for AWS just because of the position that they had already.Corey: And even Google as well. All three of you now are pivoting in a lot of the messaging to talk to the big E enterprises out there. And I've noticed for the last few years, and I'm not entirely alone. When I go to re:Invent, and I look at announcements they're making, sure they have for the serverless stuff and how to run websites and EC2 nonsense. And then they're talking about IOT things and other things that just seem very oriented on a persona I don't understand. Everyone's doing stuff with mainframes now for example. And it feels like, “Oh, those of us who came here for the web services like it says on the name of the company aren't really feeling like it's for us anymore.” It's the problem of trying to be for everyone and pivoting to where the money is going, but Google's done this at least as much as anyone has in recent years. Are those of us who don't have corporate IT-like problems no longer the target market for folks or what's changed?Brian: It's still the target market, so like, you take the corporate IT, they're obviously still moving to the cloud. And there's a ton of opportunity. Just take existing IT spending and see a number over $1 trillion per year, and if you take the run rates of Microsoft, Amazon, Google Cloud, it's certainly over $100 billion, but that means it's still less than ten percent of what is existing IT spending. There are many people that think that existing IT spend number is significantly higher than that. But to your point on what's changing, there's actually a third wave that's happening.So, if the first wave was you start a company. You're a tech company, of course, you start it on AWS or on the Cloud. Second wave is all the IT people, IT departments, the central organizations that run technology for all the people that are not technology people come to the cloud. This third wave is everybody has to become a technology person. If you're a business leader, like you're at a fast-food restaurant and you're responsible for the franchisee relations, before, like, you needed to get an EDI system running or something, and so you told your IT department to figure out.Now, you have to actually think about what apps do we want to provide to our customers. How do I get the right data to my franchisees so that they can make business decisions? How can I automate all that? And you know, whereas before I was a guy wearing a suit or a gal wearing a suit who didn't need to know technology, I now have to. And that's what's changing the most. And it's why the Target Addressable Market—or the TAM as business folk sometimes say—it's really hard to estimate looking forward if every business is really needing to become a technology business in many ways. And it didn't dawn on me, honestly, and you can give me all the ribbing that I probably deserve for this—but it didn't really dawn on me until I came to Google and kept hearing the transformation word, “Digital transformation, digital transformation,” and honestly, having been in software for so long, I didn't really know what digital transformation meant until I started seeing all of these folks, like every company have to become a tech company effectively.Corey: Yeah. And it turns out there aren't enough technologists to go around, so it's very challenging to wind up getting the expertise in-house. It's natural to start looking at, “Well, how do we effectively outsource this?” And well, you can absolutely have a compression algorithm for experience. It's called, “Buying products and services and hiring people who have that experience already baked in either to the product or they show up knowing how to do something because they've done this before.”Brian: That's right. The thing I think we have to—for those of us that come from the technology side, this transformation is scary for the people who all of the sudden have to get tech and be like—Corey, if you or I—actually, you're very artistic, so maybe this wouldn't do it for you—but if I were told, “Hey, Brian, for your livelihood, you now need to incorporate painting,” like…Corey: [laugh]. I can't even write legibly let alone draw or paint. That is not my skill set. [laugh].Brian: I'd be like, “Wait, what? I'm not good at painting. I've never been a painting person, like I'm not creative.” “Okay. Great. Then we're going to fire you, or we're going to bring someone in who can.” Like, that'd be scary. And so, having more services, more people that can help as every company goes through a transition like that—and it's interesting, it's why during Covid, the cloud did really well, and some people kind of said, “Well, it's because they—people didn't want to send their people into their data centers.” No. That wasn't it. It was really because it just forced the change to digital. Like the person to, maybe, batter the analogy a little bit—the person who was previously responsible for all of the physical banks, which are—a bank has, you know, that are retail locations—the branches—they have those in order to service the retail customers.Corey: Yeah.Brian: That person, all of the sudden, had to figure out, “How do I do all that service via phone, via agents, via an app, via our website.” And that person, that entire organization, was forced digital in many ways. And that certainly had a lot of impact on the cloud, too.Corey: Yeah. I think that some wit observed a few years back that Covid has had more impact on your digital transformation than your last ten CIOs combined.Brian: Yeah.Corey: And—yeah, suddenly, you're forcing people into a position where there really is no other safe option. And some of that has unwound but not a lot of it. There's still seem to be those same structures and ability to do things from remote locations then there were before 2020.Brian: Yeah. Since you asked, kind of, where we are in the industry, to bring all of that to an endpoint, now what this means is people are looking for cloud providers, not just to have the primitives, not just to have the IT that they—their central IT needed, but they need people who can help them build the things that will help their business transform. It makes it a fun, new stage, new era, a transformation era for companies like Google to be able to say, “Hey, here's how we build things. Here's what we've learned over a period of time. Here's what we've most importantly learned from other customers, and we want to help be your strategic partner in that transformation.” And like I said, it'd be almost impossible to estimate what the TAM is for that. The real question is how quickly can we help customers and innovate in our Cloud solutions in order to make more of the stuff more powerful and faster to help people build.Corey: I want to say as well that—to be clear—you folks can buy my attention but not my opinion. I will not say things if I do not believe them. That's the way the world works here. But every time I use Google Cloud for something, I am taken aback yet again by the developer experience, how polished it is. And increasingly lately, it's not just that you're offering those low-lying primitives that composed together to build things higher up the stack, you're offering those things as well across a wide variety of different tooling options. And they just tend to all make sense and solve a need rather than requiring me to build it together myself from popsicle sticks.And I can't shake the feeling that that's where the industry is going. I'm going to want someone to sell me an app to do expense reports. I'm not going to want—well, I want a database and a front-end system, and how I wind up storing all the assets on the backend. No. I just want someone to give me something that solves that problem for me. That's what customers across the board are looking for as best I can see.Brian: Well, it certainly expands the number of customers that you can serve. I'll give you an example. We have an AI agent product called Call Center AI which allows you to either build a complete new call center solution, or more often it augments an existing call center platform. And we could sell that on an API call basis or a number of agent seats basis or anything like that. But that's not actually how call center leaders want to buy. Imagine we come in and say, “This many API calls or $4 per seat or per month,” or something like that. There's a whole bunch of work for that call center leader to go figure out, “Well, do I want to do this? Do I not? How should I evaluate it versus others?” It's quite complex. Whereas, if we come in and say, “Hey, we have a deal for you. We will guarantee higher customer satisfaction. We will guarantee higher agent retention. And we will save you money. And we will only charge you some percentage of the amount of money that you're saved.”Corey: It's a compelling pitch.Brian: Which is an easier one for a business decision-maker to decide to take?Corey: It's no contest. I will say it's a little odd that—one thing—since you brought it up, one thing that struck me as a bit strange about Contact Center AI, compared to most of the services I would consider to be Google Cloud, instead of, “Click here to get started,” it's, “Click here to get a demo. Reach out to contact us.” It feels—Brian: Yeah.Corey: —very much like the deals for these things are going to get signed on a golf course.Brian: [laugh]. They—I don't know about signed on a golf course. I do know that there is implementation work that needs to be done in order to build the models because it's the model for the AI, figuring out how your particular customers are served in your particular context that takes the work. And we need to bring in a partner or bring in our expertise to help build that out. But it sounds to me like you're looking to go golfing since you've looked into this situation.Corey: Just like painting, I'm no good at golfing either.Brian: [laugh].Corey: Honestly, it's—it just doesn't have the—the appeal isn't there for me for whatever reason. I smile; I nod; I tend to assume that, “Yeah, that's okay. I'll leave some areas for other people to go exploring in.”Brian: I see. I see.Corey: So, two weeks before Google Cloud Next occurred, you folks wound up canceling Stadia, which had been rumored for a while. People had been predicting it since it was first announced because, “Just wait. They're going to Google Reader it.” And yeah, it was consumer-side, and I do understand that that was not Cloud. But it did raise the specter of—for people to start talking once again about, “Oh, well, Google doesn't have any ability to focus on things long-term. They're going to turn off Cloud soon, too. So, we shouldn't be using it at all.” I do not agree with that assessment.But I want to get your take on it because I do have some challenges with the way that your products and services go to market in some ways. But I don't have the concern that you're going to turn it all off and decide, “Yeah, that was a fun experiment. We're done.” Not with Cloud, not at this point.Brian: Yeah. So, I'd start with at Google Cloud, it is our job to be a trusted enterprise platform. And I can't speak to before I was here. I can't speak to before Thomas Kurian, who's our CEO, was here before. But I can say that we are very, very focused on that. And deprecating products in a surprising way or in a way that doesn't take into account what customers are on it, how can we help those customers is certainly not going to help us do that. And so, we don't do that anymore.Stadia you brought up, and I wasn't part of starting Stadia. I wasn't part of ending Stadia. I honestly don't know anything about Stadia that any average tech-head might not know. But it is a different part of Google. And just like Amazon has deprecated plenty of services and devices and other things in their consumer world—and Microsoft has certainly deprecated many, many, many consumer and other products—like, that's a different model. And I won't say whether it's good, bad, or righteous, or not.But I can say at Google Cloud, we're doing a really good job right now. Can we get better? Of course. Always. We can get better at communicating, engaging customers in advance. But we now have a clean deprecation policy with a set of enterprise APIs that we commit to for stated periods of time. We also—like people should take a look. We're doing ten-year deals with companies like Deutsche Bank. And it's a sign that Google is here to last and Google Cloud in particular. It's also at a market level, just worth recognizing.We are a $27 billion run rate business now. And you earn trust in drips. You lose it in buckets. And we're—we recognize that we need to just keep every single day earning trust. And it's because we've been able to do that—it's part of the reason that we've gotten as large and as successful as we have—and when you get large and successful, you also tend to invest more and make it even more clear that we're going to continue on that path. And so, I'm glad that the market is seeing that we are enterprise-ready and can be trusted much, much more. But we're going to keep earning every single day.Corey: Yeah. I think it's pretty fair to say that you have definitely gotten yourselves into a place where you've done the things that I would've done if I wanted to shore up trust that the platform was not going to go away. Because these ten-year deals are with the kinds of companies that, shall we say, do not embark on signing contracts lightly. They very clearly, have asked you the difficult, pointed questions that I'm basically asking you now as cheap shots. And they ask it in very serious ways through multiple layers of attorneys. And if the answers aren't the right answers, they don't sign the contract. That is pretty clearly how the world works.The fact that companies are willing to move things like core trading systems over to you on a ten-year time horizon, tells me that I can observe whatever I want from the outside, but they have actual existential risk questions tied to what they're doing. And they are in some ways betting their future on your folks. You clearly know what those right answers are and how to articulate them. I think that's the side of things that the world does not get to see or think about very much. Because it is easy to point at all the consumer failings and the hundreds of messaging products that you continually replenish just in order to kill.Brian: [laugh].Corey: It's—like, what is it? The tree of liberty must be watered periodically from time to time, but the blood of patriots? Yeah. The logo of Google must be watered by the blood of canceled messaging products.Brian: Oh, come on. [laugh].Corey: Yeah. I'm going to be really scared if there's an actual, like, Pub/Sub service. I don't know. That counts as messaging, sort of. I don't know.Brian: [laugh]. Well, thank you. Thank you for the recognition of how far we've come in our trust from enterprises and trust from customers.Corey: I think it's the right path. There's also reputational issues, too. Because in the absence of new data, people don't tend to change their opinion on things very easily. And okay, there was a thing I was using. It got turned off. There was a big kerfuffle. That sticks in people's minds. But I've never seen an article about a Google service saying, “Oh, yeah. It hasn't been turned off or materially changed. In fact, it's gotten better with time. And it's just there working reliably.” You're either invisible, or you're getting yelled at.It feels like it's a microcosm of my early career stage of being a systems administrator. I'm either invisible or the mail system's broke, and everyone wants my head. I don't know what the right answer is—Brian: That was about right to me.Corey: —in this thing. Yeah. I don't know what the right answer on these things is, but you're definitely getting it right. I think the enterprise API endeavors that you've gone through over the past year or two are not broadly known. And frankly, you've definitely are ex-AWS because enterprise APIs is a terrible name for what these things are.Brian: [laugh].Corey: I'll let you explain it. Go ahead. And bonus points if you can do it without sounding like a press release. Take it away.Brian: There are a set of APIs that developers and companies should be able to know are going to be supported for the period of time that they need in order to run their applications and truly bet on them. And that's what we've done.Corey: Yeah. It's effectively a commitment that there will not be meaningful deprecations or changes to the API that are breaking changes without significant notice periods.Brian: Correct.Corey: And to be clear, that is exactly what all of the cloud providers have in their enterprise contracts. They're always notice periods around those things. There are always, at least, certain amounts of time and significant breach penalties in the event that, “Yeah, today, I decided that we were just not going to spin up VMs in that same way as we always have before. Sorry. Sucks to be you.” I don't see that happening on the Google Cloud side of the world very often, not like it once did. And again, we do want to talk about reputations.There are at least four services that I'm aware of that AWS has outright deprecated. One, Sumerian has said we're sunsetting the service in public. But on the other end of the spectrum, RDS on VMWare has been completely memory-holed. There's a blog post or two but nothing else remains in any of the AWS stuff, I'm sure, because that's an, “Enterprise-y” service, they wound up having one on one conversations with customers or there would have been a hue and cry. But every cloud provider does, in the fullness of time, turn some things off as they learn from their customers.Brian: Hmm. I hadn't heard anything about AWS Infinidash for a while either.Corey: No, no. It seems to be one of those great services that we made up on the internet one day for fun. And I love that just from a product marketing perspective. I mean, you know way more about that field than I do given that it's your job, and I'm just sitting here in this cheap seats throwing peanuts at you. But I love the idea of customers just come up and make up a product one day in your space and then the storytelling that immediately happens thereafter. Most companies would kill for something like that just because you would expect on some level to learn so much about how your reputation actually works. When there's a platonic ideal of a service that isn't bothered by pesky things like, “It has to exist,” what do people say about it? And how does that work?And I'm sort of surprised there wasn't more engagement from Amazon on that. It always seems like they're scared to say anything. Which brings me to a marketing question I have for you. You and Amazing have similar challenges—you being Google in this context, not you personally—in that your customers take themselves deadly seriously. And as a result, you have to take yourselves with at least that same level of seriousness. You can't go on Twitter and be the Wendy's Twitter account when you're dealing with enterprise buyers of cloud platforms. I'm kind of amazed, and I'd love to know. How can you manage to say anything at all? Because it just seems like you are so constrained, and there's no possible thing you can say that someone won't take issue with. And yes, some of the time, that someone is me.Brian: Well, let's start with going back to Infinidash a little bit. Yes, you identified one interesting thing about that episode, if I can call it an episode. The thing that I tell you though that didn't surprise me is it shows how much of cloud is actually learned from other people, not from the cloud provider itself. I—you're going to be going to re:Invent. You were at Google Cloud Next. Best thing about the industry conferences is not what the provider does. It's the other people that are there that you learn from. The folks that have done something that you've been trying to do and couldn't figure out how to do, and then they explained it to you, just the relationships that you get that help you understand what's going on in this industry that's changing so fast and has so much going on.And so, And so, that part didn't surprise me. And that gets a little bit to the second part of your—that we're talking about. “How do you say anything?” As long as you're helping a customer say it. As long as you're helping someone who has been a fan of a product and has done interesting things with it say it, that's how you communicate for the most part, putting a megaphone in front of the people who already understand what's going on and helping their voice be heard, which is a lot more fun, honestly, than creating TV ads and banner ads and all of the stuff that a lot of consumer and traditional companies. We get to celebrate our customers and our creators much, much more.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Uptycs, because they believe that many of you are looking to bolster your security posture with CNAPP and XDR solutions. They offer both cloud and endpoint security in a single UI and data model. Listeners can get Uptycs for up to 1,000 assets through the end of 2023 (that is next year) for $1. But this offer is only available for a limited time on UptycsSecretMenu.com. That's U-P-T-Y-C-S Secret Menu dot com.Corey: I think that it's not super well understood by a lot of folks out there that the official documentation that any cloud provider puts out there is kind of a last resort. Or I'm looking for the specific flag to a specific parameter of a specific command. Great. Sure. But what I really want to do whenever I'm googling how to do something—and yes, that—we're going to be googling—welcome. You've successfully owned that space to the point where it's become common parlance. Good work is I want to see what other people had said. I want to find blog posts, ideally recent ones, talking about how to do the thing that I'm trying to do. If I'm trying to do something relatively not that hard or not that uncommon, if I spin up three web servers behind a load-balancer, and I can't find any community references on how to do that thing, either I'm trying to do something absolutely bizarre and I should re-think it, or there is no community/customer base for the product talking about how to do things with it.And I have noticed a borderline Cambrian explosion over the last few years of the Google Cloud community. I'm seeing folks who do not work at Google, and also who have never worked at Google, and sometimes still think they work at Google in some cases. It's not those folks. It is people who are just building things as a customer. And they, in turn, become very passionate advocates for the platform. And they start creating content on these things.Brian: Yeah. We've been blessed to have, not only, the customer base grow, but essentially the passion among that customer base, and we've certainly tried to help building community and catalyzing the community, but it's been fun to watch how our customers' success turns into our success which turns into customer success. And it's interesting, in particular, to see too how much of that passion comes from people seeing that there is another way to do things.It's clear that many people in our industry knew cloud through the lens of Amazon, knew tech in general through the lenses of Microsoft and Oracle and a lot of other companies. And Google, which we try and respect specifically what people are trying to accomplish and how they know how to do it, we also many ways have taken a more opinionated approach, if you will, to say, “Hey, here's how this could be done in a different way.” And when people find something that's unexpectedly different and also delightful, it's more likely that they're going to be strong advocates and share that passion with the world.Corey: It's a virtuous cycle that leads to the continued growth and success of a platform. Something I've been wondering about in the broader sense, is what happens after this? Because if, let's say for the sake of argument, that one of the major cloud providers decided, “Okay. You know, we're going to turn this stuff off. We've decided we don't really want to be in the cloud business.” It turns out that high-margin businesses that wind up turning into cash monsters as soon as you stop investing heavily in growing them, just kind of throw off so much that, “We don't know what to do with. And we're running out of spaces to store it. So, we're getting out of it.” I don't know how that would even be possible at some point. Because given the amount of time and energy some customers take to migrate in, it would be a decade-long project for them to migrate back out again.So, it feels on some level like on the scale of a human lifetime, that we will be seeing the large public cloud providers, in more or less their current form, for the rest of our lives. Is that hopelessly naïve? Am I missing—am I overestimating how little change happens in the sweep of a human lifetime in technology?Brian: Well, I've been in the tech industry for 27 years now. And I've just seen a continual moving up the stack. Where, you know, there are fundamental changes. I think the PC becoming widespread, fundamental change; mobile, certainly becoming primary computing experience—what I know you call a toilet computer, I call my mobile; that's certainly been a change. Cloud has certainly been a change. And so, there are step functions for sure. But in general, what has been happening is things just keep moving up the stack. And as things move up the stack, there are companies that evolve and learn to do that and provide more value and more value to new folks. Like I talked about how businesspeople are leaders in technology now in a way that they never were before. And you need to give them the value in a way that they can understand it, and they can consume it, and they can trust it. And it's going to continue to move in that direction.And so, what happens then as things move up the stack, the abstractions start happening. And so, there are companies that were just major players in the ‘90s, whether it's Novell or Sun Microsystems or—I was actually getting a tour of the Sunnyvale/Mountain View Google Campuses yesterday. And the tour guide said, “This used to be the site of a company that was called Silicon Graphics. They did something around, like, making things for Avatar.” I felt a little aged at that point.But my point is, there are these companies that were amazing in their time. They didn't move up the stack in a way that met the net set of needs. And it's not like that crater the industry or anything, it's just people were able to move off of it and move up. And I do think that's what we'll see happening.Corey: In some cases, it seems to slip below the waterline and become, effectively, plumbing, where everyone uses it, but no one knows who they are or what they do. The Tier 1 backbone providers these days tend to be in that bucket. Sure, some of them have other businesses, like Verizon. People know who Verizon is, but they're one of the major Tier 1 carriers in the United States just of the internet backbone.Brian: That's right. And that doesn't mean it's not still a great business.Corey: Yeah.Brian: It just means it's not front of mind for maybe the problems you're trying to solve or the opportunities we're trying to capture at that point in time.Corey: So, my last question for you goes circling back to Google Cloud Next. You folks announced an awful lot of things. And most of them, from my perspective, were actually pretty decent. What do you think is the most impactful announcement that you made that the industry largely overlooked?Brian: Most impactful that the industry—well, overlooked might be the wrong way to put this. But there's this really interesting thing happening in the cloud world right now where whereas before companies, kind of, chose their primary cloud writ large, today because multi-cloud is actually happening in the vast majority of companies have things in multiple places, people make—are making also the decision of, “What is going to be my strategic data provider?” And I don't mean data in the sense of the actual data and meta-data and the like, but my data cloud.Corey: Mm-hmm.Brian: How do I choose my data cloud specifically? And there's been this amazing profusion of new data companies that do better ETL or ELT, better data cleaning, better packaging for AI, new techniques for scaling up/scaling down at cost. A lot of really interesting stuff happening in the dataspace. But it's also created almost more silos. And so, the most important announcement that we made probably didn't seem like a really big announcement to a lot of people, but it really was about how we're connecting together more of our data cloud with BigQuery, with unstructured and structured data support, with support for data lakes, including new formats, including Iceberg and Delta and Hudi to come how—Looker is increasingly working with BigQuery in order to make it, so that if you put data into Google Cloud, you not only have these super first-class services that you can use, ranging from databases like Spanner to BigQuery to Looker to AI services, like Vertex AI, but it's also now supporting all these different formats so you can bring third-party applications into that one place. And so, at the big cloud events, it's a new service that is the biggest deal. For us, the biggest deal is how this data cloud is coming together in an open way to let you use the tool that you want to use, whether it's from Google or a third party, all by betting on Google's data cloud.Corey: I'm really impressed by how Google is rather clearly thinking about this from the perspective of the data has to be accessible by a bunch of different things, even though it may take wildly different forms. It is making the data more fluid in that it can go to where the customer needs it to be rather than expecting the customer to come to it where it lives. That, I think, is a trend that we have not seen before in this iteration of the tech industry.Brian: I think you got that—you picked that up very well. And to some degree, if you step back and look at it, it maybe shouldn't be that surprising that Google is adept at that. When you think of what Google search is, how YouTube is essentially another search engine producing videos that deliver on what you're asking for, how information is used with Google Maps, with Google Lens, how it is all about taking information and making it as universally accessible and helpful as possible. And if we can do that for the internet's information, why can't we help businesses do it for their business information? And that's a lot of where Google certainly has a unique approach with Google Cloud.Corey: I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where's the best place for them to find you?Brian: cloud.google.com for Google Cloud information of course. And if it's still running when this podcast goes, @isforat, I-S-F-O-R-A-T, on Twitter.Corey: And we will put links to both of those in the show notes. Thank you so much for you time. I appreciate it.Brian: Thank you, Corey. It's been good talking with you.Corey: Brian Hall, VP of Product Marketing at Google Cloud. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas, if you've hated this podcast, please, leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an insulting angry comment dictating that, “No. Large companies make ten-year-long commitments casually all the time.”Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
About BrianBrian is an accomplished dealmaker with experience ranging from developer platforms to mobile services. Before InfluxData, Brian led business development at Twilio. Joining at just thirty-five employees, he built over 150 partnerships globally from the company's infancy through its IPO in 2016. He led the company's international expansion, hiring its first teams in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Prior to Twilio Brian was VP of Business Development at Clearwire and held management roles at Amp'd Mobile, Kivera, and PlaceWare.Links Referenced:InfluxData: https://www.influxdata.com/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is bought to you in part by our friends at Veeam. Do you care about backups? Of course you don't. Nobody cares about backups. Stop lying to yourselves! You care about restores, usually right after you didn't care enough about backups. If you're tired of the vulnerabilities, costs and slow recoveries when using snapshots to restore your data, assuming you even have them at all living in AWS-land, there is an alternative for you. Check out Veeam, thats V-E-E-A-M for secure, zero-fuss AWS backup that won't leave you high and dry when it's time to restore. Stop taking chances with your data. Talk to Veeam. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: This episode is brought to us by our friends at Pinecone. They believe that all anyone really wants is to be understood, and that includes your users. AI models combined with the Pinecone vector database let your applications understand and act on what your users want… without making them spell it out.Make your search application find results by meaning instead of just keywords, your personalization system make picks based on relevance instead of just tags, and your security applications match threats by resemblance instead of just regular expressions. Pinecone provides the cloud infrastructure that makes this easy, fast, and scalable. Thanks to my friends at Pinecone for sponsoring this episode. Visit Pinecone.io to understand more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. It's been a year, which means it's once again time to have a promoted guest episode brought to us by our friends at InfluxData. Joining me for a second time is Brian Mullen, CMO over at InfluxData. Brian, thank you for agreeing to do this a second time. You're braver than most.Brian: Thanks, Corey. I'm happy to be here. Second time is the charm.Corey: So, it's been an interesting year to put it mildly and I tend to have the attention span of a goldfish of most days, so for those who are similarly flighty, let's start at the very top. What is an InfluxDB slash InfluxData slash Influx—when you're not sure which one to use, just shorten it and call it good—and why might someone need it?Brian: Sure. So, InfluxDB is what most people understand our product as, a pretty popular open-source product, been out for quite a while. And then our company, InfluxData is the company behind InfluxDB. And InfluxDB is where developers build IoT real-time analytics and cloud applications, typically all based on time series. It's a time-series data platform specifically built to handle time-series data, which we think about is any type of data that is stamped in time in some way.It could be metrics, like, taken every one second, every two seconds, every three seconds, or some kind of event that occurs and is stamped in time in some way. So, our product and platform is really specialized to handle that technical problem.Corey: When last we spoke, I contextualized that in the realm of an IoT sensor that winds up reporting its device ID and its temperature at a given timestamp. That is sort of baseline stuff that I think aligns with what we're talking about. But over the past year, I started to see it in a bit of a different light, specifically viewing logs as time-series data, which hadn't occurred to me until relatively recently. And it makes perfect sense, on some level. It's weird to contextualize what Influx does as being a logging database, but there's absolutely no reason it couldn't be.Brian: Yeah, it certainly could. So typically, we see the world of time-series data in kind of two big realms. One is, as you mentioned the, you know, think of it as the hardware or, you know, physical realm: devices and sensors, these are things that are going to show up in a connected car, in a factory deployment, in renewable energy, you know, wind farm. And those are real devices and pieces of hardware that are out in the physical world, collecting data and emitting, you know, time-series every one second, or five seconds, or ten minutes, or whatever it might be.But it also, as you mentioned, applies to, call it the virtual world, which is really all of the software and infrastructure that is being stood up to run applications and services. And so, in that world, it could be the same—it's just a different type of source, but is really kind of the same technical problem. It's still time-series data being stamped, you know, data being stamped every, you know, one second, every five seconds, in some cases, every millisecond, but it is coming from a source that is actually in the infrastructure. Could be, you know, virtual machines, it could be containers, it could be microservices running within those containers. And so, all of those things together, both in the physical world and this infrastructure world are all emitting time-series data.Corey: When you take a look at the broader ecosystem, what is it that you see that has been the most misunderstood about time-series data as a whole? For example, when I saw AWS talking about a lot of things that they did in the realm of for your data lake, I talked to clients of mine about this and their response is, “Well, that'd be great genius, if we had a data lake.” It's, “What do you think those petabytes of nonsense in S3 are?” “Oh, those are the logs and the assets and a bunch of other nonsense.” “Yeah, that's what other people are calling a data lake.” “Oh.” Do you see similar lights-go-on moment when you talk to clients and prospective clients about what it is that they're doing that they just hadn't considered to be time-series data previously?Brian: Yeah. In fact, that's exactly what we see with many of our customers is they didn't realize that all of a sudden, they are now handling a pretty sizable time-series workload. And if you kind of take a step back and look at a couple of pretty obvious but sometimes unrecognized trends in technology, the first is cloud applications in general are expanding, they're both—horizontally and vertically. So, that means, like, the workloads that are being run in the Netflix's of the world, or all the different infrastructure that's being spun up in the cloud to run these various, you know, applications and services, those workloads are getting bigger and bigger, those companies and their subscriber bases, and the amount of data they're generating is getting bigger and bigger. They're also expanding horizontally by region and geography.So Netflix, for example, running not just in the US, but in every continent and probably every cloud region around the world. So, that's happening in the cloud world, and then also, in the IoT world, there's this massive growth of connected devices, both net-new devices that are being developed kind of, you know, the next Peloton or the next climate control unit that goes in an apartment or house, and also these longtime legacy devices that are been on the factory floor for a couple of decades, but now are being kind of modernized and coming online. So, if you look at all of that growth of the data sources now being built up in the cloud and you look at all that growth of these connected devices, both new and existing, that are kind of coming online, there's a huge now exponential growth in the sources of data. And all of these sources are emitting time-series data. You can just think about a connected car—not even a self-driving car, just a connected car, your everyday, kind of, 2022 model, and nearly every element of the car is emitting time-series data: its engine components, you know, your tires, like, what the climate inside of the car is, statuses of the engine itself, and it's all doing that in real-time, so every one second, every five seconds, whatever.So, I think in general, people just don't realize they're already dealing with a substantial workload of time series. And in most cases, unless they're using something like Influx, they're probably not, you know, especially tuned to handle it from a technology perspective.Corey: So, it's been a year. What has changed over on your side of the world since the last time we spoke? It seems that well, things continue and they're up and to the right. Well, sure, generally speaking, you're clearly still in business. Good job, always appreciative of your custom, as well as the fact that oh, good, even in a world where it seems like there's a macro recession in progress, that there are still companies out there that continue to persist and in some cases, dare I say, even thrive? What have you folks been up to?Brian: Yeah, it's been a big year. So first, we've seen quite a bit of expansion across the use cases. So, we've seen even further expansion in IoT, kind of expanding into consumer, industrial, and now sustainability and clean energy, and that pairs with what we've seen on FinTech and cryptocurrency, gaming and entertainment applications, network telemetry, including some of the biggest names in telecom, and then a little bit more on the cloud side with cloud services, infrastructure, and dev tools and APIs. So, quite a bit more broad set of use cases we're now seeing across the platform. And the second thing is—you might have seen it in the last month or so—is a pretty big announcement we had of our new storage engine.So, this was just announced earlier this month in November and was previously introduced to our community as what we call an IOx, which is how it was known in the open-source. And think of this really as a rebuilt and reimagined storage engine which is built on that open-source project, InfluxDB IOx that allows us to deliver faster queries, and now—pretty exciting for the first time—unlimited time-series, or cardinality as it's known in the space. And then also we introduced SQL for writing queries and BI tool support. And this is, for the first time we're introducing SQL, which is world's most popular data programming language to our platform, enabling developers to query via the API our language Flux, and InfluxQL in addition.Corey: A long time ago, it really seems that the cloud took a vote, for lack of a better term, and decided that when it comes to storage, object store is the way forward. It was a bit of a reimagining from how we all considered using storage previously, but the economics are at minimum of ten to one in favor of objects store, the latency is far better, the durability is off the charts better, you don't have to deal—at least in AWS-land—with the concept of availability zones and the rest, just from an economic and performance perspective, provided the use case embraces it, there's really no substitute.Brian: Yeah, I mean, the way we think about storage is, you know, obviously, it varies quite a bit from customer to customer with our use cases. Especially in IoT, we see some use cases where customers want to have data around for months and in some cases, years. So, it's a pretty substantial data set you're often looking at. And sometimes those customers want to downsample those, they don't necessarily need every single piece of minutia that they may need in real-time, but not in summary, looking backward. So, you really—we're in this kind of world where we're dealing with both hive fidelity—usually in the moment—data and lower fidelity, when people can downsample and have a little bit more of a summarized view of what happened.So, pretty unique for us and we have to kind of design the product in a way that is able to balance both of those because that's what, you know, the customer use cases demand. It's a super hard problem to solve. One of the reasons that you have a product like InfluxDB, which is specialized to handle this kind of thing, is so that you can actually manage that balance in your application service and setting your retention policy, et cetera.Corey: That's always been something that seemed a little on the odd side to me when I'm looking at a variety of different observability tools, where it seems that one of the key dimensions that they all tend to, I guess, operate on and price on is retention period. And I get it; you might not necessarily want to have your load balancer logs from 2012 readily available and paying for the privilege, but it does seem that given the dramatic fall of archival storage pricing, on some level, people do want to be able to retain that data just on the off chance that will be useful. Maybe that's my internal digital packrat chiming in at this point, but I do believe strongly that there is a correlation between how recent the data is and how useful it is, for a variety of different use cases. But that's also not a global truth. How do you view the divide? And what do you actually see people saying they want versus what they're actually using?Brian: It's a really good question and not a simple problem to solve. So, first of all, I would say it probably really depends on the use case and the extent to which that use case is touching real world applications and services. So, in a pure observability setting where you're looking at, perhaps more of a, kind of, operational view of infrastructure monitoring, you want to understand kind of what happened and when those tend to be a little bit more focused on real-time and recent. So, for example, you of course, want to know exactly what's happening in the moment, zero in on whatever anomaly and kind of surrounding data there is, perhaps that means you're digging into something that happened in you know, fairly recent time. So, those do tend to be, not all of them, but they do tend to be a little bit more real-time and recent-oriented.I think it's a little bit different when we look at IoT. Those generally tend to be longer timeframes that people are dealing with. Their physical out-in-the-field devices, you know, many times those devices are kind of coming online and offline, depending on the connectivity, depending on the environment, you can imagine a connected smart agriculture setup, I mean, those are a pretty wide array of devices out and in, you know, who knows what kind of climate and environment, so they tend to be a little bit longer in retention policy, kind of, being able to dig into the data, what's happening. The time frame that people are dealing with is just, in general, much longer in some of those situations.Corey: One story that I've heard a fair bit about observability data and event data is that they inevitably compose down into metrics rather than events or traces or logs, and I have a hard time getting there because I can definitely see a bunch of log entries showing the web servers return codes, okay, here's the number of 500 errors and number of different types of successes that we wind up seeing in the app. Yeah, all right, how many per minute, per second, per hour, whatever it is that makes sense that you can look at aberrations there. But in the development process at least, I find that having detailed log messages tell me about things I didn't see and need to understand or to continue building the dumb thing that I'm in the process of putting out. It feels like once something is productionalized and running, that its behavior is a lot more well understood, and at that point, metrics really seem to take over. How do you see it, given that you fundamentally live at that intersection where one can become the other?Brian: Yeah, we are right at that intersection and our answer probably would be both. Metrics are super important to understand and have that regular cadence and be kind of measuring that state over time, but you can miss things depending on how frequent those metrics are coming in. And increasingly, when you have the amount of data that you're dealing with coming from these various sources, the measurement is getting smaller and smaller. So, unless you have, you know, perfect metrics coming in every half-second, or you know, in some sub-partition of that, in milliseconds, you're likely to miss something. And so, events are really key to understand those things that pop up and then maybe come back down and in a pure metric setting, in your regular interval, you would have just completely missed. So, we see most of our use cases that are showing a balance of the two is kind of the most effective. And from a product perspective, that's how we think about solving the problem, addressing both.Corey: One of the things that I struggled with is it seems that—again, my approach to this is relatively outmoded. I was a systems administrator back when that title was not considered disparaging by a good portion of the technical community the way that it is today. Even though the job is the same, we call them something different now. Great. Okay, whatever smile, nod, and accept the larger paycheck.But my way of thinking about things are okay, you have the logs, they live on the server itself. And maybe if you want to be fancy, you wind up putting them to a centralized rsyslog cluster or whatnot. Yes, you might send them as well to some other processing system for visibility or a third-party monitoring system, but the canonical truth slash source of logs tends to live locally. That said, I got out of running production infrastructure before this idea of ephemeral containers or serverless functions really became a thing. Do you find that these days you are the source of truth slash custodian of record for these log entries, or do you find that you are more of a secondary source for better visibility and analysis, but not what they're going to bust out when the auditor comes calling in three years?Brian: I think, again, it—[laugh] I feel like I'm answering the same way [crosstalk 00:15:53]Corey: Yeah, oh, and of course, let's be clear, use cases are going to vary wildly. This is not advice on anyone's approach to compliance and the rest [laugh]. I don't want to get myself in trouble here.Brian: Exactly. Well, you know, we kind of think about it in terms of profiles. And we see a couple of different profiles of customers using InfluxDB. So, the first is, and this was kind of what we saw most often early on, still see quite a bit of them is kind of more of that operator profile. And these are folks who are going to—they're building some sort of monitor, kind of, source of truth for—that's internally facing to monitor applications or services, perhaps that other teams within their company built.And so that's, kind of like, a little bit more of your kind of pure operator. Yes, they're building up in the stack themselves, but it's to pay attention to essentially something that another team built. And then what we've seen more recently, especially as we've moved more prominently into the cloud and offered a usage-based service with a, you know, APIs and endpoint people can hit, as we see more people come into it from a builder's perspective. And similar in some ways, except that they're still building kind of a, you know, a source of truth for handling this kind of data. But they're also building the applications and services themselves are taken out to market that are in the hands of customers.And so, it's a little bit different mindset. Typically, there's, you know, a little bit more comfort with using one of many services to kind of, you know, be part of the thing that they're building. And so, we've seen a little bit more comfort from that type of profile, using our service running in the cloud, using the API, and not worrying too much about the kind of, you know, underlying setup of the implementation.Corey: Love how serverless helps you scale big and ship fast, but hate debugging your serverless apps? With Lumigo's serverless observability, it's fast and easy (and maybe a little fun, too). End-to-end distributed tracing gives developers full clarity into their most complex serverless and containerized applications, connecting every service from AWS Lambda and Amazon ECS to DynamoDB, API Gateways, Step Functions and more. Try Lumigo free and debug 3x faster, reduce error rate and speed up development. Visit snark.cloud/lumigo That's snark.cloud/L-U-M-I-G-OCorey: So, I've been on record a lot saying that the best database is TXT records stuffed into Route 53, which works super well as a gag, let's be clear, don't actually build something on top of this, that's a disaster waiting to happen. I don't want to destroy anyone's career as I do this. But you do have a much more viable competitive threat on the landscape. And that is quite simply using the open-source version of InfluxDB. What is the tipping point where, “Huh, I can run this myself,” turns into, “But I shouldn't. I should instead give money to other people to run it for me.”Because having been an engineer, where I believe I'm the world's greatest everything, when it comes to my environment—a fact provably untrue, but that hubris never quite goes away entirely—at what point am I basically being negligent not to start dealing with you in a more formalized business context?Brian: First of all, let me say that we have many customers, many developers out there who are running open-source and it works perfectly for them. The workload is just right, the deployment makes sense. And so, there are many production workloads we're using open-source. But typically, the kind of big turning point for people is on scale, scale, and overall performance related to that. And so, that's typically when they come and look at one of the two commercial offers.So, to start, open-source is a great place to, you know, kind of begin the journey, check it out, do that level of experimentation and kind of proof of concept. We also have 60,000-plus developers using our introductory cloud service, which is a free service. You simply sign up and can begin immediately putting data into the platform and building queries, and you don't have to worry about any of the setup and running servers to deploy software. So, both of those, the open-source and our cloud product are excellent ways to get started. And then when it comes time to really think about building in production and moving up in scale, we have our two commercial offers.And the first of those is InfluxDB Cloud, which is our cloud-native fully managed by InfluxData offering. We run this not only in AWS but also in Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. It's a usage-based service, which means you pay exactly for what you use, and the three components that people pay for our data in, number of queries, and the amount of data you store in storage. We also for those who are interested in actually managing it themselves, we have InfluxDB Enterprise, which is a software subscription-base model, and it is self-managed by the customer in their environment. Now, that environment could be their own private cloud, it also could be on-premises in their own data center.And so, lots of fun people who are a little bit more oriented to kind of manage software themselves rather than using a service gear toward that. But both those commercial offers InfluxDB Cloud and InfluxDB Enterprise are really designed for, you know, massive scale. In the case of Cloud, I mentioned earlier with the new storage engine, you can hit unlimited cardinality, which means you have no limit on the number of time series you can put into the platform, which is a pretty big game-changing concept. And so, that means however many time-series sources you have and however many series they're emitting, you can run that without a problem without any sort of upper limit in our cloud product. Over on the enterprise side with our self-managed product, that means you can deploy a cluster of whatever size you want. It could be a two-by-four, it could be a four-by-eight, or something even larger. And so, it gives people that are managing in their own private cloud or in a data center environment, really their own options to kind of construct exactly what they need for their particular use case.Corey: Does your object storage layer make it easier to dynamically change clusters on the fly? I mean, historically, running things in a pre-provisioned cluster with EBS volumes or local disk was, “Oh, great. You want to resize something? Well, we're going to be either taking an outage or we're going to be building up something, migrating data live, and there's going to be a knife-switch cutover at some point that makes things relatively unfortunate.” It seems that once you abstract the storage layer away from anything resembling an instance that you would be able to get away from some of those architectural constraints.Brian: Yeah, that's really the promise, and what is delivered in our cloud product is that you no longer, as a developer, have to think about that if you're using that product. You don't have to think about how big the cluster is going to be, you don't have to think about these kind of disaster scenarios. It is all kind of pre-architected in the service. And so, the things that we really want to deliver to people, in addition to the elimination of that concern for what the underlying infrastructure looks like and how its operating. And so, with infrastructure concerns kind of out of the way, what we want to deliver on are kind of the things that people care most about: real-time query speed.So, now with this new storage engine, you can query data across any time series within milliseconds, 100 times faster queries against high cardinality data that was previously impossible. And we also have unlimited time-series volume. Again, any total number of time series you have, which is known as cardinality, is now able to run without a problem in the platform. And then we also have kind of opening up, we're opening up the aperture a bit for developers with SQL language support. And so, this is just a whole new world of flexibility for developers to begin building on the platform. And again, this is all in the way that people are using the product without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure.Corey: For most companies—and this does not apply to you—their core competency is not running time-series databases and the infrastructure attendant thereof, so it seems like it is absolutely a great candidate for, “You know, we really could make this someone else's problem and let us instead focus on the differentiated thing that we are doing or building or complaining about.”Brian: Yeah, that's a true statement. Typically what happens with time-series data is that people first of all, don't realize they have it, and then when they realize they have time-series data, you know, the first thing they'll do is look around and say, “Well, what do I have here?” You know, I have this relational database over here or this document database over here, maybe even this, kind of, search database over here, maybe that thing can handle time series. And in a light manner, it probably does the job. But like I said, the sources of data and just the volume of time series is expanding, really across all these different use cases, exponentially.And so, pretty quickly, people realize that thing that may be able to handle time series in some minor manner, is quickly no longer able to do it. They're just not purpose-built for it. And so, that's where really they come to a product like Influx to really handle this specific problem. We're built specifically for this purpose and so as the time-series workload expands when it kind of hits that tipping point, you really need a specialized tool.Corey: Last question, before I turn you loose to prepare for re:Invent, of course—well, I guess we'll ask you a little bit about that afterwards, but first, we can talk a lot theoretically about what your product could or might theoretically do. What are you actually seeing? What are the use cases that other than the stereotypical ones we've talked about, what have you seen people using it for that surprised you?Brian: Yeah, some of it is—it's just really interesting how it connects to, you know, things you see every day and/or use every day. I mean, chances are, many people listening have probably use InfluxDB and, you know, perhaps didn't know it. You know, if anyone has been to a home that has Tesla Powerwalls—Tesla is a customer of ours—then they've seen InfluxDB in action. Tesla's pulling time-series data from these connected Powerwalls that are in solar-powered homes, and they monitor things like health and availability and performance of those solar panels and the battery setup, et cetera. And they're collecting this at the edge and then sending that back into the hub where InfluxDB is running on their back end.So, if you've ever seen this deployed like that's InfluxDB running behind the scenes. Same goes, I'm sure many people have a Nest thermostat in their house. Nest monitors the infrastructure, actually the powers that collection of IoT data collection. So, you think of this as InfluxDB running behind the scenes to monitor what infrastructure is standing up that back-end Nest service. And this includes their use of Kubernetes and other software infrastructure that's run in their platform for collection, managing, transforming, and analyzing all of this aggregate device data that's out there.Another one, especially for those of us that streamed our minds out during the pandemic, Disney+ entertainment, streaming, and delivery of that to applications and to devices in the home. And so, you know, this hugely popular Disney+ streaming service is essentially a global content delivery network for distributing all these, you know, movies and video series to all the users worldwide. And they monitor the movement and performance of that video content through this global CDN using InfluxDB. So, those are a few where you probably walk by something like this multiple times a week, or in our case of Disney+ probably watching it once a day. And it's great to see InfluxDB kind of working behind the scenes there.Corey: It's one of those things where it's, I guess we'll call it plumbing, for lack of a better term. It's not the sort of thing that people are going to put front-and-center into any product or service that they wind up providing, you know, except for you folks. Instead, it's the thing that empowers a capability behind that product or service that is often taken for granted, just because until you understand the dizzying complexity, particularly at scale, of what these things have to do under the hood, it just—well yeah, of course, it works that way. Why shouldn't it? That's an expectation I have of the product because it's always had that. Yeah, but this is how it gets there.Brian: Our thesis really is that data is best understood through the lens of time. And as this data is expanding exponentially, time becomes increasingly the, kind of, common element, the common component that you're using to kind of view what happened. That could be what's running through a telecom network, what's happening with the devices that are connected that network, the movement of data through that network, and when, what's happening with subscribers and content pushing through a CDN on a streaming service, what's happening with climate and home data in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of homes through common device like a Nest thermostat. All of these things they attach to some real-world collection of data, and as long as that's happening, there's going to be a place for time-series data and tools that are optimized to handle it.Corey: So, my last question—for real this time—we are recording this the week before re:Invent 2022. What do you hope to see, what do you expect to see, what do you fear to see?Brian: No fears. Even though it's Vegas, no fears.Corey: I do have the super-spreader event fear, but that's a separate—Brian: [laugh].Corey: That's a separate issue. Neither one of us are deep into the epidemiology weeds, to my understanding. But yeah, let's just bound this to tech, let's be clear.Brian: Yeah, so first of all, we're really excited to go there. We'll have a pretty big presence. We have a few different locations where you can meet us. We'll have a booth on the main show floor, we'll be in the marketplace pavilion, as I mentioned, InfluxDB Cloud is offered across the marketplaces of each of the clouds, AWS, obviously in this case, but also in Azure and Google. But we'll be there in the AWS Marketplace pavilion, showcasing the new engine and a lot of the pretty exciting new use cases that we've been seeing.And we'll have our full team there, so if you're looking to kind of learn more about InfluxDB, or you've checked it out recently and want to understand kind of what the new capability is, we'll have many folks from our technical teams there, from our development team, some our field folks like the SEs and some of the product managers will be there as well. So, we'll have a pretty great collection of experts on InfluxDB to answer any questions and walk people through, you know, demonstrations and use cases.Corey: I look forward to it. I will be doing my traditional Wednesday afternoon tour through the expo halls and nature walk, so if you're listening to this and it's before Wednesday afternoon, come and find me. I am kicking off and ending at the [unintelligible 00:29:15] booth, but I will make it a point to come by the Influx booth and give you folks a hard time because that's what I do.Brian: We love it. Please. You know, being on the tour is—on the walking tour is excellent. We'll be mentally prepared. We'll have some comebacks ready for you.Corey: Therapists are standing by on both sides.Brian: Yes, exactly. Anyway, we're really looking forward to it. This will be my third year on your walking tour. So, the nature walk is one of my favorite parts of AWS re:Invent.Corey: Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. And thank you for your time today. I will let you get back to your no doubt frenzied preparations. At least they are on my side.Brian: We will. Thanks so much for having me and really excited to do it.Corey: Brian Mullen, CMO at InfluxData, I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an insulting comment that you naively believe will be stored as a TXT record in a DNS server somewhere rather than what is almost certainly a time-series database.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
This week we sit down with Lizard Skin founder, Brian Fruit to learn the original story of the brand founded in 1993. From cycling bar tape and accessories now to baseball, hockey and lacrosse, the brand has had an interesting journey making its products in the United States. Lizard Skins Episode Sponsor: Hammerhead Karoo 2 (code: TheGravelRide for free HRM strap) Support the Podcast Join The Ridership Automated Transcription, please excuse the typos: Lizard Skins [00:00:00] Craig Dalton: Hello, and welcome to the gravel ride podcast, where we go deep on the sport of gravel cycling through in-depth interviews with product designers, event organizers and athletes. Who are pioneering the sport I'm your host, Craig Dalton, a lifelong cyclist who discovered gravel cycling back in 2016 and made all the mistakes you don't need to make. I approach each episode as a beginner down, unlock all the knowledge you need to become a great gravel cyclist. This week on the show. We welcome Brian fruit, the founder of lizard skins. Was there a skin spin part of the cycling industry since 1993. It's been quite an incredible journey for the company. Y'all know how much I love the business side stories behind the brands we know and love. So I was super excited to get into it with Brian and just learn more about the journey. With respect to their bar tape. What I find is interesting is that the material they have is definitely. Sort of on the gummy air side and you'll hear Brian, describe a bit about that product. But also it's worth noting. They offer four different sizes of kind of the diameter. Of the bar tape, which really changes the feel you can go from super thin. I E a lot of bar feel all the way out to kind of pair Ruby style, super cush. Which I think is an interesting option that you don't see across the board. A lot of times when you go into your local bike shop, You see only one diameter tape that's available. So it's an interesting thing to play around with and something I've enjoyed while testing out some of the lizard skin tape. Just before we jump in, I need to thank this week sponsor the hammerhead crew to. I am literally in Spain as you're listening to this, I'm recording this intro just before I'm boarding my flight and definitely thinking about all the adventures I'm going to have on the roads of Jarana. I thought about borrowing a computer from the group that I'm going with, but it was from another brand that I had a little bit of a bad experience with back way back when. I've come to love many things about my hammerhead computer. And I am convinced it's the most advanced GPS cycling computer available today. It's got industry leading mapping navigation and routing capabilities that set it apart from other GPS options. Free global maps with points of interest included like cafes and campsites. Mean that my riding in Gerona. I won't be without information. I'll have everything at my fingertips. As I'm saying all this, I'm literally reminding myself that I should go download the country maps. So I've got everything on hand. In my hammerhead crew to device. Hammerhead gives bi-weekly software updates. So the features are always up to date. And they're always listening. You can provide feedback to the team in hammerhead and potentially it's going to end up in a software update. You're not locked to a particular software package because they're always upgrading it. I really look for the climber feature. That's one of my favorite features these days. It was particularly poignant for me when I was riding in, uh, Bentonville Arkansas, a few weeks back at the big sugar gravel event, all those punchy climbs. I was really on the limit. I'm much more of a sit and grind on the coastal range here in California. So this punchy climbs or something I wasn't used to. So understanding exactly how far I was to the top and how many candles I could burn staying with the groups I was desperate to stay with really came in handy. So very much recommend the hammerhead crew to it's my exclusive computer. For gosh, probably over a year now. I'm not the only one singing its praises. It was named bicycling magazines, editors choice in GPS, cycling computers. For the past two years. Take a look on their websites for a limited time offer our listeners can get a free heart rate monitor with the purchase of a hammerhead crew to just visit hammerhead IO right now, and use the promo code, the gravel ride at checkout to get yours today. Remember it's an exclusive limited time offer for our podcast listeners. So don't forget that promo code, the gravel ride for that free heart rate monitor strap. Would that business behind us, let's jump right into my conversation with Brian. Hey Brian, welcome to the show. [00:04:27] Brian Fruit: Awesome. Super glad to be beyond today. [00:04:30] Craig Dalton: Yeah. I'm excited to dig into Lizard Skins a little bit, but I'd love to start out, as we always do, by a little bit about your history and how you ultimately got into cycling, and let's talk about the origin story of lizard skin. [00:04:44] Brian Fruit: Well, that's a, that's a good one. Yeah, it's been. Three decades ago now dating myself a little bit I was a college student at BYU and I got my first mountain bike. I worked, you know, most of the summer and saved up some money and got a mountain bike and, and thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it. Not just for the awesome writing that we were able to do in the mountains. Just as a way to get around campus and commute. It was just so much more liberating than fighting the parking spots. So I just fell in love with cycling. I think I'd, you know, from a very small age, I've always loved everything with wheels on it. And then this mountain bike was, that was a revelation. So fast forward a few more years and I'm a senior about to graduate and there's a company. Called Reflex bikes. [00:05:35] Craig Dalton: I remembered them. [00:05:36] Brian Fruit: yeah, they made these cool lugged frames. You know, some of them were aluminum tubes, some of 'em were carbon tubes, and they sold to another company. Look, that makes, you know, pedals and things like that. [00:05:49] Craig Dalton: And did Reflex have some sort of Utah connection or were you just familiar? [00:05:54] Brian Fruit: they were making 'em here in Utah, [00:05:56] Craig Dalton: I, Wow, I didn't know that. I had a girlfriend who had that one of those bikes in the very early nineties. [00:06:02] Brian Fruit: Did it creak? [00:06:03] Craig Dalton: It creeped. And the one thing I remembered too about it was that there was some really challenging cable routing. So when it came time to build it up, it was like a nightmare. Getting something through the bottom bracket, I think was what I struggled with. [00:06:17] Brian Fruit: Yeah. So it was a cool bike and it had a great designer and, and he had sold the business. And, and moved over to Europe actually to, to work on design there. And, and apparently there was a, a trademark issue on the name reflex. And the people that owned it were no longer willing to allow that name to be used. And so, Look just said, I think we're just done with this, but this doesn't make sense for us to be involved with. So they decided to liquidate everything. So rims and cranks and headsets, and you name it, bottom brackets, shifters, handlebar. And, and so they sent out these postcards to all these stores, and my friend worked as a bike patrol at Sundance Ski Resort, brought the. Postcard home. And I'm like, that's kind of interesting. So I drove up there the next day and I bought $300 worth of bike parts. Didn't have any money. I was just a college student and all the way home like, Oh, what am I doing? I don't have 300 bucks is the worst decision ever. And I sold all those parts that night to just random people in the apartment complex and friends that I rode with. It's cuz there was no social media back then. This is, you know, early 90. 92, I believe. And and the next day I went up there again, like, you know, being drawn to the, you know, bike parts, like the bug to the blue light zapper, and bought like $300 of the parts again and all the way home. Like, Oh, what am I doing? This is the worst decision ever. Sold all those parts again. And that was it. You know, over the next six weeks I was buying and selling parts and I sold them to bike stores and I sold them to individuals and I, I sold about $30,000 worth of parts, made a decent amount of money on that, bought my wife a wedding ring and saved up a little money for us to get married. And, and that's kind of how how my life got started. You know, in the bike world, I just kind of fell in love with the whole, the whole scene and, and not the people, but even like the smells when you walk into a bike store, I just like the smell of a bike store. It just, I know that sounds weird, but it just feels right in bike stores. I, even, when I'm on vacation, I like to go try to find a bike store to pop my head in and look around, so, [00:08:49] Craig Dalton: What an, that's an amazing kind of origin story, and I love the name dropping of reflex. It brings back very, very fond memories for me. So did you continue sort of pursuing kind of like a distribution type business model? [00:09:04] Brian Fruit: So, that lasted for about six weeks. You know, they were selling all those parts at this big discount and that just kind of made me think, man, something in the bike industry would be really fun. And we looked at two or three ideas and, and. None of 'em actually worked out. And then a friend introduced me to another friend and that guy's name was Lance Larson. And Lance had this idea of making neoprene and Velcro accessories for bicycles and calling 'em lizard skin. and but Lance wasn't a, a writer and he wasn't really familiar with the space. So he and I connected and, and in the simplest terms, the original, you know, premise was that he would make the products and I would sell 'em. It, it didn't really work out exactly like that. There was a lot more crossing over, back and forth, but Lance and I got to work together for eight and a half years. And, and built the company from nothing. The very first month we did $350 of annual sales. [00:10:09] Craig Dalton: Do you remember what the first product was that you came out with? [00:10:12] Brian Fruit: Yeah, yeah, it was the little neoprine and Velcro chainstay protector and man, they were small back then. It was like a really small length and really small diameter. And now, you know, they make the tubes so much larger. You know, the, the old one wouldn't even fit on a bike today. [00:10:29] Craig Dalton: Yep. Yeah. If you think about those old steel tube change stays that used to wrap, they were tiny, like the, like the size of your pink. [00:10:36] Brian Fruit: Yeah, so small. Exactly. And we made all kinds of fun colors and, and we made these little headset seals that would keep the dirt and grim out of the headset. And then eventually we started making fork boots, which would keep the dirt out of the front fork because the seals back then weren't very good. And then we made a same kind of a boot for the rear shock. And eventually started making rubber injection molded grips. And then we added in some BMX products. We made BMX pad sets and BMX plates and BMX shin guards and elbow guards. And and then, you know, I bought my partner out and, and that, that took several years and there wasn't a lot of extra cash, you know, cuz. Everything just seemed to go to him to, to buy him out. And, and eventually we got that all done. And, and then we were able to really kind of move forward more dramatically because we had, you know, some money to work with. [00:11:34] Craig Dalton: Right, Right, right. Yeah, I, I think back across that period that you're describing, and I do remember those original lizard skin chain guards, but I probably, I remember more. Like the arrival of color, cuz back in the early nineties, certainly on the mountain bike scene, that was the heyday of anize parts and finding any, any way to make your bike a little bit more colorful and have a little flare to it. [00:11:59] Brian Fruit: Oh, people were putting on Coca Cranks and Cook Brothers and, and you know, Paul components and everything was purple and red and yellow and, you know, green and yeah, you could buy a, a Chris King headset and it was all Rastafari and [00:12:16] Craig Dalton: Yeah, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. So, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was, it was like there was so much innovation going on back then in the world of mountain bikes, and I mean, I think that's what I've enjoyed about the last several years in the gravel bike world is you just see that kind of innovation. No one knows exactly what's right. The bike designers have been given a lot of freedom to design bikes that, you know, range from a road plus bike to a full on bike packing bike, and they're all in this, this quote unquote new genre of gravel cycling. [00:12:49] Brian Fruit: It is fun. I rode a friend of mine's you know, bike packing bike just earlier this week, and. It was super fun, you know, it just had a, a cool geometry to it. And, and he had, he had outfitted mountain bike breaks onto his, you know, drop bar controls, and it had some significant breaks. You know, he's a bike store guy and he figured out how to do it. It was awesome. [00:13:16] Craig Dalton: at what year did you sort of transition your business partner out and start to think really like what new products could you innovate? [00:13:24] Brian Fruit: Yeah, so I bought him out in 2001 you know, early part of 2001. And you know, we, the philosophy then was like, turn over every rock just. If nothing else to see what was under underneath. And you know, we bought different equipment to do our manufacturing with. We, we just really tightened up to try to make everything more frankly more profitable and more efficient. [00:13:50] Craig Dalton: Yeah. I meant to ask earlier, did you, at what point did you bring manufacturing in-house and what does that look like from an equipment perspective? [00:13:59] Brian Fruit: So we were making these little neoprine and Velcro accessories in the United States from day one and, and still do 30 years later. So what it takes is, I mean, we did it differently. You know, in the old days, the equipment we used wasn't very efficient. We've got. Good stuff now. And so it's a dye press with a still rule dye and then that allows you to cut the fabric out in these perfect shapes. And anybody that's working on the dye press the first day, you know, you have to make sure and tell 'em, you know, if, if you're dropping the dye or if the dye is slipping outta your hands, just let it hit the ground. Like don't try to catch it, you know, cuz it's [00:14:45] Craig Dalton: Sharp all over. Yep. [00:14:47] Brian Fruit: we can, we can fix the, we can fix the dye. It's [00:14:50] Craig Dalton: And then after you, after you're dye cutting the neo printer, are you then going into a sewing process? [00:14:57] Brian Fruit: We have really nice commercial sewing machines. We use a zigzag stitch on it and we sew that in-house with different sizes of Velcro on each side. And then kind of do some trimming to make it look. And then we package it up all, you know, done in the us. So, you know, that was a good thing and we were able to make a super high quality product and, and we sold a lot of those. Eventually a lot of the brands started adding some type of a. Chain protector or you know, chain stay guard to the bikes and it, and definitely impacted our sales. But we added these other products, you know, injection molded grips, and eventually we created a great relationship with odi where they made a. a significant line of lock on grips for us under their, under their patent and technology, but sold by us, under our name and, and to our customers. [00:15:53] Craig Dalton: With ODI manufacturing in the US as well. [00:15:56] Brian Fruit: That's correct. Yep. They're out in California actually, so, you know, it's like, double hard in the United States and California , but great product and they, they have great tooling and they could make these grips just so crisp and clean and, and the technology they have just, and still have is, is second to none. So we teamed up with them on, on lock, on grips. And then eventually we really wanted to come up with a lightweight mountain by grip that was just different. And so we checked into another industry and we made some appointments and we started visiting factories, hoping to get this lightweight grip you know, maybe for cross country racing. And, and unfortunately we weren't successful in finding, you know, that. You know, through maybe another industry. But on that trip we figured out that we found a company that could make tape for us. And it was literally my, my general manager, Brad Barker. And he and I were on this trip together, and as we were about to walk out the, the the building, the business, he kind of turned around and asked them. It was like, Hey, could you guys make tape for. And they're like, Oh yeah, we could totally do that. He says, Great. I'll, I'll, I'll be in touch. So, you know, he says, Brian, I really wanna try this. I really wanna, you know, sink my teeth into it. So, you know, he was working with the factory back and forth about nine months and making samples for handlebar tape for road bikes. The first sample was like, what, 12 or 18 inches long? And we're like, Well, this is not gonna work. And then the next sample was, you know, really long, but the product didn't stretch. Well, that's not gonna work. And so we went through rendition, after rendition after rendition, frankly, not knowing how to create the proper tech kit to speed the process along, but just trial and error and. [00:18:01] Craig Dalton: was there something in the road bike market that you felt was missing like some type of performance out of the grip that you guys saw as an opportunity? [00:18:09] Brian Fruit: Yeah, that's a great a great question. We, we did feel like that there could be something different. Most of the tape that was available at that time was the synthetic cork and you know, gets dirty and it kind of slippery and it wasn't really any. as to it or any technical, anything. So when we came out with ours, it was completely different and had a much different texture and feel. It, it actually felt softer even though it was the same thickness and way more grippy and it was cleanable. You could just take a little alcohol and a, and a clean, you know, white rag or something. You could clean it right up and, and it wasn't stained and dirty. So we ended up finding a product that was gonna work and we were really proud of, of the product we had designed. And then the factory told us how much it was gonna cost and it was like one of those, you know, stressful moments and we're like, Ugh, how's this ever gonna work? Cuz Bar Tape at that time sold for 15 to $20 for, you know, the common synthetic co. [00:19:18] Craig Dalton: Yep. [00:19:19] Brian Fruit: Ours was gonna be $35. . And so we're just like, Oh, this is gonna be tough. But everybody that touched our tape loved it. And so we're like, Well, we just gotta get people to touch it, you know? Cuz once they do, they'll love it. And that's the phrase, Touch it, feel it, love it came from [00:19:39] Craig Dalton: Yeah. I, you know, it's so, it is poignant when you put your hands on some lizard skin tape, it feels different. You know, I'm riding it on my, my bike right now and. Everything you've just described is what I've felt about it, like it feels When I'm barehanded I often ride barehanded and I, I feel much more connected to the grip because of the sort of, I dunno, stickiness is the right word, but this kind of sticky quality that I feel when riding it that's quite different than court grip. [00:20:12] Brian Fruit: Yeah, it's, it's grippy, you know, and it's from this patented, you know, technology and material that that our partner supplier created in tandem with us. And and it's just been absolutely wonderful. [00:20:28] Craig Dalton: So it's, so, it's so interesting to me as, Sorry to interrupt Brian. Just as like a business journey, you sort of realize, hey, we've got something unique here, but I can't tell you about it. You've gotta feel it and touch it to believe and see. I can imagine, like in the bike industry, that's a challenge, right? To kind of just translate that into the hands of enough people to develop a passionate following to say, I'm willing to pay this premium price for this performance now that I know about it. [00:20:59] Brian Fruit: So I happened to be on a, a family trip, and again, I love bike stores, right? So we have a distributor in Guatemala that, that was selling our product and they had a bike store. So I went and visited that store while we were on this family trip. And there was a customer that came in and he had a road bike, I think it was a tri bike actually. And the handlebar tape was all falling off and, and I just happened to hand him my handlebar sample that I had and he just fell in love with it. And he told the, the manager owner of the store there, he's like, I want this. And and we told him kind of what the price was, and that's a lot of money in Guatemala. and he's like, No, no, I want that tape. Like, so give me that tape. And, and that's kind of how it's worked. Like we pay a ton more for our tape. It's not that we make a lot of money on it. We actually have a pretty tight margin on it, but the manufacturing cost is just a lot more because of what the product is and the, the materials that are, that are used. But once you feel it, it's like, . Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna splurge and I'm, I'm, This is what I want. [00:22:12] Craig Dalton: So are you still using the same manufacturing partner [00:22:15] Brian Fruit: We are, Yeah. And they've come up with, you know, new technology and, and you know, improvements to the polymer to make it, you know, even more grippy and even more durable. So it's been nice. You know, we did a complete redesign on the tape a couple years ago, two or three years ago now. And the new tape actually has a pattern on it. And if you looked at that pattern with like a, a jeweler's loop or a magnifying glass, you would see that the pattern is like, It, it's multi depth. So some of the little bumps are really deep, some are less deep, some are really shallow, just to maximize the feel and control on the bike you know, with, with these different dimensions into the pattern. So pretty technical. [00:23:05] Craig Dalton: Yeah. I think as as riders, we benefit from your obsession over this one little part of the bike. Say, how can we make it the best it can be? [00:23:15] Brian Fruit: I mean down that same conversation, and this is not a, This is me telling a bad story about myself. Unfortunately, not a good business story, but our plug that we had was really cool looking and was shiny and, and had the little lizard on it, but it did have a tendency to fall out. You know, if you didn't leave enough tape tucked in. So some people, it worked great and it never fell out, but other people, it fell out. So I wanted to get a new screw in plug and, and unfortunately we allowed ourselves to run out of plugs during that process. And probably lost a million dollars of sales just because we didn't. The actual plug that I wanted and I didn't want to go back to the old plug, cuz in my mind it already moved on to the new plug and the supplier for the new plug was being a Turkey and not making a for us. And, and we had to actually switch, you know, suppliers and, and but honestly now we have an amazing screw and plug which is a super simple thing and like, it shouldn't even be like a big thought, but. It probably cost me a ton of money making that transition, just cuz we didn't, we didn't wanna continue on with the old one and we didn't have our ducks in a row on the new one we thought we did. But but [00:24:32] Craig Dalton: I think anybody who's ever manufactured anything can commiserate with that story, myself included. [00:24:39] Brian Fruit: So, but now we got a great plug and the supplier's good and, and everything's, everything's functioning well. [00:24:46] Craig Dalton: You know, one of the, one of the things when you visit the lizards in skin site as a customer is that the first thing you see is an array of colors. And you're like, Great, if I wanna create some accent color, like you just have so many different unique colors available for the bar tape. But when you select your color and you get into it, you also then realize there's this secondary, probably much more important from a performance perspective, opportunity to choose your thick. Of color. For most riders, you probably buy bar tape and you don't even think about it. I don't know what the average is. Maybe it's a two and a half millimeter, but on your site you've got, I think it's 1.8 millimeter, 2.5, 3.2, and 4.6 millimeter bar tape, which is a pretty wide array. [00:25:35] Brian Fruit: So when we started this journey on making Hbar tape And we really tried to figure out what everybody else was doing and trying to get understanding. So we were out there with a micrometer trying to measure it and, and kind of the normal standard tape out there was about 2.5 millimeters, but nobody ever called that out. There was never any technical data. It was just a box and it. You know, Hbar tape with no detail. So we came out originally with the 2.5, which is still our very best seller and it's kind of the most common that you would see. But we had a request for some thinner tape, and there were some customers that said, Oh man, you know, you need to make it a little thinner. So then we came out with a 1.8 in limited colors. And, and we found that certain people in, in certain, you know, applications really like the thinner product and especially people with a little bit smaller hand because they just couldn't get their hand comfortably around, you know, this big fat bar. Big fat tape. Then we had a lot of people was like, Oh, why don't you make a thicker tape? You know? And I think they were like, Man, if you're gonna make a thinner one, why don't you make a thicker one? So then we came out with a 3.2 and you know, the packaging was bigger. Everything about the, the thing is just bigger. And people loved it. Like, man, it, it quickly became a great seller for us. Not better than the 2.5, but it was better than the one eight in fact. And so we've done real well with the three, two, and it lays down nice. And then we just had certain customers you know, wanting to do gravel rides, you know, cobbles, maybe they just have hands that hurt. You know, they have, could be an injury, just could be the way they are on the bike. But their hands just go numb and get sore. They. They wanted more cued. And so some people would like double wrap their bars. You know, but that, that has some challenges to it. So it came out with this 4.6 and it's a beast. It is a big, old fat role. But super comfortable when you get it on. It is a little harder to lay it down, you know? And. In all honesty, if you're wrapping 2.5, that's pretty easy. 3.2 takes a little more finesse and 4.6, it takes a decent amount of experience to make it lay nice and flat, but. [00:28:07] Craig Dalton: interesting to layer in those op those options for gravel cyclists. Obviously, like on this podcast we've got had lots of discussions around, you know, how do you create suspension? You start with your body, then the tires. Then grip tape's gonna play. Play a role in there. And again, for all the reasons you're just talking about, for some people, they're really taking a lot of abuse in their hands for one reason or another. Maybe they've got an injury and I, I could see having that option available to them, even if it's for a special purpose, a special event, wrapping your bars in a separate way. I remember back in the Perry Ru Bay classic days. When you're talking about people doing double wrap bar tape, everybody was consorting themselves in the prop peloton to find some way to make their bikes more comfortable. For days like Perry rba. [00:28:57] Brian Fruit: Yeah, and there's been a few different products made, you know, like, little gel packs and little foam pieces and stuff to put underneath there, and. And, and they work to some degree, but you know, the gel packs are break or they'll get kind of wiggly and the handlebar tape doesn't work well with it. And by doing this nice 4.6 and the 3.2, like, it just fits. It's just there. It's solid. You don't have to worry about a bump or a weird spot on there. And it, and it's been successful. [00:29:30] Craig Dalton: And as I understand things, you've been also getting feedback from a couple pro tour teams for the bar tape. [00:29:36] Brian Fruit: We were very fortunate to get a pro tour team to use the HA Bar tape many, many years ago. That first team was the con and this was kind of like a Forest Gump moment. But they were using our tape and one of their writers Johnny Hoer. Always being indebted to him. He was leading the polka dot jersey competition, the mountain mountain points in the tour, Frances, and it was a flat part of the beginning of the, of the tour. So ultimately he was doing breakaways and getting these points and on one of those days that he was in a breakaway, you know, getting a, a handful of mountain. A press car bumped him and another rider. And they went off the road and into a Bob wire fence. They hit that fence so hard that it actually pulled the P wood post outta the ground. And as just hardcore professionals, they got back on the bike, all cut up and dazed and, and jerseys and shorts all ripped up from the Bob wire. And, you know, their team gives 'em a push and off they go. You. At the end of the race, you know, Johnny gets off and he had been bandaged by the medical car and you know, they're trying to bandage him as he was riding his bike. So by the time he finished the race, you know, most of the bandages were falling off. It was a mess. And they interviewed him afterward and his attitude was like, this was an accident. I wished it wouldn't happened. This is gonna really mess up my opportunities at the tour, but it could have been worse. Let's move on. The other gentleman, writer that got hit had a very different take. His team was trying to find out who was responsible, who was gonna pay. It was just very bitter and, and interestingly enough, everyone fell in love with Johnny. And they started looking at his bike and once those chain rings he used and what kind of bike it was and what was his saddle and what kind of handlebar tape he used. Oh my goodness. Our handlebar tape started selling like crazy. [00:31:55] Brian: So all the distributors started having a run on the product and they ran out of, you know, lizards, skins, bar tape, and and boom. That was it. That was our four Gump moment. Handlebar tape became the most popular aftermarket tape in the world. And it was because, you know, one guy was was cool, you know, [00:32:17] Craig: And thrown into and thrown into a barb wire fence. I remember those images. [00:32:22] Brian: Oh. But you know, he just handled it right. You know, I think a lot of times in life we all have bad things that happen to us that are out of our control, but it's how we handle those things that kind of impact, you know. How we interact with the rest of the world [00:32:42] Craig: Yeah, as you remind me of that story, I remember very viscerally thinking about, gosh, this is gonna be another Primadonna roadie that has a tantrum. And I remember how you describe like the other team, the other writer. It was just this big to do and you know, who's gonna pay for this and how do we replace how he would've done throughout this tour juxtaposed to how Johnny handled it and how their team handled it. [00:33:10] Brian: Yeah, it was it was, it was pretty crazy. So, taught me, you know, a great lesson, right, of, you know, it's important to manage how we react you know, to, to potentially bad things, you know, happening to. So, you know, how we behave can really, you know, change overall how something goes down. [00:33:34] Craig: Yeah. Such, such an amazing journey and so cool that you've been able to do it using us manufacturing all this time. I love that part of the story. Before I let you go, Brian, I did wanna touch on one other thing because I think it's interesting. I mean, the gravel cyclist should go to your site and check out the different dimensions of bar tape and all those cool colors. You have great product. It definitely delivers that kind of grippiness and unique feel that we were talking about earlier. But I was also bemused to learn that you're also into several different sports, and I think the listeners would kind of dig hearing just a little bit about your journey into those other sports. [00:34:13] Brian: Y. So Hannah Bar tape was, was doing extremely well. And one of the guys from work Brad Barker that helped design the tape. Originally, he loved baseball. He had boys that were playing on baseball teams. Had another friend from college that, that gave me that little postcard for the sale at at Reflex actually. He. He was one of the guys that helped me feed my mountain bike passion. He had three boys that loved baseball and they were all putting this tape on baseball bats, bicycle tape on baseball bats. So it, it, it was like, Huh, is there something there? So we started making two thicknesses of baseball grip. We made a 1.1. Which is kind of the traditional thickness for baseball. And we made a 1.8, which is a little thicker. You know, think of the 3.2 in cycling, that kind of thing. And we put it out there. We won best of show for the first trade show we went to, and, and you know, nothing really happened. But when we sold the stuff into a store, it, it, it did. . So we figured out, it's like, well, we just have to increase the amount of stores. So we eventually got a bunch of stores selling it, and then there was a local probe by the name of John Buck. He connected up with us and wanted to go to a trade show and we said, That'd be great. You can share our booth and you can show your product in our booth and it, and it'll be fun. So we start that and at that show, . He brings his bats and we wrap 'em for him. And the whole time he's like feeling the bat, you know, while talking to customers about his products. And at the end of the show he's like, you know, if you made this thinner, I would use it in the pros and I would get other people to use it in the pros and I think have something. So Brad came back from that show and we talked and he says, this is, this is the convers. and we both looked at each other like 130 years of history with people using like sticky stuff, pine tar on baseball bats. Like, how in the world are we gonna change that tradition? Like, that's never gonna happen. And they were like, Yeah, probably not. And they were like, What? What should we do? And we both agreed it's a pro player, we should probably make it. So we did, we made a, a thinner version, one or a 0.5, really, really. and John started using it. Hunter Penn started using it. Big Poppy started using it like, you know, Miguel Cabret, I mean, just tons of these great players and they were sluggers and and eventually we got invited to go to the Equipment Manager show for Major League Baseball, which then led to us getting a license of Major League Baseball where we became the official bat grip on field license. for Major League Baseball and, and it was amazing and our sales grew, grew, grew, which allowed us to hire more people and get into a bigger, you know, better facility and you know, hire more designers and then continue to make more products and and grow the company. [00:37:33] Craig: Yeah, cuz now you're in baseball, hockey, lacrosse as well as cycling. [00:37:39] Brian: and recently we just added pickle. [00:37:42] Craig: Of course, the rise of pickleball, that is the moment in time we're in [00:37:48] Brian: So it and each of these sports, the product is different. So we're not just repackaging, we're actually redesigning the product each time. So you know how long it needs to be, what's the thickness, what type of a backing do we use? For cycling, we use an EVA backing, but for baseball we use afil. [00:38:09] Craig: Yeah. [00:38:10] Brian: you know, different patterns and the gripping qualities on the patterns are very different. So, we've, we've replicated ourself effectively in all these different sports. [00:38:23] Craig: When you, when you think about the business now, what percentage is cycling versus everything else? [00:38:29] Brian: Wow. I mean, in 2020, you know, there was a surge and cycling was the biggest part of the. 2021, it was still great. 2022. You know, cycling sales have, have slowed a little bit because there's a lot of inventory that's been shipped out there. So baseball is now the biggest part of the, of the business. Cycling is second, and then hockey would be third. [00:38:52] Craig: Gotcha. [00:38:53] Brian: So, [00:38:55] Craig: Yeah, super interesting story. Totally appreciate you sharing the journey with me. I enjoyed the conversation. [00:39:02] Brian: Oh, you bet. It, it's been a lot of fun. You know, I look back I, I wouldn't have wanted to go a different route, you know, I've loved the cycling industry and I actually started lizard scans and then several years later I, I started a bike store and then a couple years later I bought another bike store and, and I still have those bike stores. They're, they're great. I love 'em. And, and it, it just, it feels like walking into the Cheers bar, you know, from, from that sitcom. So when you go in the bike store, that's what it feels like, you know, it's just like, it, it's just, it's another home, right? [00:39:42] Craig: absolutely. Yeah. We all, I I hope that many of the listeners out there have that kind of relationship with their local bike shop, cuz I certainly do in my town. I love going there, I love seeing all the team that works there and, and just saying hi and having that familiar, you know, love of the sport that you can share. [00:40:00] Brian: Yeah, it's just, you know, fun getting to have friends continue to come in and get to see 'em. I mean, it's almost like a little mini fan family reunion, like every day that you go in the store. So [00:40:12] Craig: Yeah, absolutely. Well, have a great weekend, Brian, and we'll talk again soon. [00:40:17] Brian: appreciate it. Take. [00:40:19] Craig Dalton: That's going to do it for this week's edition of the gravel ride podcast. Big, thanks to Brian from lizard skin for joining I hope you enjoyed learning a little bit about his journey and are intrigued by some of the other product categories that they've found themselves in over the years. Definitely go check them out@lizardskins.com. Uh, as I mentioned earlier, that bar tape's been, it's been interesting trying out the different diameters. I'm still in the 2.4 camp, But I am curious about that 1.8 thickness bar tape as well. If you're interested in connecting with me, please join the ridership. That's w w w dot the ridership.com. That's a free global cycling community. It's hosted on slack. So it's basically a slack channel that you can communicate with other gravel, cyclists. From all around the world. If you're able to support the show, please visit buy me a coffee.com/the gravel ride. Or ratings and reviews are hugely appreciated until next time. Here's the finding some dirt under your wheels
Did you know that each year the average American family of four loses $1,500 to uneaten food? What's more, consumer food waste is the largest category of waste sent to landfills. When food is wasted, so is the land, water, labor, and energy that were used in producing, processing, transporting, preparing, storing and disposing of the discarded food. So why does household food waste and plate waste happen? We have two guests today to help us explore this topic. First, Dr. Roni Neff from Johns Hopkins University. Roni studies wasted food, food system resilience, and climate change through a public health lens. Second, we have Dr. Brian Roe from the Ohio State University. Brian focuses on food waste and behavioral and consumer economics. Interview Summary This podcast is co-sponsored by the Recipes Food Waste Research Network Project, led by American University, and funded by the National Science Foundation (2115405). Norbert: So our first question is to you, Roni. Could you help us understand why food goes uneaten, and why do you avoid using the term food waste. Roni: Great questions. So I'd like to give a simple answer, but the reality is that waste of food is caused by a whole mess of reasons, all intersecting and reinforcing each other. It's become part of the fabric of how we operate as a society. It's part of the functioning of our food system, and it's our way of life. That makes it challenging to address, and it's also what makes it very interesting. So Brian and I were on a National Academy of Sciences panel recently that closely reviewed the literature on consumer waste of food. We actually identified 11 distinct factors that shape it. Let me summarize it in two main buckets. First, our food system pushes us to waste through upstream policy and marketing factors that provide us with an overabundance of food. They encourage us to buy or take more than we need, and they leave us with misperceptions about what food is good quality and safe to eat. The second is that even as we don't like wasting food, with everything else that we care about, it doesn't necessarily rise to the top of our minds or priorities. So we waste because we forget, we change our plans. We choose not to eat foods we don't want. We take the path of convenience. I don't say that to blame or shame us, because we all do it, and our society and our norms push us there. And if you think you don't, try tracking what you throw out for a week and you'll see it. But also, shame isn't productive. The trick is to put in place strategies to help us. I want to say one other thing about drivers from a public health perspective. In consumer surveys that we've done, the top two reasons that people give for throwing out food are concern about food safety and concern about eating food that's good quality. Of course we don't want anyone eating unsafe food, but actually the food is often perfectly safe. And sometimes the problem is a lack of knowledge of how to tell it is okay or risk aversion. Date labels play an important role, and we need a national standardization. But also its messages. We in public health have pushed this idea that freshness is the way to convince people to eat healthfully. That's a disservice. When it's cooked into a meal, you often can't tell the difference if it was frozen, if it was a little wilted, it tastes just as good and it saves us money. Let me also answer your question about why I avoid using the term food waste. I prefer the term wasted food because it puts the emphasis on the idea that this is food, it's not waste. If we catch it before it's too late, we or someone else could eat it. And especially as we get to talking about recovering food that's good for people to eat, it's food, and using the word waste can be harmful. Norbert: I really do appreciate that definition. That helps us reframe how we think about this challenge that we face and how we can do something differently. Brenna: Brian, let's transition to you for a minute. Can you tell us about the economic decision people make when food is wasted? Brian: It's not actually just one decision, right. If we think just even at the household level, it's a whole bunch of decisions. There is this great article a few years back by Laura Block and some of her co-authors, and she talked about the squander sequence, which I think is a very apt description of what's going on, even in small segments of the food supply chain like the household. We're thinking about our own situation. We're thinking about the first economic decision, how much food do I bring in to the home at any given point. And you know, there's a big fixed cost. You're getting yourself organized. Maybe you're taking yourself to the store, you're setting up your online food delivery. So you're making decisions and tradeoffs about do I buy a few more items, a few larger sized items, et cetera. You have to make tradeoffs about how much to acquire and bring into the home. Sometimes we lean to the side of safety and buy a little bit more food than we need. And then we're in our homes, we have all this food there, and we're thinking about how much do I prepare, and who's going to be at the table in a particular situation. And again, we're making tradeoffs about what types of food do I want to prepare, how much do I prepare, is that item, like Roni was saying, is it on the cusp of having a date on its label that's getting close, do I add that or not. So there's decisions being made there about how much to actually put onto the plate. And then there decisions about do I finish my plate or I'm trying to lose weight as well. So maybe I don't eat all the food on my plate, particularly if I'm at a restaurant, and they serve me very large portions. Then I have to make decisions about do I want to wrap that up and bringing that home with me. Or if I'm at home, is there enough there to actually put into the refrigerator. And then of course we're sitting there, it's Thursday night, and maybe friends stop over and want to go out to dinner with us. But yet we had food there sitting in the fridge that we were planning to prepare. And we have to make those decisions about tradeoffs, about the spontaneity of the moment, and kind of the perceived fun of that versus what do we do with the food that we've already have that might then go unused in our refrigerator. So there's this whole sequence of decisions that have to be made, and we're always being tugged by risk aversion, whether we want to make sure there's enough food, it's safe enough, whether we want to not embarrass ourselves socially by not having enough food on hand. Then there's the convenience of, rather than dealing with all those small bits of leftover in the fridge and whether we can do something clever with them to make those interesting, or just pack it in and order a pizza instead. So there's just all this whole sequence of decisions that have to be made. Brenna: That's really interesting, Brian. I know in our house there are lots of layers of questions in terms of how we go through our food, so thank you for saying that in a bit more detail so people understand deciding to waste is not typically a simple decision on the part of consumers, but it's one hopefully we can impact. That brings me to my next question. There have been a number of interventions suggested to reduce food waste. Which ones do you think would be most effective? Brian That's a good question, and I don't think there's overwhelming evidence yet, as we've talked about amongst ourselves, and we know there's just limited good data out there upon which to make these decisions, and even less data to help us evaluate past interventions. But as I've thought about this, and I kind of think about that whole squander sequence that we just talked about, and I kind of reflect on some modeling that economists have done in the past thinking about sequential decision processes. There's this idea of a weakest link technology, where it's the weakest link that reduces the ability for us to do well. So in the case of food waste, you have to not only do one decision appropriately, but every point in that process of bringing the food into the back of the house until it gets into somebody's stomach you have to execute in order for that food to actually be ingested and therefore not wasted. In those models, what's shown is that those last steps are sometimes the most crucial and the most valuable to making sure that the end goal - that is getting the food eaten rather than wasted - takes place. I think focusing on helping consumers at the very end of that process is very critical. And I've seen this very clever intervention that was put out there by, of all people, Hellmans. They're a Unilever company and they make the mayonnaise. They have this very clever kind of gamification where they do a “fridge night.” They kind of challenge people to go into their fridge and make one more meal with the food in their refrigerator each week. They've got an app that supports it, and it helps build confidence among consumers to be able to go boldly into the refrigerator and create a recipe that they think will be used and useful and enjoyed by their family. So I think being at the very end of that process is important - so you can make mistakes earlier in that big squander sequence, but there you can kind of play catch up at the end and put together something that will be used and reduce waste at that front. So that's the one that's really struck me recently as being very intriguing and I'd love to see even more evaluation of that intervention and how it works out in the field. Brenna: Absolutely, I'm very curious to know how many people are using that app. It's an interesting concept. Roni: Yes! Brenna: Roni, what perspectives would you like to add in terms of effective food waste reduction interventions? Roni: Sure, so I would echo all the things that Brian said, and I'll take it from the opposite end. On the one hand, there are things that are very kind of simple and direct. The flip side of that is that there's a lot of evidence from a lot of domains of behavior change for a very multifaceted type of intervention and hitting it from as many angles as possible at once. So a lot of the countries where they have been having really good success, often there's consumer education combined with policy change, and people are hearing about it in schools and they're hearing about it in communities. So as big and as broad as we can get in terms of how we intervene, it seems like we might be most likely to help shift the lever at a broad perspective as well. Norbert: Thank you for this conversation on interventions, the ways that policy makers, organizations, communities can actually make a change. So Brian, I have a question for you. You have talked about this example of the gamified app, of sort of like a "Chopped" version online, but I'm wondering how do researchers evaluate if these interventions actually work, and what kind of measurement is really needed? Brian: Yeah, and just for our listeners who don't know, Norbert and Brenna do awesome research in this area as well, and are very good experts on measurement as well. So you'll be familiar with a lot of these approaches, and Roni as well, but yeah, measurement is always a trick. Because people really don't like to mess around with the things that they no longer want. So measuring waste is always a tricky endeavor and there are different ways to go about it. You can do the very kind of nitty gritty, and try to collect it maybe at the curbside, or maybe convince consumers or processors to collect it in their own buildings, and then have you and your research team go out and dig through it and measure it and weigh it in all sorts of ways. That can be very effective. In the household setting, sometimes, though you don't get everything because things go down the sink or into your pet's bowl, or maybe into a compost bin that goes someplace else, so sometimes you miss things there. You can also beg people to measure their waste blow-by-blow, day-by-day through some type of diary. We can try to do things to help them ease the burden of doing this, maybe with a photo-based app or something like that. Or you can do what a lot of people do, and I do some of this myself, which is to ask people to remember types of food and the amounts of food that they wasted over a particular period, perhaps over the course of a week. That can be very effective. But typically, people are forgetful or might be a bit shy about reporting things that they've wasted. So a lot of studies suggest that typically people underestimate the amount of waste that they create when using that approach. So there's probably no perfect approach to doing this, but just understanding the pros and the cons, the strengths and weaknesses of each of those measurement approaches is kind of critical for the researcher to understand what's the best way that they can go in and evaluate an intervention or get a baseline or understand trends over time. Norbert: Thanks Brian. I have got to say this sounds so messy. And yes, I mean literally messy, going in through people's trash, but you really made a really compelling point about how difficult this is, and that there are an array of ways that researchers have tried to measure this. Where do you think concerns for how people want to be perceived fits into this difficulty of measuring, when asking people or trying to even measure physical waste, when people know that they're being evaluated? Brian: Yeah, there can be what's known as reactivity to a measurement approach. The sociological Heisenberg effect, if you will. And so that's where some of the passive measurement approaches, such as doing curbside audits of an entire neighborhood for example. So you don't have to worry about privacy concerns because you've mixed 40 different households together in one collection of garbage gives you a baseline so that then when you go to the household level, you can kind of estimate the amount of underreporting or reactivity that might be there. There's some tricks of the trade to be able to back out how much under reporting there might be. Norbert: Roni, I want to shift gears a little bit, and I want to understand how is wasted food a critical question at the intersection of nutrition, climate change and household economics? Roni: Great question. So climate change and food security, including nutrition security, are at the top of our list of our most pressing global challenges. As food prices keep rising, households are feeling this strain. So we care more and more about what we can do to stretch the food dollar. The beauty of focusing on wasted food is that it's one single lever that moves the needle on these multiple issues. It's not the solution to any of them, and there can be trade offs, but let's look at the potential impacts. From a climate perspective, the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change estimated last year that about eight to 10% of our total global human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are coming out of wasted food alone. Not only is it impactful, but wasted food supports the urgency of rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Experts have focused particularly on methane, which is one greenhouse gas, and it's short-lived and it's powerful, and it's key in wasted food, because it comes both from our food production and from food that's decaying in landfills. So cutting waste of food has been recognized as a key climate strategy because it helps us get to that rapid reduction. When it comes to nutrition and food security, there's this intersection because the same strategy, in many cases, can address waste of food and improve food security. So for example, some shared risk factors for poor nutrition and waste would include large portion size and oversupply. Then, when you think about like efforts to bring in healthier food like in school meals, unless the food tastes good enough, the kids won't eat it. So you lose on both nutrition and waste. Then as we turn to household economics, as was mentioned in the introduction, we're spending about $1,500 a year for a household of four on food that we're not eating. So preventing that waste extends our food dollar. Also knowledge that we might, waste of food could also, it does also lead some households to not purchase healthy or perishable foods, especially if they have lower incomes. So it advances nutrition to have strategies to reduce that waste. So one other reason why wasted food is a critical question at the intersection of all these issues is that many of the solutions that advance change on these issues are politically fraught. Generally speaking, wasted food is not. Left or right, like none of us like waste. Everyone is a fan of saving money. So I see where working on wasted food is an opportunity to address these issues with less of those kinds of political challenges and many collateral benefits. Norbert: Roni, thank you so much for that commentary on the political nature of addressing this. I mean, that is something that lots of people can get behind, and I appreciate how politically fraught our moment is, and I appreciate the way you framed this, and I'm really grateful for you raising the concern of families from low income households and the challenge of food waste and nutrition access and food security. Thank you so much for bringing those together, because I think that's an under-discussed topic. So Brian, I want to hear your impression or thoughts about the intersection of nutrition, climate change and household economics. So how do you see wasted food as critical to that question around that intersection? Brian: Yeah, Roni touched on so many great points there. Some others I'll amplify are that, yeah, really, it's an accessible topic that people can connect with on many different levels, whether it be the nutrition, whether it be on the environment, climate change, whether it be on municipal issues. Nobody likes to build more landfills. Nobody wants to be by a landfill, and what is 20% of most landfills, it's typically wasted food. So even at the municipal level it can be something of a rallying point, and something that provides meaningful benefits at that level. At the system level, I think another thing that goes unappreciated is we talk about nutrition, and most people want to focus on, for example, food recovery that is taking food, that might have not found an immediate home in the food system, recovering that, and then redirecting it to others in the food system that might need it. More fundamentally, if we can right size the food system, if we reduce our wasted food from say the one third that we see now down to even 20%, that means we can also push down food prices at an aggregate level. That really helps nutrition, because we know families in need who have difficulties finding the food they need, oftentimes it is a financial issue. Bringing down food prices through reduction of waste can have large positive implications for everybody, including those who are really struggling to meet their financial needs and get stressed by their food budgets. So I think those systematic issues are really something we have to appreciate as well. Bios Roni Neff is an Associate Professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's department of Environmental Health & Engineering and Center for a Livable Future. She received her AB from Brown University, ScM from Harvard, and PhD from Johns Hopkins. Previously she worked for 10 years in public health practice and policy at the community, municipal and national levels. She edited the widely-used textbook, Introduction to the U.S. Food System: Public Health, Environment, Equity. Her team has just published the guidebook, Food System Resilience: A Planning Guide for Local Governments, developed in partnership with 5 U.S. cities. Brian Roe is the Van Buren Professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at Ohio State University. Roe attended the University of Wisconsin – Madison where he received a bachelor's degree in Agricultural Economics. Roe went on to receive a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland. Prior to his employment at Ohio State, Roe worked on policy issues surrounding food safety and health information disclosure as a Staff Fellow at the US Food and Drug Administration in Washington, DC.
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with Dawn Brodey and Brian Forrest, talking about the various film versions of “Frankenstein” and “Dracula.”Dawn gave me 4.5 films to revisit: The 1931 version of Frankenstein, Frankenweenie (the feature and the short), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Young Frankenstein.Meanwhile, Brian assigned me the original Nosferatu, the 1931 Dracula, Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, Horror of Dracula, Dracula in Istanbul and Bram Stoker's Dracula. LINKSDawn's podcast (HILF): http://dawnbrodey.com/ - showsBrian's Blog and Vlog, Toothpickings: https://toothpickings.medium.com/ A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Frankenstein (1931) Trailer: https://youtu.be/BN8K-4osNb0Frankenweenie Trailer: https://youtu.be/29vIJQohUWEMary Shelley's Frankenstein (Trailer): https://youtu.be/GFaY7r73BIsYoung Frankenstein (Trailer): https://youtu.be/mOPTriLG5cUNosferatu (Complete Film): https://youtu.be/dCT1YUtNOA8Dracula (1931) Trailer: https://youtu.be/VoaMw91MC9kAbbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (Trailer): https://youtu.be/j6l8auIACycHorror of Dracula (Trailer): https://youtu.be/ZTbY0BgIRMkBram Stoker's Dracula (Trailer): https://youtu.be/fgFPIh5mvNcDracula In Istanbul: https://youtu.be/G7tAWcm3EX0Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert's Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastDawn and Brian TRANSCRIPT John: [00:00:00] Before we dive into the assignment you gave me—which was to watch stuff I hadn't seen and also rewatch stuff I had seen to get a better idea of who's done a good job of adapting these books—let's just jump in and talk a little bit about your area of expertise and why you have it. So, I'm going to start with you, Brian. I was very surprised after working with you a while to find out that you had a whole vampire subset in your life. Brian: A problem, you can call it a problem. It's fine. John: Okay. What is the problem and where did it come from? Brian: I was just vaguely interested in vampires for a while. When I was in my screenwriting days, someone had encouraged me to do a feature length comedy about vampires, and that led me to do a lot of reading. And then I just kind of put it aside for a while. And then I was, I had just finished a documentary for Committee Films and they said, do you have any other pitches? And I thought, and I said, you know, there's still people who believe in vampires even today, that could be really interesting. And I put together a pitch package. Then, the guy in charge of development said, [00:01:00]this is what we need to be doing. And then it stalled out. Nothing ever happened with it. And I said, what the hell. I could do this on my own. I could fly around and interview these people. And I did, I spent a couple years interviewing academics and some writers. And along the way, I started finding all these very intriguing moments in the history of either vampire lore or fiction or even just people who consider themselves vampires today. And all these things would connect to each other. It was a lattice work of vampires going back hundreds of years. It didn't fit the documentary, unfortunately, but I found it way too interesting. And I said, I need some kind of outlet for this. And so I started writing about it on Tooth Pickings. And that eventually put me in touch with people who were more scholarly, and it opened up a lot more conversations. And now I can't get out. I'm trapped. John: Well, the first sign is recognizing there's a problem. [00:02:00] Okay. Now, Dawn, you had a different entryway into Frankenstein. Dawn: Yeah, well, I was a theater major and a history minor at the University of Minnesota. Go Gophers. And, this was in the late nineties, early two thousands, when there were still a lot of jobs for people who had degrees and things like this. Or at least there was a theory that this was a reasonable thing to get educated in. And then I graduated in 2001, which was months after 9/11, when all those jobs went away. And so, I had this education so specific and what was I gonna do? And gratefully the Twin Cities is a great place for finding that kind of stuff. And one of my very first jobs out of college was at the Bakkan museum. So, the Bakkan museum was founded by Earl Bakkan, who is the inventor of the battery-operated pacemaker. And he has always, since childhood, been obsessed with the Frankenstein movie that came out in 1931. And he attributes [00:03:00]his great scientific invention and many others to a science fiction in general. And to the spark of the idea that comes from sources like this. So, when he opened the museum, he insisted that there'd be a grand Frankenstein exhibit. And that means going back to the book, and that meant going back to the author, Mary Shelley, who wrote the novel Frankenstein, she started writing it when she was 16.And so, I was hired because—boom, look at me—my degree is suddenly colliding, right? So, I was hired by the Bakkan museum to create a one-woman show about the life of Mary Shelley, where I would play Mary Shelley and would perform it within the museum and elsewhere. And through the course of that research, I read the novel for the second time, but then I read it for my third, fourth, fifth onwards and upwards. Because the show was about 45 minutes long, I referenced, you know, the novel, the books, the popular culture, the science behind it. And the deep dive just never stopped. And so long after I was required to do the research and the show was done and up, I just kept reading. [00:04:00] And it gave me the opportunity to meet experts in this field and the peripheral field, as I would sort of travel with this show and be an ambassador for the museum and stuff like that. And, yeah, it still curls my toes. John: All right, so with that background. I'm going to just be honest right here and say, I've read Dracula once, I've read Frankenstein once. So that's where I'm coming from, and both a while ago. I remember Frankenstein was a little tougher to get through. Dracula had a bit more of an adventure feel to it, but something I don't think has really been captured particularly well in all the movies. But they both have lasted and lasted and lasted.Why do you think those books are still, those ideas are still as popular today? Dawn: I will say that I think Frankenstein, it depends on what you mean by the idea. Because on the surface, just the idea of bringing the dead to life, is, I mean, the Walking Dead franchise is right now one of the most popular franchises. I mean, I think we are really pivot on this idea. And I remember saying to a friend once that the part in [00:05:00]Revelation where the dead rise is like the only part of the Bible that I don't question. It's like, oh, the dead will get up. You know, we always just seem to be real sure that at some damned point, they're getting up. And so I think that that is part of why that it sticks in our brains. But then the story around Frankenstein—especially as it was written in 1818—has so many universal and timeless themes, like ambition and what is right and wrong. And the question that Jurassic Park posed in 1995 and continues to—1993 around there—and continues to pose, which is: just because science is capable of doing something, should it do something? And how do we define progress? Surely the very idea of being able to beat death and not die seems to be kind of the ultimate goal. And here is someone saying, okay, so let's just say, yeah. We beat death and everyone goes, oh shit, that'd be terrible. [00:06:00] You know? And then also, I always love the idea of the creature, the monster, Frankenstein's creature himself, who has a lot of characteristics with which people have identified throughout history. Some people say, for example, that Mary Shelley's whole purpose for writing Frankenstein was a question of: didn't God do this to us, make us these ugly creatures that are imperfect and bumbling around and horrifying? And then once he realized that we weren't perfect, he fled from us in fear or fled. He just keeps going and every generation has a new media that tells the story a little bit better, a little bit different, and yeah, there we are. John: I will say that for me, the most memorable part of the book was the section where the monster is the narrator and is learning. And I think with the exception of Kenneth Branagh's film, it it's something that isn't really touched on that much. There's a little bit in Bride of Frankenstein, of him going around and learning stuff. But the sort of moral questions that he [00:07:00] raises as he's learning—what it is to be human—are very interesting in the book. And I wish they were in more of the movies, but they're not. So, Brian on Dracula, again, we have dead coming to life. Why do we love that so much? Brian: Well, it's one of the questions that made me want to make a film about it myself: why has the vampire been so fascinating for hundreds of years? Why does it keep coming back? You know, it ebbs and flows in popularity, but it never leaves. And it keeps seeming to have Renaissance after Renaissance. Dracula specifically, I think one of the interesting things about that novel is how many different lenses you can look at it through and not be wrong.People have looked at it through the lens of, is this thing an imperialist story? Is it an anti-imperialist story? Is it a feminist story? Is it an anti-feminist story? And you can find support for any of those views reading Dracula. And I think that some of it might be accidental; there's times where Dracula is catching up to whatever the cultural zeitgeist [00:08:00] is right now. And we look at Dracula and we say, oh, he was thinking about this back then. Or maybe Bram Stoker was just very confused and he had a lot of different ideas. John: All right, let's explore that a little deeper. You each gave me an assignment of some movies to watch or to re-watch that you felt were worth talking about, in relation to your subject of Frankenstein or Dracula. I'm going to start with Frankenweenie, just because I had not seen it. And in going through it, I was reminded—of course, as one would be—of watching Frankenweenie, I was reminded of Love, Actually. Because I came to the realization after years of Love, Actually being around that it—Love, Actually—is not a romantic comedy. It is all romantic comedies, all put into one movie. And Frankenweenie is all horror films. Condensed, beautifully and cleverly into one very tasty souffle. [Frankenweenie Soundbite] John: I stopped at a certain point making note of the references to other horror films. Just because there are so many of them. But the idea that it references everything from Bride of Frankenstein to Gremlins. They do a rat transformation that's right out of American Werewolf in London. The fact that they have a science teacher played by Martin Landau doing the voice he did as Bela [00:10:00] Lugosi in Ed Wood. I mean, it's a really good story that they just layered and layered and layered and layered. What was it about that movie that so captivated you? Dawn: Well, so much of what you just said. And also it seems to me the epitome of the accessibility of the story of Frankenstein. The idea that if anyone can think of any moment in which if I could bring someone back to life. But what I love about it too, is that the novel Frankenstein that is not Victor Frankenstein's motivation. It generally tends to be the motivation of almost every character, including the Kenneth Branagh character--at some point, he, when Elizabeth dies, his wife dies for the second time, he says, yes, I'm going to try to bring her back. But it is so not the motivation of the scientist in the book. It is just ambition. He just wants to do something no one else has done. And lots of people die around him and he really never, ever says to himself at any point in the novel, I wish I could bring them back, I'm going to bring them back. That's never, that's never part of it. He just wants to be impressive. And so, I love [00:11:00] that it starts with that pure motivation of wanting to bring the dead to life; just wanting to bring your dog back, so that it's so accessible for everyone watching it. Who wouldn't wanna try this? But then, even in that scene with the teacher, when he shows the frog. And he's demonstrating that if you touch a dead frog with electricity, its legs shoot up, which give the kid the first idea of bringing his dog back. Which is like a deep cut in, in the sense that that's nothing -- Mary Shelley herself and her friends were watching experiments exactly like that before she wrote the book: galvanism and animal magnetism were these really popular public demonstrations happening in London and elsewhere where they would do just that. But because electricity itself was so new, I mean, it blew people's hair back you know, that these dead frogs were flopping around. It was the craziest thing. And a lot of them were thinking to themselves, surely it is only a matter of time before we can, we're gonna have our dead walking around all the time. So, it was so circulating and so forward. [00:12:00] So it's not just movie references and it's not just Frankenstein references. That movie really includes source deep source references for how Frankenstein came to be. And I just love it. John: Which brings me to Frankenstein, the 1931 version, in which Colin Clive has a similar point of view to what you were talking about from the book. He just wants, you know, he wants to be God. [Frankenstein soundbite] John: What I was most impressed with about that movie or a couple things was: it starts, it's like, boom. We're in it. First scene. There there's no preamble. There's no going to college. There's no talking about it, right? It's like, they're starting in the middle of act two. And I think a lot of what we think of when it comes to Frankenstein comes from that movie, [00:13:00] that the stuff that James Whale and his cinematographer came up with and the way they made things look, and that's sort of what people think of when they think of Frankenstein. Now, as you look back on that movie, what are your thoughts on the, what we'll call the original Frankenstein? Dawn: Yeah. Well, I love it. You'll find with me and Frankenstein that I'm not a purist. Like I love everything. Like I have no boundaries. I think this is great. One of the things that 1931 movie did was answer—because it had to, anytime you take a novel and make it a movie, you take a literary medium and make it a visual medium, there's obviously going to be things that you just have to interpret that the author left for you to make for yourself individual. And in this instance, that individual is the cinematographer. So, we're gonna get their take on this. And one of the real ambiguous things that Mary Shelley leaves for you in the novel is the spark of life. What is the spark of life? She does not in any [00:14:00]detail describe lightning or static or any of the recognizable or, or future developments of how electricity would've been. Brian: I was shocked when I first read that book and saw how little space was devoted to that, that lab scene. It's blink of an eye and it's over. Dawn: “I gathered the instruments of life around me that I may infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my.” Period. I just, what I love is what I love about film in general is that they went, oh, spark being all right, girl, it's a dark and stormy night and you know, and there's chains and there's bubblers and there's a thing. And the sky opens. I mean, God bless you, like way to just take that thought. Make it vivid, make it, build a set, make us believe it. And it's so, so pervasive that in Frankenweinie, you know, which of course is about Frankensein. [00:15:00] Like that is one that they do: he's got the white robe that ties in the back and the gloves. And in Young Frankenstein, it's the, you know, that lab scene. And so I love that. And the other thing that they had to do was describe the look of the creature, make the creature—Frankenstein's monster himself—look so like something. Because she, similarly in the novel, says that he is taller than a regular man, has dark hair and yellow watery eyes. That's all we know about what the Frankenstein looks like. And so, in 1931, Boris Karloff with the bolts. And it's black and white, remember, we don't think his skin is green. That he turned green at some point is kind of exciting, but of course he was just gray, but just dead flesh, you know, rotten, dead walking flesh is what's frightening. And, I just thought that the movie did that so well, John: I think the makeup was kind of a green/gray, and that when color photos came out of it, that's why someone went, oh, [00:16:00] it's green, but it wasn't green. Brian: I thought I saw a museum piece of, you know, an actual makeup bit that Jack Pierce did and I thought it was greenish. Dawn: Yeah. Greenish/gray. I think, yeah, the rots, just kind of trying to capture the sort of rotten flesh. Brian: It's just like the bride's hair was red. Dawn: That's right. That's right. My day job here in Los Angeles is as a street improviser at Universal Studios, Hollywood. And two of their most treasured characters of course are Frankenstein and Dracula. So, while most people might separate them, John, they are usually arm and arm where I work every day. And the bride has recently come back to the theme park as a walking character, and they gave her red hair. We don't mess around. John: That's excellent. But you mentioned Dracula, let's jump into the 1931 Dracula. There's a connection point between the two that I want to mention, which is the amazing Dwight Frye, who is Fritz, I believe in Frankenstein. And I'm not the first one to mention his naturalistic [00:17:00] acting kind of putting him above everybody else in that movie. Famously, when he's running up the stairs, stopping to pull his socks up at one point. He's just really, really good in that. And then you see him in Dracula as the, essentially the Harker character. I think he was called Harker -- Brian: Yeah. Well, he's Renfield in Dracula. They merged those two characters. I thought it was a smart move for a first attempt at the film. Yeah. And Dwight Frye, he's in a lot of other Universal horrors, too. Dwight Frye often doesn't get the credit. He somehow was not the leading man he should have been. John: I don't know why that is. He turns up again as an assistant in Bride of Frankenstein. He's a towns person in Frankenstein meets the Wolfman. And then he tragically died on a bus ride to an auto parts job that he took because he wasn't getting any acting work, which was too bad. A really, really good actor. Brian: There is another intersection besides the fact that they were both produced by Junior. Lugosi was put into the [00:18:00] short, the trial film they shot for Frankenstein. I can't call it a short film, because it was never intended for release. But they shot a cinematic test reel and they had Lugosi play the monster, but he was under a sheet the whole time. I think he may have been able to pull the sheet off. It's a lost film. We don't know for sure. We just have kind of the recollections of a few crew people. John: I've never heard of that. I would love to see that. Brian: I would too. I think a lot of people would really love to see it, but it was as much a kind of a testing ground for Lugosi— whether they wanted him to be the monster—as it was for some of the techniques, the things they wanted to try in the film. And what I understand is the producer saw the test reel and they said, yes, we love this look, this is the look we want you to give us. And then it's whatever version of Lugosi not getting that part you want to believe: whether Lugosi turned it down or the producers didn't like him or something. But he ended up not taking that part. John: But he is of course always known as Dracula. So, what are your thoughts on their adaptation? Which [00:19:00]again is not the first adaptation but is the kind of first official? Brian: Yeah. The first to bear the name Dracula, although, well, I'll back up a second. Because some releases of Nosferatu called it Dracula. He would be named as Dracula in the subtitles, you know, because that's an easy thing to do in silent film, you can just swap that out however you want to. But yes, it's the first authorized official film adaptation. John: Well, let's back up to Nosferatu, just for a second. Am I wrong in remembering that the Bram Stoker estate—Mrs. Stoker—sued Nosferatu and asked that all prints be destroyed? And they were except one print remained somewhere? Brian: Close. That is the popular story that she sued Prana Films. She won the lawsuit. All films were set to be destroyed. Now there's a guy named Locke Heiss and a few others who've been doing some research on this. And they will tell you that there's no proof that a single print was ever destroyed. It's a more fun story to say that, you know, this one was snuck away and now we have the film. But there was no real enforcement mechanism for having all the theaters [00:20:00]destroy the film. Who was going to go around and check and see if they actually destroyed this film or not? Nobody, right? So maybe some people destroyed it. Maybe Prana Films destroyed their remaining copies. But the exhibitors kept all of theirs and there's different versions and different cuts that have been found. So, we know that some of these reels went out in different formats or with different subtitles or even different edits. And some of them have made their way back to us. John: There's some really iconic striking imagery in that movie. That haunts me still. Brian: What I always tell people is see the film with a good live accompaniment, because that still makes it hold up as a scary film. If you see a good orchestra playing something really intense when Orlok comes through that door. It feels scary. You can feel yourself being teleported back to 1922 and being one of those audience people seeing that and being struck by it. John: What do you think it would be like to have [00:21:00] seen that or Dawn to have seen the original Frankenstein? I can't really imagine, given all that we've seen in our lives. If you put yourself back into 1931, and Boris Karloff walks backwards into the lab. I would just love to know what that felt like the first time. Dawn: You know, what is so great is I was fortunate enough to know Earl Bakkan who saw the movie in the theater in Columbia Heights, Minnesota when he was 10 years old.And he went, he had to sneak in. People would run outta this, out of the theater, screaming. I mean, when they would do the close up of Frankenstein's Monster's face, you know, women would faint. And of course that was publicized and much circulated, but it was also true. People were freaking out. And for Earl Bakkan—this young kid—the fear was overwhelming, as you said. And also in this theater, I was lucky enough, I did my show in that theater for Earl and his friends on his 81st birthday. So, I got to hear a [00:22:00] lot of these stories. And they played the organ in the front of the curtain. Brian: Is this the Heights theater? Dawn: Yes, the Heights. Brian: Oh, that's an amazing space. Dawn: So, they played the organ in there and it was like, oh my God. And it was so overwhelming. So, I'm glad you asked that question because I was really fortunate to have a moment to be able to sort of immerse myself in that question: What would it have been like to be in this theater? And it was moving and it was scary, man. And yeah, to your point, Brian, the music and the score. I mean, it was overwhelming. Also, I think there's something that we still benefit from today, which is when people tell you going in this might be way too much for you, this might scare you to death. So just be super, super careful. And your heart's already, you know… John: And it does have that warning right at the beginning. Dawn: Yeah. Versus now when people sit you down, they're like, I'm not gonna be scared by this black and white movie from 1931. And then you find yourself shuffling out of the bathroom at top speed in the middle of the night. And you're like, well, look at that. It got me. Brian: That reminds me, there [00:23:00] was a deleted scene from the 1931 Dracula that was a holdover from the stage play. Van Helsing comes out and he breaks the fourth wall and he speaks directly to the audience. And he says something to the effect of—I'm very much paraphrasing—about how we hope you haven't been too frightened by what you've seen tonight, but just remember these things are real. And then black out. And they cut that because they were afraid that they were really going to freak out their audience. Dawn: It's like a war of the world's thing, man. It's oh, that's so great. I love that. [Dracula Soundbite] John: So, Brian, what is your assessment of the 1931 version? As a movie itself and as an adaptation of Stoker's work? Brian: The things they had to do to try to adapt it to film, which they borrowed a lot of that from the stage play. They used the stage play as their guide point, and I think they made the best choices they could have been expected to make. You know, there's a lot of things that get lost and that's unfortunate, but I think they did a decent job. I don't find the 1931 version scary. I like Bela Lugosi. I think he's a great Dracula. I think he set the standard. With the possible [00:25:00]exception of the scene where the brides are stalking Harker slash Renfield, I don't think the imagery is particularly frightening. The Spanish version, I think does a little bit better job. And you know the story with the Spanish version and the English version? Dawn: We actually talk about it on the back lot tour of Universal Studios. Because they shot on the same sets in some cases. Brian: Yeah. My understanding is that Dracula shot during the day, Spanish Dracula would shoot at night. So, they got to benefit maybe a little bit by seeing, okay, how is this gonna be shot? How did Todd Browning do it? Okay. We're gonna do it a little bit differently. It's a little bit of a cheat to say they move the camera. They do move the camera a lot more in the Spanish version, but the performances are a little bit different. I'm going to, I can't get her name out. The actress who plays the ingenue in the Spanish Dracula, I'm not going to try it, but you can see her kind of getting more and more crazed as time goes on and her head is more infected by Dracula. You see these push-ins that you don't see in the English version. There's blocking [00:26:00] that's different. I put together a short course where I was just talking about how they blocked the staircases scene. The welcome to my house, the walking through spider web. And how it's blocked very differently in the two versions. And what does that say? What are these two directors communicating differently to us? In one, Harker slash Renfield is next to Dracula. In one, he's trailing behind him. In one, we cut away from the spider web before he goes through. And in the other one, we see him wrestle with it. That's not really what you asked, John. Sorry, I got off on a tear there. John: I agree with you on all points on the differences between the two films. Although I do think that all the Transylvania stuff in the English version is terrific: With the coach and the brides. The Spanish version, the biggest problem I have is that their Dracula looks ridiculous. Brian: He's not Bela Lugosi. You're right. John: He looks like Steve Carell doing Dracula and there is no moment, literally no moment [00:27:00] where he is scary, whereas Lugosi is able to pull that off. Brian: There's a lot of people who have observed that the Spanish Dracula would be a superior film were it not for Bela Lugosi being such an amazing Dracula in the English version. John: He really, really nailed it. Brian: And since he learned his lines phonetically, he could have done the Spanish Dracula. Just write it out for him phonetically, because he didn't speak English very well. John: If we could just go back, you know, cause a lot of things in history we could change, but if we could just be at that meeting and go, Hey, why not have Bela do it? Okay. So then let's jump ahead, still in Dracula form, to Horror of Dracula. From 1958. With Christopher Lee as Dracula and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. [Soundbite from Horror of Dracula] Brian: For some people, Lee is the ultimate Dracula, and I think that's a generational thing. I think he's great. He's got the stage presence and I love Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. I don't like the film as a whole. It feels like I'm watching a play with a camera set back. It doesn't work for me the way it works for other people. That is personal taste. Don't come after me. John: It does, however, have one of the greatest, ‘Hey, we're gonna kill Dracula' scenes ever, with Peter Cushing running down the table and jumping up and pulling down the drapes and the sun. Brian: Oh, right. Interesting. Because in Dracula, the book, the sun is not deadly, remotely really. But that's [00:29:00]the influence of Nosferatu being pasted onto the Dracula cannon, that the sunlight is deadly to Dracula. Dawn: I remember having this fight very enthusiastically in the nineties when Bram Stoker's/Winona Ryder's Dracula came out and I was already sort of a literary nerd. And they were like, hey, they have a scene with him walking around during the day. And I was like, yeah, nerds. That's right. That's cuz vampires can walk around during the day.I was very already, like, you don't know anything, go back to history. Brian: And there's a seventies version where he's out on a cloudy day, but he is not hurt either. There suggestions in the book that he's more powerful at night. Dawn: He's a creature of the night. I always understood he had to wear sunglasses. He was sort of like a wolf. Like they show him as a wolf during the day; it can happen, but it's not great. Brian: I like the way they did it in the Gary Oldman version. He's suited up. He's got the sunglasses on. There's not a whole lot of skin exposed. But he's not [00:30:00] going to turn into smoke. John: Well, okay. Let's talk about that version and Kenneth Branagh's version of Frankenstein. Dawn: Ug. John: I'm not going to spoil anything here, when I say it doesn't sound like Dawn cared it. Dawn: You open this, you opened this can of worms. John, sit down for a second. Listen. He calls it: Mary Shelly's fucking Frankenstein. I inserted the fucking. I'm sorry, I wasn't supposed to say that. He calls it. He calls it. How dare you, Kenneth, Brannagh, call this Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. So that was A-number one. But I went into it all excited: It's Kenneth Brannagh. Love him. He calls it Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and he starts with the ship captain out at sea, just like the book. And so I pull up my little, you know, security blanket and I'm like, oh, Kenneth Brannagh, do this to me, buddy. Do it to me buddy. Show me Mary Shelley Frankenstein as a movie. [00:31:00] And then he just fucks it up, John. And he doesn't actually do that at all. It's a total lie. He screws up every monologue. He makes up motivations and then heightens them. And it's dad. The acting is capital B, capital A, capital D across the board. Everybody sucks in this movie. It looks bad. The direction is bad, and it has nothing to do. He tries to bring Elizabeth back to life. This is a huge departure from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Thank you very much, Mr. Brannagh, that's all I have to say for now. John: All right, I was fooled by the fact that he started at, at the north pole. Dawn: That's because he's tricking us, John. That's because it's the whole movie is a lie. John: Okay with that same mindset, what do we think of Bram Stoker's Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola? Dawn: I love that one. Brian: I'm afraid that I don't have, I can't match Dawn's intensity in either respect. Um, except I thought Robert DeNiro [00:32:00] was really good in Frankenstein. Dawn: But that's no, he's not. you're wrong. Your opinion is valid and wrong. Yeah, I'm kidding for listeners who don't know me. I am, I am kidding. Of course. Everybody's opinion is valid except for that one. Yeah. The movie, everything about that movie is bad. John: He is, I think, miscast. Dawn: And Helen Bonan Carter is one of the finest actresses of not just our generation, but of all time. And she sucks in this movie. John: Right. So. Bram Stoker's Dracula. Brian: Bram Stoker's Dracula. [Soundbite: Bram Stoker's Dracula] Brian: Also produced by Branagh. And I assume that is the connection, why they both start with the author's name. I always call it Coppola's Dracula because it gets too confusing to make that distinction. I thought it was a decent movie, but it didn't feel like Dracula. It felt like someone who had heard of Dracula and wrote a good script based on what they had heard. So many divergences that bothered me, although I think it's aged better than it felt the first time. I remember seeing it when it first came out in the nineties and not thinking much of it. And I think audiences agreed with me and it seems like it's been kinder, that audiences have been kinder to it as it's gotten older. John: Okay. Dawn, you love it. Dawn: I loved it. I loved it. It, you know what though? That was one of [00:34:00] those movies that unlike, unlike Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, I can't look at with like an adult critical eye because I, what year did it come out? Was it like 90, 92? I'm like middle school getting into high school and like Winona Ryder was everything. Vampires are everything. I mean, Gary Oldman is the, is a great actor and it's so sexy, very sexy. The sex is Primo. And so I remember loving it, very moving. I don't remember comparing it as certainly not as viciously to the novel because I read Dracula after I had seen the movie. And so there's always that inherent casting where Nina is always going to be Winona Ryder. But I do remember really loving the Gothic convention of the letter and that the movie did seem to utilize and to great effect how letter writing can build suspense and give us different perspectives in a, in a unique cinematic way. Brian: [00:35:00] The two or three biggest stakes that film puts in the ground are not to be found in the book. So there's no love story in the book. There's no Vlad in the book. John: Can I interject there? Isn't that basically, didn't they just rip that off of Dark Shadows, The idea of my long lost love is reincarnated in this woman. I must connect with her. Brian: That is a good question, John. I'm glad you asked that because I call it the doppelganger love interest. Right? We first see that, the first time I know of it happening, I'm sure there's an earlier precedent, is in The Mummy, but then Dark Shadows does it. But that's not where Stoker, I mean, that's not where Coppola and a screenwriter claimed to have gotten the idea. They claimed to have gotten it from Dan Curtis's Dracula in 74. John: Dan Curtis, who produced Dark Shadows, with Barnabas Collins, falling in love with his reincarnated love. Brian: But Dan Curtis's Dracula comes out two years after Blacula. That has a reincarnated love interest. John: Not only does the Blaclua [00:36:00] have a reincarnated love interest, but if I'm remembering movie correctly at the end, when she says I don't want to go with you. He goes, okay. And he's ready to go home. It's like, sorry to bother you. Brian: No, uh, in Blacula, he commits suicide John: Oh, that's it? Yeah. He walks out into the sun. Brian: He goes home in a different way. John: Yes. He's one of my favorite Draculas, the very stately William Marshall. Brian: Yeah, absolutely. That is a favorite of mine. John: Anyway, you were saying stakes in the ground from Coppola's Dracula. Brian: Well, the, the love story, the equating Dracula with Vlad the Impaler. And I felt like they did Lucy really bad in that movie. They had her turn into a wanton harlot, which is not in keeping with the book. Some things are okay, but they really said these are the building blocks of our story and that bugged me. But Anthony Hopkins I liked, so, all right. Dawn: Alright, but see, this [00:37:00] the itch that still that still makes me wanna scratch though: why say Bram Stoker's Dracula? Why say Mary Shelley's Frankenstein? I mean, because I think you heard the venom, obviously. If they took Mary Shelley's name off that thing, you can make Frankenweenie. And I will love, like, I love Frankenweenie. Do your Frankenstein homage all day, all the time. But when you call, when you say it's Bram Stoker's, I think that this is what has been frustrating historians like me and getting high school students Ds in English class ever since. Because it just creates the false perception that you've basically read the book. Right. Or that you, if you know the thing you know the book and it's just a cheap ploy. And I don't like it. Brian: I think, somebody correct me on this, that there, there had been a plan to do a reboot of the Universal monster franchise, and these two movies were supposed to be the reboot of it. [00:38:00] And then they would've then done HG Wells' Invisible Man. John: The Mummy killed it. They've tried to reboot it several times. And that was the first attempt. Brian: Yeah, I've heard that called the dark universe. They were trying to do their own MCU. Dawn: Yeah. Well, at Universal Studios, there is of course in, in LA, in general, there's the property wars, you know? What what's, who has what? And sometimes those get really blurred. Like why does Universal Studios have Harry Potter? When we can see Warner Brothers from the top of our wall/ And that's obviously, you know, those things happen. But when it comes to like the IP or intellectual property, those original monsters are so valuable and they always are at Halloween. And then it's like, sort of, how can we capitalize on this? And yeah. And it's cross generational. Brian: All they really own right now is the look right? They own Jack Pierce's makeup job from Frankenstein. Dawn: But I think that that's exactly the point; [00:39:00] the delusion of what is it that you own if you own, you know, Frankenstein, whatever. But yes, there was definitely an interest to sort of revamp all of the original Universal Monsters they call them and it's the Mummy, Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Invisible Man. John: It's everybody who shows up in Mad Monster Party. Dawn: Exactly. [Soundbite: Mad Monster Party] Dawn: But yeah, The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise, was a tremendous flop. And I think that sort of took the wind out of everybody's sails. John: Let me ask you this, Dawn. If Mel Brooks had titled his movie, Mary Shelley's Young Frankenstein, instead of Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, would you have a problem with that? Dawn: Yeah, no, but no, I would not have had a problem, because that would've been irony and juxtaposition. Not just a straight lie. John: So that brings us to some comedies. Young Frankenstein and Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, which I was very surprised and a little unnerved to [00:40:00] realize a few years back, Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein was made a mere 10 years before I was born. And I had always assumed it was way back then. And it's like, no, it wasn't all that way back then. It was pretty, pretty recently. Brian: That happened to me when I realized that Woodstock was only six years before my birth. And it always seemed like ancient history. John: Is that the common thing, Madame Historian? That people kind of forget how recent things were? Dawn: Oh yeah. Remember Roe V. Wade. Sorry, too soon. Brian: We're recording this on that day. Dawn: Yeah, absolutely. I think that it happens to everybody so much faster than you think it's going to. I remember looking around in the nineties feeling, well, surely the seventies was ancient history, you know, because they had That Seventies Show, which debuted as like a period piece. I am still very young and hip and happening and [00:41:00] they are in production for That Nineties Show right now. And I said to my husband, That Nineties Show. I was like, Jesus, I guess that's 20 years because I was in the nineties they did That Seventies Show. And he goes, no baby that's 30 years. And I was like, I'm sorry. I said, I'm sorry, what? He goes, the nineties was 30 years ago. And I just had to sit down and put my bunion corrector back on because these feet are killing me. John: All right. Well, let's just talk about these two comedies and then there's a couple other things I wanna quickly hit on. What are our thoughts on, let's start with Young Frankenstein? [Soundbite: Young Frankenstein] Dawn: I told you I'm not an idealist and we're not a purist about Frankenstein, but I am an enthusiast. So that is why I told you to watch Kenneth Branagh's movie, even though I hate it so much. And that is also why I love Young Frankenstein, because I think that it is often what brings people into the story. For many, many people, it introduces them to the creature. They may know literally nothing about Frankenstein except for Young Frankenstein. And that's actually fine with me because I'm a comedian myself. And I believe that parody is high honor. And often when you parody and satirize something, especially when you do it well, it's because you went to the heart of it. Because you got right in there into the nuggets and the creases of it. And there is something about Young [00:43:00] Frankenstein as ridiculous as it is that has some of that wildness and the hilarity and The Putting on the Ritz. I did find out from my Universal Studios movie history stuff, that that scene was very nearly cut out. Mel Brooks did not like it. And he just didn't like that they were doing it. And of course it's the one, I feel like I'm not the only one who still has to make sure that my beverage is not only out of my esophagus, but like aside, when they start doing it. [Soundbite: Young Frankenstein] Brian: And I understand they were about to throw away the sets from the 1931 Frankenstein when Mel Brooks or his production designer came up and said, Stop stop. We want to use these and they were able to get the original sets or at least the set pieces. John: I believe what it [00:44:00] was, was they got Kenneth Strickfaden's original machines. Ken Strickfaden created all that stuff for the 1931 version and had been used on and off, you know, through all the Frankenstein films. And it was all sitting in his garage and the production designer, Dale Hennessy went out to look at it because they were thinking they had to recreate it. And he said, I think it still works. And they plugged them in and they all still worked. Brian: Oh, wow. Dawn: Oh man. It's alive. John: Those are the original machines. Dawn: I didn't know that. That's fantastic. John: At the time when I was a young kid, I was one of the few kids in my neighborhood who knew the name Kenneth Strickfaden, which opened doors for me. Let me tell you when people find out, oh, you know of the guy who designed and built all those? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I know all that. One of my favorite stories from Young Frankenstein is when they sold the script. I forget which studio had said yes. And as they were walking out of the meeting, Mel Brooks turned back and said, oh, by the way, it's gonna be in black and white, and kept going. And they followed him down the hall and said, no, it can't be in black and white. And he said, no, it's not gonna work unless it's in [00:45:00] black and white. And they said, well, we're not gonna do it. And they had a deal, they were ready to go. And he said, no, it's gonna stay black and white. And he called up Alan Ladd Jr. that night, who was a friend of his, and said, they won't do it. And he said, I'll do it. And so it ended up going, I think, to Fox, who was more than happy to, to spend the money on that. And even though Mel didn't like Putting on the Ritz, it's weird, because he has almost always had musical numbers in his films. Virtually every movie he's done, he's either written a song for it, or there's a song in it. So, it's weird to me. I've heard Gene Wilder on YouTube talk about no, no, he didn't want that scene at all, which is so odd because it seems so-- Brian: I never thought about that, but you're right. I'm going in my head through all the Mel Brooks films I can remember. And there is at least a short musical interlude in all of them that I can think of. John: But let's talk then about what's considered one of the best mixes of horror and comedy, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein [00:46:00] [Soundbite: Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein] Brian: As with comedies of that age, it, it starts off slow, but then it starts to get very funny as time goes on. And all the comedy is because of Abbot and Costello. They are the, [00:47:00] the chemistry they have on screen. I don't know how much of that was actually scripted and how much of it was just how they rolled with each other. But it works really well. Not much of the comedy is provided by the monsters or the supporting cast or even there's maybe a cute, a few sight gags. But wouldn't you say most of the comedy is just the dynamics between them? John: It is. The scary stuff is scary and it's balanced beautifully at the end where they're being chased through the castle. The monsters stayed pretty focused on being monsters and Abbot and Costello's reactions are what's funny. Dawn: If I may, as someone who has already admitted I haven't seen much of the movie, it's feels to me like it may be something like Shaun of the Dead, in the sense that you get genuinely scared if zombie movies scare, then you'll have that same adrenaline rush and the monsters stay scary. They don't have to get silly. Or be a part of the comedy for your two very opposing one's skinny, one's fat, you know, and the way that their friendship is both aligning and [00:48:00]coinciding is the humor. Brian: I believe there is one brief shot in there where you get to see Dracula, Frankenstein's monster and the Wolfman all in the same shot. And I think that might be the only time that ever happens in the Universal Franchise. During the lab scene, does that sound right John? John: I think you really only have Dracula and the Wolfman. I'll have to look it up because the monster is over on another table-- Brian: Isn't he underneath the blanket? John: Nope, that's Lou Costello, because it's his brain that they want. And so they're fighting over that table. And then just a little, I have nothing but stupid fun facts. There's a point in it, in that scene where the monster gets off the table and picks up someone and throws them through a window. And Glenn Strange, who was playing the monster at that point -- and who is one of my favorite portrayers of the monster, oddly enough -- had broken his ankle, I believe. And so Lon, Chaney, Jr. put the makeup on and did that one stunt for him, cuz he was there. Brian: He did that as Frankenstein's monster? John: Yes. Frankenstein. Brian: I didn't know that. Yes, I [00:49:00] did not know that. So he plays both of those roles in that movie? John: Yes. Let me just take a moment to defend Glenn Strange, who played the monster three times: House of Dracula, House of Frankenstein, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. In House of Frankenstein, he is following up the film before that, which was Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, in which, in this very convoluted universe, Lugosi is playing the monster, even though he didn't wanna do it in 31. Because his brain in Ghost of Frankenstein had been put into the Monster's body. So, in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, it is Lugosi as the Frankenstein monster. It is Lon Chaney Jr., who had played the monster in Ghost of Frankenstein, now back to playing Larry Talbot. So, it is Wolfman versus Frankenstein. And the premise of the script was he's got Ygor's brain and it's not connecting properly. He's gone blind. They shot that. They had tons of dialogue between the two characters of Larry Talbot pre-wolfman, and the monster, Bela Lugosi. And the executives thought it sounded silly. So they went in and they cut [00:50:00] out all of Lugosi's dialogue out of the movie. So now you have a blind monster stumbling around with his arms in front of him, but he doesn't talk. And if you look at the movie, you can see where he's supposed to be talking and they cut away quickly. And it's really convoluted. Glenn Strange who then has to play the monster next, looks at that and goes well, all right, I guess I'm still blind. I guess I'm still stumbling around with my arms in front of him. Which is the image most people have of the Frankenstein monster, which was never done by Boris in his three turns as the monster. So with, in that regard, I just think Glenn Strange did a great job of picking up what had come before him and making it work moving forward. Anyway, a couple other ones I wanna just hit on very quickly. Brian asked me to watch Dracula in Istanbul. Under the circumstances, a fairly straightforward retelling of the Dracula story. I would recommend it--it is on YouTube--for a couple of reasons. One, I believe it's the first time that Dracula has actual canine teeth. Brian: Yes. John: Which is important. But the other is there's the scene where he's talking to Harker about, I want [00:51:00] you to write three letters. And I want you to post date the letters. It's so convoluted, because he goes into explaining how the Turkish post office system works in such a way that the letters aren't gonna get there. It's just this long scene of explaining why he needs to write these three letters, and poor Harker's doing his best to keep up with that. That was the only reason I recommend it. Brian: That movie is based on a book called Kazıklı Voyvoda, which means The Warrior Prince and it was written in, I wanna say the 1920s or thirties, I wanna say thirties. It's the first book to equate Dracula and Vlad the Impaler, which I've come back to a couple times now, but that's significant because it was a Turkish book and the Turks got that right away. They immediately saw the name Dracula like, oh, we know who we're talking about. We're talking about that a-hole. It was not until the seventies, both the [00:52:00] fifties and the seventies, that Western critics and scholars started to equate the two. And then later when other scholars said, no, there, there's not really a connection there, but it's a fun story. And it's part of cannon now, so we can all play around with it. John: But that wasn't what Bram Stoker was thinking of? Is that what you're saying? Brian: No. No, he, he wasn't, he wasn't making Dracula into Vlad the Impaler. He got the name from Vlad the Impaler surely, but not the deeds. He wasn't supposed to be Vlad the Impaler brought back to life. John: All right. I'm going to ask you both to do one final thing and then we'll wrap it up for today. Although I could talk to you about monsters all day long, and the fact that I'd forgotten Dawn, that you were back on the Universal lot makes this even more perfect. If listeners are going to watch one Dracula movie and one Frankenstein movie, what do you recommend? Dawn, you go first. Dawn: They're only watching one, then it's gotta be the 1931 Frankenstein, with Boris. Karloff, of course. I think it has captured [00:53:00] the story of Frankenstein that keeps one toe sort of beautifully over the novel and the kind of original source material that I am so in love with, but also keeps the other foot firmly in a great film tradition. It is genuinely spooky and it holds so much of the imagery of any of the subsequent movies that you're only watching one, so that's the one you get. But if you do watch any more, you've got this fantastic foundation for what is this story and who is this creature? John: Got it. And Brian, for Dracula? Brian: I was tossing around in my head here, whether to recommend Nosferatu or the 1931 Dracula. And I think I'm going to have to agree with Dawn and say the 1931 for both of them, because it would help a viewer who was new to the monsters, understand where we got the archetypes we have. Now, why, when you type an emoji into your phone for Vampire, you get someone with a tuxedo in the slick back hair or, I think, is there a Frankenstein emoji? Dawn: There is, and he's green with bolts in his neck. [00:54:00] Brian: Yeah, it would. It will help you understand why we have that image permanently implanted in our heads, even though maybe that's not the source material. We now understand the origins of it. Dawn: And if I may too, there's, there's something about having the lore as founded in these movies is necessary, frankly, to almost understand what happens later. I mean, I get very frustrated in 2022, if there is a movie about vampires that takes any time at all to explain to me what a vampire is, unless you're breaking the rules of the vampire. For example, you know, like in Twilight the vampire sparkles, like a diamond when it's out in the sunshine and is the hottest thing ever. That's really great to know. I didn't know that about vampires. That wasn't necessarily true before, you know, but you don't need to take a lot of time. In fact, when you do read Dracula, one of the things for me that I found very frustrating was the suspense of what is it with this guy? They were like: He said we couldn't bring [00:55:00] garlic and they take all this time. And you're kind of as a modern reader being like, cuz he is a fucking vampire. Move on. Like we know this, we got this one. It's shorthand Brian: That's one snide thing I could say about the book is that there are times where Dracula's powers seem to be whatever his powers need to be to make this next scene creepy and move on to the next chapter. John: He was making it up as he went along. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Brian T. Bradley, Esq. is a nationally recognized Asset Protection Attorney. He has been interviewed and a featured guest on many top shows such as: Bigger Pockets Rookie, Flipping America Podcast with Roger Blankenship the “Flipping America Guy” and member of the Forbes Magazine Real Estate Council. Brian was selected to the Best Attorney's of America's List 2020, Lawyers of Distinction List three years in a row (2018, 2019, 2020,) Super Lawyers Rising Star List 2015, nominated to America's Top 100 High Stake Litigators List, nominated to the 2017 Law Firm 500 Award. Brian also writes on high-end asset protection. Ownership of real estate has many benefits from an investment and tax standpoint. There is downside risk, however, since the value of real estate holdings may be significant and can be used to cover damages awarded in a lawsuit. Therefore, it's important to consider asset protection strategies relating to real estate holdings in order to minimize such risk. In today's episode, Brian lays out how asset protection really works from a legal standpoint and dispels some common myths that are thrown around in the industry. Episode Link: https://btblegal.com/ --- Transcript Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals. Michael: What's going on everyone? Welcome to another episode of the Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum and today I'm joined by Brian Bradley, asset protection attorney and he's going to be dropping some knowledge about all the things we should be aware of as real estate investors when it comes to protecting our assets. So let's get into it. Brian, what's going on, man? Thanks so much for taking the time to hang out with me today. I really appreciate it. Brian: No, absolutely Michael, thanks for having me on. It's going to be an important topic, a fun topic, I'm gonna try to keep it fun and not legally dense and you know, just like I'm not anyone's, you know, Attorney here legal guru. So we're just gonna be talking generalities, right? We're gonna learn a lot in this, you know, it's gonna be a lot of fun and as you're building scale and making more money, you know, you're getting a bigger red button on you and so like this world of where we're gonna be talking about asset protection is kind of a big deal. There's just a lot of ways to skin a cat, different layers, different strategies for where you're at in your life. So, you know, I think as we break these down, hopefully I can, you know, make this will make a little bit more sense for you and your listeners. Michael: Yes, it will. Thank you. I am super excited to learn a lot because before we hit record here, you and I were chatting about some of the topics that we'll be covering today and I was like, what is that totally brand new. So I'm really excited from a self-serving perspective. So give everyone that quick and dirty background who doesn't know Brian Bradley, who you are, where you come from, and what is it you're doing in real estate today? Brian: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I'm an asset protection attorney, you know, we're talking about it off recording, like from Lake Tahoe, so you know, big snowboard ski, you know, ski bum, you know, Lake bum, I got into asset protection from the litigation side of the law, I was selected to America's best attorney list 2021-2020 Super Lawyers rising star 2021-2015. Michael: My guess is that no, that's not like an online survey, you filled out to get that… Brian: Oh, no, and another do with me, that's really just people that you work their butt up in court, and then they recommend you or judges recommend you and I have nothing to do with it and it's actually pretty, you know, I appreciate even just the nomination, let alone winning it, you know, to where I think they only say 1% of all attorneys in the nation even get nominated for those awards, let alone then, you know, 1% of those even gets picked to as a as a winner and so… Michael: Congratulations… Brian: Thanks, yeah and for me getting into, you know, asset protection, which will define what that is, you know, in a minute, like, that'll be like our think our base starting point. I just, I just got into this weird area of law, because when I like money, I like investing, I like, you know, not paying as much taxes as you know, as I can and as you grow, you got to be smart with your money, right and who can take it from you and so as a trial lawyer starting out, I just had so many clients who were being sued and their lives just turned completely upside down coming to me after they're already being sued and at that point, you know, you're just too far down the rabbit hole, you know, it's like going to get a car insurance after you already got in an accident or, you know, home insurance after your house already, you know, caught on fire, it's just, it's not gonna happen and so I see a lot of people thinking that they don't need to do anything is another misconception. You know, it's kind of human nature, right? You know, like, I'm just gonna ride lady luck. I'll deal with it when I when, you know, it hits me later on and that's just not how anything that needs to be proactive in the legal sense is going to work like insurance or asset protection. Wishful thinking is not a protection tool. You know, that's how everything you know, like, go to Vegas, go to breaks and hit the roulette table and see how long your wishful thinking is gonna last for you, right? You know or, you know, as you're leveling up, people forget about this. Like, as your wealth is leveling up, you're leveling up, you don't level up your protection, you don't level up your insurance. Yeah, people go buy an umbrella policy, but they don't realize what an umbrella policy is just like everything else, right? You know, it just provides more access and money to, you know, for coverage, but it doesn't, it's not the same escape clauses, you know, like, there's no insurance in the world that's gonna say, okay, hey, if I go punch you in the face, are you gonna cover it for me? No, like, they don't cover you for intentional wrongdoings or allegations of fraud and intentional wrongs and so that's how they have their escape clauses out especially for very big cases. You know, if you're talking about like a million dollar or more lawsuit. A couple other big misconceptions that we need to address as we lay this landscape is just, you know, the revocable living trust, if people think like, oh, yeah, I have a trust, right, that you know, they don't realize trust. There's a lot of different types of trust. Your family estate plan, your revocable living trust are not designed to protect you while you're living in they don't have the lead have teeth to be able to. So once you pass, they're only designed to avoid probate not protect you while you're living from lawsuits and then over the last five years, I've noticed this massive misconception about the use of limited liability companies. LLCs and they just think that they're like, you know, Silver Bullet Dracula slayers and you guys miss, like, first word first letter, like limited, I tell you. Whereas, whereas this happened, where's this come from? Like, they're not hiding the fact they tell you like they titled it telling you limited liability. So like, now we have to reeducate people on this, like, yeah, don't put everything in the world under one LLC. Otherwise, if it gets pierced, you're gonna lose it on like, What are you talking about, which we'll break that down, you know, in a little bit. And then the sad thing is like, and I think it's worth explaining is this, if you just look around, and you look at, you know, our legal system and the world we live in, it's just broken, it's a broken system, you know, and we're so happy nirvana and just to like, kind of lay this framework down a little bit more. We're no longer about justice. We're about redistributing wealth from the haves, which is you, your listeners, people trying to grow and accumulate more to the have nots and over the last 40-50 years, things that didn't happen in the past, or that weren't allowed to happen in the past like contingency fee lawyers or law from advertising their common place. and then this created a cultural shift of a predatory legal system that's no longer about justice. So it's about profits now and then when you get on the road of high net worth, in affluent families and wealth, this level of protection, now we have to deal with taking a macroeconomic, more of like a global look about what's going on and the big picture here is really that we have a global financial system that has structurally deep rooted issues. You know, we have government backed fiat currencies that are now in question. This is also including the US dollar. So don't think like, just because we're in the US, we're exempt from all of this, you know, monetary policy today, you know, the one that exists is, you know, inflate or die and then you got governments looking for a deep and accessible pools of financing and meaning our money, you know, the hard workers, the people who are investing, along with financial repression, monetary economic manipulation. So this just adds all the challenges that we have to deal with when we're looking to protect your assets and so asset protection is that modern best bet to level this playing field by using a lot of the tools and the combination of the tools that we're going to talk about today to make it very hard for you to be collected on and so what this is really about is just like a talk about giving you peace of mind, lifestyle preservation, and you know, really just how collectible are you at the end of the day… Michael: Love it. But well, I am all about doing things to help peace of mind and insulate ourselves from the world at large. This you happy world at large. So help us understand Brian, like, what are some of the things when someone says asset protection to you like, Brian, I gotta protect my assets? What does that mean to you? What alarm bells are going off in your head? Brian: Yeah, absolutely. One is like, do you understand the difference between tax mitigation and asset protection and I've been getting this a lot, you know, especially this last year, obviously, as we see what's going on, you know, within inflation, taxes and everything right now, asset protection is not tax mitigation, like that's your CPE and wealth managers job. If creating an asset protection plan or an asset protection, trust or going offshore, you know, where to create tax havens like one that's illegal, it's fraud, you know, so system won't work, and then you go to jail for that type of stuff. Michael: So don't do that is what you're saying. Brian: That's not what this is about. So people always like, oh, I want to protect my assets and I don't want to pay taxes, completely two different things. The asset protection plan is to protect your assets from predatory lawsuits and litigation, not saying I want to not pay taxes, that's tax mitigation, talk to your CPA and wealth managers. First, lock down your assets from lawsuits because if you get sued and lose everything, what's your miracle working CPA going to be able to do for you if you have nothing for them to work on, so order of operation, protect your assets, then let them work through the system that's created to actually like mitigate, you know, forced depreciation, all those wonderful things that they do cost segue analysis… Michael: Yeah but Brian, to that, to that point, really quick. I'm just curious, like, do you work with a lot of CPAs because I can see, I can envision a scenario in which the legal side of things is super buttoned up super tight, but maybe isn't very tax efficient and so my guess is there's probably a happy medium, or some input that a CPA or wealth manager can inject into the situation to help make both things as tight as possible. Brian: Correct. You got to, you know, the issue generally is people don't involve their lawyers until later on down the line and it creates a lot of problems. So for example, a lot of CPAs will set up S Corps for investors, especially real estate investors for some reason, and great for tax purposes, horrible for litigation and I get this call a lot, you know, and most of my clients are calling with like 50 $100 million of real estate all stuffed in one S Corp. Okay, great again, for tax mitigation, horrible for let's say you get sued and now you're S Corp and all the shares get frozen and cease, there is nothing I can do for you. At that point, I can't move assets out and then even if I want it and you realize like, oh my god, I have so many pieces of property under one corporation like this is very risky, I need to start diversifying and employing these assets out, you're stuck, you're not going to be able to and I just had this call yesterday with a potential client. The reason is, when you're all the benefits of the S Corp, right? You know, deferred taxation and all this stuff, you're kicking the can down the road, once you start taking the assets out, you have to pay the money back and so people don't generally have millions of dollars sitting in their bank account saying like, okay, hey, I feel like you know, taking all the assets out of my S Corp now and now I'm going to go and pay the piper and the IRS. So because you don't have that money sitting around to pay the IRS and the taxes, we can move the assets for you and I'm not going to force you to go, you know, and have the IRS coming after you to collect on you and move the assets out anyways, because now you're just creating a bad situation for the client. So the lesson here to learn is if you're thinking of investing, you need to talk to both the lawyer and the CPA, because a lot of CPAs, they shouldn't be giving you legal advice. They're not lawyers, and they're not going to understand the aspect of what happens actually in court with s corpse and C corpse, when it comes to litigation, and why we don't want to use those to protect your assets. So we have to all talk together. The problem is I get this all I get the mess after the fact right, and then I have to start supporting afterwards and so when done, right, really, the modern, you know, estate planning is asset protection, what we're doing is creating legal barriers between your assets, and your potential creditor, the person suing you, the person trying to come after your money before it's needed and that's it, you know, it's like a safe for your gold or your guns or your valuables. Anything of value, you know, you want to put behind the legal barrier and out of your personal name so that it's not easily attached with a lien or reached and so I just like the rich, I really liked the Tony Robbins saying success leaves clues. The rich don't own things in their personal names their businesses do their trust, do they just get the beneficial use and enjoyment out of them while separating out that legal liability and we do that through just like different tools and mechanisms that we have kind of like key concepts and roadmaps like LLC is limited partnerships and trust. Michael: Got it. Okay and so when real estate investor comes to you, they're just getting started. They are moist clay, you can totally mold them, they don't already have a bunch of issues. What is your go to, like ideal scenario for asset protection? Brian: Yeah, so there, I mean, you're just starting out your green horn, like really just going to be an LLC and insurance and that's where you're gonna go, okay and as you think about how to use these systems and how to grow within them, okay, I want you and your listeners to think about winter, okay, like we were talking about this before we started recording like I'm from Lake Tahoe, snow, cold snowboarding skiing, I lived in Michigan, freezing cold arctic, you know, minus 40 degree weather for a while, well, I'm in Portland damp cold, you got to really layer you and so the first entry layer is as your base layer, when you're getting dressed, it's going to sit on your skin. This is the equivalent of an LLC and insurance. This is you know, when you're just starting out investing in you have zero to three units, or you know, zero to three properties, you're exposed net worth generally is like 250,000, net or below and then as you grow, and you add more assets, and you hit around that four unit or four property mark, you could be starting to invest in a couple different states as well, you know, you have now around like 500, to 700,000 exposed nets, what you need is a mid-layer, which is usually a little bit thicker, that's going to be made out of like a merino wool sweater, or for you ladies a car and again, this is your management company, like a limited partnership and I can break down that later on if we have time and then when you hit around that 1 million net worth mark, you know, you're gonna want to water shell waterproof layer. This keeps you nice and dry and warm when the weather's really bad. You know, this is your doomsday lawsuit protection layer is going to be an asset protection trust and specifically for our clients, we use a hybrid trust, which is combining an offshore trust and domesticating it through the IRS. So when a client comes to me, I receive it I realistically, you want four things you know, you want you're going to want an effective plan to have, you're going to want to control your plan. Three, you want a reasonable and sustainable cost, you know, depending on what layer you're at, is going to be individual for the for the client profile and then four you want a plan that's going to be easy to maintain compliance on what the IRS like I can create the strongest thing in the world for you. But if you're not going to be maintaining it and you don't want to do the IRS compliance with it, eventually you're just going to stop doing it and the whole system falls apart. So as you go through the valuation process and you're talking to different attorneys and you're vetting the process, just remember the acronym ECCC effectiveness, control cost and compliance and as long as you can start checking off all those boxes, you know you're gonna have a really good system. If you want to I can break down the first layer if you want to Trying to kinda go there like LLCs, or just really wherever you feel like directing this. Michael: Yeah, so I think our listeners probably have a good handle on LLCs. But I would love if you would walk us through what this hybrid trust is because it's not something that I'm familiar with, I've never heard of before. Brian: So yeah, and I think the reason why is like not many people focus on asset protection at a high level, you know, I think events like insurance, a lot of people wonder not only purely asset protection attorneys, right, they're generally business attorneys who do some asset protection or their real estate, you know, attorneys who do a little bit and they take continuing legal education course, learn about LLCs, and the kind of stops there and like insurance, they kind of tried to cast a large net nationwide, what was one thing you can cast nationwide and LLC and so I kind of think that's why like, the base layer, knowledge kind of stops there, because not many people just focus on, you know, very, very strong protection. This comes with the asset protection trust. So it's this final layer, the bad weather, you know, the outer shell waterproof layer, is this asset protection trust, it's going to be really the heart and soul of the system, especially when you have over 1 million exposed and that wealth and what I mean exposed is like your 401 K is exempt. So I don't include that in a net worth evaluation, because it's already a reset protecting some states, like if you're a Florida resident, we have a very strong homestead exemption of 100% of your of your primary residence. So I will take that out of the equation too, depending on the state you're in and the homestead. So what we're looking at is exposed unprotected, and that, you know, equity and wealth, all right. The great thing about trust is that they can be sculpted, to fit how you need them and they can morph as you need them without dealing with funding issues that you're going to fall into an LLC and other business entities that get their protection pierced, meaning now you're going to be held personally liable. So I just love trust and having a trust at the very top of the planning is very powerful and this is where picking the proper jurisdiction for a trust really comes into play. The standard 101 trust that I'm sure like everybody's familiar with, you know, kind of started in the 60s is the family revocable living trust. So you know, like when trust, you know, trust don't die. So then when you do, you act, and you fund your trust, which a lot of people forget to do, like, oh, I created my estate plan, and then they never transfer title into it. Remember, fund that fund the trust, if it's just, you know, your revocable living trust, the benefit of it is when you pass you don't have to go through probate, you can just skip the court system and probate and it changed the landscape of estate planning. Then you have what are called land trusts for real estate, you know, you hold your land, and then you connect them to an LLC. But land trusts don't have any protection in and of themselves. They're only as strong as the LLC that they're connected to, you know, so they're just a privacy mechanism, not a protection mechanism. Okay from there, you have higher levels of trust. They're called asset protection trust and I really want to spend the time, you know, with this and break down the three different types, you know, and after this, I think you and probably 99% of your listeners are going to know more than 99% of all the attorneys out there about asset protection, trust, they came, yeah, they came about in the early 1980s. You know, and so an asset protection trust is what's called a self-settled spendthrift trust. All sell settled means is that you created it for yourself, you know, they're for you, by you, as your own beneficiary, and they have very important spendthrift provisions in them. So this lets you protect your assets while you're actually living, you know, from creditors trying to sue you from not having to relinquish control of your assets. The difference is that they allow you to protect your assets, not just for your grandkids, but for yourself, which you weren't allowed to do in the past and then like I said, you're probably familiar with another type of self-settled trust the revocable living trust. They're the same and that they're self-settled created for you by you. The difference is that with an asset protection version of this trust, it includes these critical provisions called spendthrift provisions and what spendthrift provisions are is they are provisions that allow you to protect your assets from the creditors, they're the actual teeth behind it and for those to work, the trust them has to be not revocable, but it will revocable. So it's a very different type of trust, you know, just like chocolate or vanilla, both ice cream, just different types of ice cream. Michael: Yeah… Brian: You know, this is where the fun really starts to actually happen. There's two major school of thoughts here you can go international meaning offshore, another country jurisdiction, you know, you hear about Cook Islands, Cayman Islands, Belize, in the Bahamas, or domestically here in the US, you know, Nevada, Delaware, Wyoming, Texas, um, so you can set them up here in the United States and you know, if you don't mind, I think a great way to talk about it, just kind of talking about it through historical context, because I think if you understand the foundations of both offshore and domestic then you understand the principles of how we combine them together and why you want to Michael: Yeah, let's do it. Brian: Alright, cool. So again, you really have these three options, right, you can establish them offshore, you're going establish them domestically, and then we can hybrid them out like a hybrid car, take the best of both worlds put them together. So from the historical concept, the offshore trust actually came first, in 1984, when the famous Cook Islands, they created the first asset protection trust. I like and choose the Cook Islands if and when it's applicable, just because it literally offers the best home court advantage and why it's the best is because asset protection is just what these trusts in the Cook Islands were specifically drafted for and the power here is they have this wonderful word called statutory non recognition of any other jurisdictional court orders in the world, including the United States and so what this means is that if you have a judgment against you, in the United States, and you took it down to the Cook Islands, your US judgment is literally worthless, it literally has no value whatsoever. statutorily the Cook Islands they prohibited from recognizing it even from their own constitution and so if somebody wants to sue your trust, and it has a Cook Islands, you know, clause in it. So as a Cook Islands trust, they will have to start their case all over from scratch, the person who's suing you, they're going to have to prove their case beyond the reasonable doubt. This is the murder standard, the highest legal standard in the world that 99% sure standard. Not that you know, 51%, preponderance of the evidence, I'm not sure we don't know what happened. But we don't like the way they look right now. So let's just let's just give it to them. You know, you can't get a contingency fee attorney to represent you, because they're just not allowed down there. It's an ethical in the Cook Islands, just like it used to be unethical here in the United States. But then that got changed in the 60s, the claim meaning the lawsuit, you know, it's not amendable. So what this means is that it can't be changed or amended after the discovery process starts like we can do here in the United States. Like we can literally just say, okay, I'm suing you for this, dig around start discovery, then completely change what We're suing you for, because we started using as a fishing expedition. The person suing you, yeah, no, I mean, this is just like standard trial tactics is like, okay, hey, let me just flood you with discovery and like, start poking around and say, oh, hey, we didn't even know this was right here. Now I'm gonna add this to the complaint and sue you now, for this looks like a better cause of action anyways, I can't do that down there. But we can do it here all the time in the US. Michael: So it sounds like I need to go move to the Cook Islands. Brian: Now. Well, here and maybe not right, because you know, there's, there's cons to things, we'll get to the cons in a minute. So the person suing you, they're gonna have to front the entire court costs by the judge from New Zealand and if you lose your pay, you know, and I honestly think this is one of the worst things that we don't have here in the United States, though, like the loser doesn't need to pay the legal fees and the cost of the winner. So if you get sued for something completely bogus, I mean, a frivolous lawsuit, and you spend $200,000, defending yourself on legal fees, then the judge finally is like, this is ridiculous. I'm throwing this case out, you're still out 200,000 bucks, you know, the person who sued you, they're not going to be getting the bill for that because our legal system in the United States, they just that will discourage lawsuits and our legal system is run by trial lawyers who don't want to discourage lawsuits and there's only a one year statute of limitations. So if you go back to those four things I mentioned, right, remember, like effectiveness, cost, control, compliance, I mean, effectiveness, five out of five stars, nothing really nothing beats statutory nonrecognition. So what about the other ones, right, you know, control costs and compliance. This is kind of his kryptonite, you know, these are the drawbacks. If you're going to be purely foreign, like a purely foreign trust, you have a lot more IRS reporting, compliance and disclosure. So you have these things called IRS forms 3520 3520 A's. What this is, is a full balance sheet disclosure of everything that trust owns, and sometimes even the entire trust agreement to be disclosed and submitted to the IRS and it is expensive for this IRS forms to be done every year. Also, you're going to have factor compliance, because you're going to have a foreign bank account at that time. And of course, we're these trusts to work, you're going to be out of control of the trust. That's why they work so good. That's why they're the creme de la crème and clients are just not comfortable with this. So while we literally have the most effective trust in the world, by far, it's not something that I generally start with, I probably only say like 1% of my clients, I will go to a purely foreign trust with which then brings us right to the second option. Okay, we're not going to be going forward and what about these domestic trust? Yeah, they came about 10 years later down the road of all places, Alaska started it out and then not to be outdone, obviously, you're gonna be like, Well, hey, we're Wyoming and Nevada and Delaware like this is what we're known for. So we're jumping on the gravy train, right and then now about 19 other states now have created some form of asset protection, self-settled trust statutes. So we're seeing as a state starting to jump on board seeing yeah, our legal system is a threat and things have to get done to protect your assets and so as to protection the United States is very is very important to understand this ballot on It's just the concepts like how you go about doing it is very important. The issue with a purely foreign under the purely domestic asset protection trust is that, you know, we live in the United States of America, we have a Constitution, Article four section one for Faith and Credit Clause. What this provides and means is that every state has to grant the full faith and credit to the judicial proceedings of every other state. What this is means what it's telling you is that, for example, Nevada can pass and has passed an asset protection statute, okay, but it cannot ignore a California or Washington or like another states court orders. So where the Cook Islands can literally just throw that California judgment in the trash. Nevada can't do that. Nevada has to respect it constitutionally and even litigate it and then you have courts that are just simply ignoring the choice of law clause. So I mean, like literally, like bait levers more dissent in re Hubber, cucumber Steelman, Dover still all great facts, all great cases, they should have one of those cases, and judges literally just use their superpower public policy, we're ignoring the you know, choice of law clause, trust is breach means loss of assets, that's just completely unacceptable and so because of the case law that we're seeing, I'm not a big fan of a purely domestic asset protection, trust or anything purely domestic without something offshore built into it. This is why I prefer the hybrid version called like, we just call it a bridge trust, but it's really just like a hybrid, hybrid trust, think of them like a hybrid cars, okay? What we're doing just combining the best of both, and then making a better product and so these trusts have been around for almost three decades. So they're not, you know, the new lady to the dance, they've been around for about 30 years now and at the end of the day, what you're doing is taking a fully registered foreign Cook Island, offshore asset protection, trust, what all that for two years of solid case law, again, so it's fully registered offshore from the day we created with the offshore trustee, they're there in standby just in case you need them and then we build a bridge back to the IRS for IRS classification. So the IRS is literally taking this foreign trust and then they're classifying it as a domestic US trust, by complying with USC Section 7701. It's called the court test control test and so because of that bridge, as long as we have our compliance in place, we stay classified domestically and what this does is that the trust is now going to be cheaper to create. So generally, a purely foreign trust is going to cost like 4550, even $60,000 plus $12,000, a year to maintain very expensive, a hybrid trust is going to be cheaper, you're generally gonna be talking about, you know, 23 to 30,000, to set up a hybrid trust, plus no IRS tax filings whatsoever, while you're domestic because it's classified as a domestic US grantor trust, so you have no more IRS tax filings, unless God forbid, we have to break that bridge and now you also get the power of the offshore trust. If and when we need it. It's in our toolbox now, just like a contractor who says like, okay, hey, I don't need to use all my tools today. But I'm going to need them possibly at some point. So now I can use them as I need them. Versus coming to me later on after the fact oh, my God, Brian, I mow somebody over with my car, like, can you help me? You know, like, I want that foreign trust? Well, no, sorry, it's after the fact I can't do it now. But if we have the hybrid, I could have engaged it. So that would be like during the State of duress, we would break the bridge, stop being an IRS compliance, you are what you are a foreign trust. Until that point, you want to be classified domestically. So that hybrid trust is very, very effective, you may control of your assets, you may take control the trust, right up until that doomsday scenario where you don't want to be in control of it anymore. You know, maintenance and compliance with the IRS. Very simple. So at that point, you've now checked off all the boxes, effectiveness, cost control and compliance check, check, check, check, check and so this is where you know, for our clients, we generally are starting with these hybrid trust. Michael: Wow, this is wild, is super cool and so are you thinking that most folks that are in that kind of million dollars of expose net worth, this is where that starts to make sense. Brian: That's exactly like, so our main client profile that comes in you would think they'd be like, you know, 10s of millions of dollars for us, like realistically, I would say 75% of our clients generally around that 1.2 million, exposing that. Some high risk, probably like a doctor or surgeon lawyer, or just straight real estate investors. I have some of my favorite clients, nurses, firefighters, cops who self-funded their retirement through cash flowing properties, and now they're about to retire and they realize like, I can't lose all of this now because this is literally my nest egg and my legacy. Yeah, they need to lock it down and so you generally see the average client profiles like 1.2 to 2 million of exposed net with some risk, and it makes sense at that point. Yeah, get the LLC get the limited partnership get the trust for like 30,000 dollars locked down a million plus, and then sleep well at night. That's when the investment kind of makes sense for this type of protection. Michael: Yeah, that makes total sense and what would you say because I would imagine, after listening to this folks might go to other attorneys they work with mentioned this type of hybrid trust and they might be told now you don't need an LLC is good enough. I mean, what's the I know, we've talked about kind of a counter argument, but how does that conversation get ahead? Brian: Most of the time, I was, say, like the one the estate planning attorney, they will know about this, because their knowledge base, you know, is just not going to be around, let alone foreign trust. I mean, there's not that many people who even know like that much detail about how a foreign trust works, let alone using the incorrect domestic asset protection trust, you know, how many times I have California residents, using the Nevada asset protection trust, and the person who set it up for them, like the lawyer has no idea like, okay, what about this case? We're still in 2012, California case that said, hey, you're a California resident, we don't recognize asset protection trust, because we don't have the statutes here. So your Nevada asset protection, trust, and sorry, it's worthless, it's not gonna it's not gonna work, you know, so unless you go to an actual specialist and say, hey, here's the case law, here's what's going to happen down the run. Most people don't have that level of education, because they're not in that world. They don't exist in in it. So I feel bad for the clients because where's the knowledge come from? You think you're going to an attorney who was specialized in this, but you're not taught this in law school, you're not taught this for the bar exam, so how you develop this level of knowledge is really just did you get into the right group of people and were you passionate about it enough to like transition your practice into it… That's why I do these talks is just to educate people and you know, just the base thing, like, why not just an LLC, they're disregarded entities for tax purposes. So they're disregarded for taxes. That means it's disregarded to you for lawsuits and liability, meaning you're pierced. If you're using them for real estate. They're not businesses, they're holding companies, which means the number one argument that will win and pierce that every time is well, Your Honor, this is an actual business. It's an extension of Michael is just a holding company. Boom, you're pierced funding issues, bad accounting systems, like there's four ways to pierce that veil right there and I don't even have to think part about it. Charging, charging order protection mean, like what state do I go set these things up in? You know, how many times I hear people like, oh, just go create a Wyoming LLC? Are you a resident of Wyoming? Is the asset in Wyoming and the answer is no to either one of those, you just tried to buy another state's jurisdiction, that you have no connection to try bringing another state's laws to like California and other state that you're not connected to, and there's no reason to, you're gonna get laughed out of court. Like, it's just you can't go by other states more beneficial laws and bring them, you know, to another state that, you know, that has no jurisdictional connection to it and anonymity is the other like, really, like, flavor of the last like, two years is like, oh, create this anonymous, Delaware or Wyoming? Trust and Ghost the lawsuits, right? Yeah, well, that's not how these that's not how it works but that's how it's being sold by, you know, law firm salesmen and promoters. Yeah, create this and get a really crazy operating agreement and then next thing, you know, like, you're never gonna have to show up in court. I'm sorry, you have a personal agent of service for these out of state law firms their sole job, like, let's say, Mike here is my, you know, personal agent of service, he's gonna get my service and he's gonna say, hey, Brian, here's your service. That's why dude, you just… Michael: Got to show up in court… Brian: Court now and amenities done at that point. So the only way that an amenity works is you show up the court, a judge is gonna say, Hey, you're getting sued for a million bucks. Here's your you know, asset disclosure list. Tell me everything that you own, because we didn't know what can be collected on or not, at that point, and amenity or a quote, unquote, air quotes, Secrecy is now up to you. So you're gonna decide, am I gonna lie under oath and hope to god, I don't get you know, my operating agreement will hold up and commit perjury in court, or do I just disclose it. So like, you're the weak link at that point and then if you lie and commit perjury, under oath, you're going to jail on top of losing your assets. So it makes more sense just to say, hey, create a proper asset protection plan, LLC in the state that is layered up into a management company, once you hit the net worth put in the trust, and then sleep well at night because at the end of the day, I don't care if you lose your lawsuit. I care about it for your collectible or not, you know, like you can lose the 10 $50 million case. I just if the asset protection trusts setup strong and in the right jurisdictions with a proper exit strategies, does it mean that you can be collected on and then it lets me settle a case for pennies on the dollar… Michael: Dang this is nuts, Brian… This is like or this is earth shattering stuff. We got to have you back on to talk more about this. But I want to be very respectful of your time get you out here for people that have a similar response and you're like, holy crap, I gotta call this guy Brian, immediately. Learn more about this, reach out for your services. What's the best way for folks to get in touch get a hold of you? Brian: Yeah, one great resources, jump on my website, www.btbegal.com , I use it more as an educational resource with a lot of case law client studies. I just want you to be educated at the end of the day like, listen this here's the case law. Like, that's what lawyers should know about, especially trial lawyers. That's why I'm a good trial lawyer. I tell stories through case law and then another great way is through my email, you know, Brian: B R A I N @btblegal.com. I do you know, free 30 minute consultation, whether we're a great fit or not, like we'll figure that out over the phone. I would just rather how people have an educated decision, and then they can like go shop around. Michael: Love it, love it. Well, hey, man, thanks again for coming on. Really appreciate the time and we'll definitely be in touch. Brian: Yeah, for sure. Thanks brother… Michael: All right, everyone. That was our episode, a big thank you to Brian for coming on talking about a lot of things that we've never heard before on the show and definitely bring up some excellent counterpoints to be thinking about as always, if you enjoyed the episode, feel free to leave us a rating or review wherever it is to get your episodes and we look forward to seeing the next one. Happy investing…
As a lawyer in Nashville, Tennessee, Brian Boyd helps clients with real estate, construction, and business matters. It is with that knowledge that he and his wife, Dawn, have grown their portfolio to a six-figure income. Brian earned his BA from the University of Tennessee—Chattanooga, a JD from Samford University's Cumberland School of Law, and an LLM in Taxation from Georgetown University Law Center. When not practicing law or working with Dawn on their real estate ventures, Brian can be found on the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu mats at his local gym. His newest book is Replace Your Income: A Lawyer's Guide to Finding, Funding, and Managing Real Estate Investments Today Brian talks about corporate structures, how they differ, and what you could be doing to protect your assets. Episode Links: www.briantboyd.com. www.boydwills.com --- Transcript Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The remote real estate investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals. Michael: What's going on everyone? Welcome to another episode of The Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum. And today with me, I have Brian Boyd, who is a legal tax professional as well as an author and active investor. He's gonna be talking to us today about what we need to do to protect our rear ends. So let's get into it. Brian, what's going on, man, thanks so much for taking the time to hang out with me today. I appreciate you. Brian: Hey, Michael, thanks for having me today. I'm glad to be here. Michael: I am super excited to chat with you. Because you are a legal attorney and investor something we don't often see too much of. Brian: Yeah, I am. I started out in Washington, DC as a tax attorney at a company called Ernst and Young. And over the years, I got into real estate and investing because I was representing a lot of contractors and developers and started looking at the way they were doing their businesses. And from there, I started tweaking their models trying to figure out well, how can I make this a little bit more tax efficient, create a little bit more loss with a lot more cash flow. And so that's when my wife and I in 2017, decided to get into real estate investing on our own. And now we're up to 25 doors, and we're cash flowing just fine. You know, in, in fact, maybe in the next year or two, she could step away from her full time job. And we'll just manage real estate. Michael: Man, I love it. And so is your background in tax or on the legal side of things, or both. Brian: So I have a JD and I have an LLM, which is a master's degree in, in law. But It specializes in tax. So yes, I do corporate formations. I do business transactions, helping people the real estate, anything and everything to do with businesses, individuals and their finances. In real estate investing. That's what I do. So there was a time I used to go to court, but I don't go to court anymore. My partner goes to court, and I just do business transactions and real estate investing. Michael: Man, I love it. And before we get everyone's hopes up, you are located out in Tennessee. But is that the only state in which you practice in? Or can you help folks all over the place? Brian: So I am licensed in Tennessee and Vermont of all places. My partner is licensed in Tennessee in Maryland. But if it has to do with federal law, I can work all over the country. However, if people are asking specifically about California law, I'm not your guy, call a local attorney speak to a local attorney. But from a structural standpoint, I can give you the basics and kind of point you in the right direction. But unless you're in one of those jurisdictions, and you want me to practice in those jurisdictions, those are the jurisdictions I'm limited to. Michael: Okay. Well, let's talk about that for a minute. Because I think we were chatting before the show, we hit record, and there are a ton of Californians physically moving out to Tennessee. But my guess is they're probably a lot of Californians investing out in Tennessee. And so for those folks that maybe live outside Tennessee, but are investing in Tennessee, in terms of structuring their team around them, should they be thinking about having a local attorney local to them, as well as someone such as yourself or a an attorney located where the property is? How should you be thinking about that? Brian: No, that's great question. I actually had an attorney contact me a few weeks ago and he is a he's in Chico, California. He called me and said, Hey, I properties in Tennessee. Can you help me on what? Yeah, I'll absolutely be happy to help you. And so what we did is we structured a Tennessee holding company with a wholly owned Tennessee subsidiary. And even though he's out there, he owns the LLC here. And as he invests around the country, like Texas, or Florida, or you know, any of the other states, you know, we'll set up other holding companies to represent those entities. But he can stay in California and own these companies, as long as they're structured properly, to pass through to him over in California. Michael: Okay, awesome. Well, Brian, give us like, the quick and dirty if there is such a thing of what investors need to know, because I think a lot of our investors are starting to scale their portfolios that got a couple of deals under their belt, and they're really looking for some asset protection. What are some things they need to be aware of and where have you seen people go wrong? Brian: So I have seen people go wrong with a few misnomers about what they believe series LLCs are and what land trusts are. So a series LLC, I know that everybody hears therefore multiple properties. and they are. But they also don't understand that when you have a series LLC, you have to have a separate bank account, a separate tax ID separate books, all of that creates an administrative burden on you to keep all these bank accounts separate all these books separate all these tax IDs separate. And typically I see those used more efficiently if you're a developer, that way you can develop a series, sell it, and not worry about it. Again, if you're holding your assets in series LLC, and you have series one through 10, for example, that's 10 tax IDs, that's 10 sets of books, that's 10 book keeper entries every month for those separate things. Whereas if you just have an LLC, and you treat it properly, so your corporate veil cannot be pierced. And a corporate veil is the corporate formalities that you have to adhere to. So your corporate structure is honored by the courts. And typically, here are the things that people get popped for, they'll pay for their groceries out of their LLC, they'll pay their own mortgage out of their LLC, or they'll just treat their LLC like a checkbook. And that's not what it's for. It is a standalone entity, and it has to be treated and respected that way. So if you don't do those things, you're fine. Your one LLC is going to handle it just fine. For example, my wife and I have, we have a parent company, and that parent company has two LLC is underneath it. And one LLC is for our portfolio over here. And the other LLC is for that portfolio over here. And it all flows up into the holding company, which is a perfectly fine way to structure your holdings. Yes, it is more filing fees every year, it's three filing fees. But if you're trying to get away from filing fees by creating a series, LLC, you're losing the war to win the battle on a filing fee. Because you're gonna pay all these other expenses for tax IDs and book entries and bank statements. And you're just creating a mess. I would not use series LLCs. Now as it relates to land trust, we mentioned that earlier, I've heard a lot of people say, Well, I want to use a land trust. Why do you want to use a land trust? I understand that land trust, get it out of your name. And I'm well aware of that. But it doesn't really create any protections like an LLC would. A lot of people say, Well, I want the anonymity of an LLC, well, you can have the anonymity, you know, of an LLC without using Land Trust. Many states, Wyoming, Tennessee, Texas, you can file your LLC documents, and your name won't appear anywhere on there as long as you use a registered agent. So you can receive the benefits of the anonymity that comes along with the land trust by simply using the LLC. And you'll get more protections with the LLC. So I would encourage your listeners to go talk to a lawyer about setting up an LLC to hold their assets, I tend to eschew Land Trust, they don't really provide the protection that people think they do. Unless you're using an irrevocable trust, which is a trust that gets it out of your estate. Not only does it get it out of your estate, it gets it out of your control, and you can't do anything with it, you have to go through a trustee and that trustee is supposed to use their best judgment on what to do for the trust. So think about that, as you move forward. And these these ideas that people read about online, I really like LLCs, my wife and I use them, I encourage my clients to use them. So that's just coming from my experience and what I do day to day in my practice. Michael: Yeah, from a lot of the folks I've spoken to it sounds like the LLC has come like the Colt 45. For real estate investors. It's reliable, it's standard issue, it can do a lot of the things you need, you need it to do. It's nothing fancy, it just can get the job done. Brian: No, absolutely. I agree with that statement completely. Okay, cool. Michael: And, Brian, I think you're a good person to ask because I think we have similar styles of investing and asset protection, which I'm glad to hear. It sounds like you've broken down your portfolios into two separate LLCs What comfort what level of comfort do you have with the size of your portfolio in each LLC, before you want to further break it up or bring additional LLC online? Brian: And you know, that's a good question. So the way we have treated our LLCs is we go by city, what's in each city. So for example, in Chattanooga, we have an LLC for Chattanooga, and Knoxville and Gatlinburg, we have an LLC for those properties. And in our short term rentals are Montana and the West Tennessee property. We have a separate LLC for that because they're out west So we've kind of broken it down over here, over here and over there. And then we have a parent LLC over top of it. So it's not really a matter of the number of doors or number of properties that have in an LLC. For me, it was geographic, and being able to keep everything separate. And especially for our bookkeeper to know that, hey, these are Chattanooga, they're in that LLC. When you run that k one, it needs to include all these properties. Same over here. So it wasn't a matter of my comfort level with the number of properties, it was just a matter of how can I segregate out all the separate assets that we have and make it user friendly? And also, we're not clumping all of our assets into one LLC. We're spreading them out. But we're doing it geographically. Michael: Right. Okay. And as you and your wife do start to scale, I mean, is there a number of value that you that you'd see hitting in a particular LLC and saying, oh, that's maybe a little heavy, and that LLC, even if I'm investing in the same geographic area, let me bring online, another LLC, just so I don't have so much value sitting in a singular bucket? Or is not? Is that not really a concern of yours? Brian: No, that's not really a concern. And here's why it's not a concern. It's because it doesn't really matter how much my entire portfolio is valued at, I'm always going to be deploying that equity somewhere else to get into another deal. And that equity may get deployed into another LLC. So it's not really a matter of oh, we're too heavy in this particular market. If I had 1000 doors in Chattanooga, I would still leave everything in that one LLC. Michael: Okay, right on. Let's talk about insurance for a minute. Yeah, how much is enough? Brian: I would tell people, you can't have enough. You can't. So we, we have homeowners insurance on every single property. And then our LLC is have business insurance as well. So we also have business insurance for the LLC. And each property is fully insured. And then we require renters to have homeowners insurance. And on top of that, we require renters to use a product called say Rhino, which is security deposit insurance. So they're not paying us a security deposit that we're holding an escrow for them, they're paying monthly, you know, let's say, you know, a month's rent is $1,000, we typically require two and a half months of rent for a security deposit, will Rhyno only requires them to pay like $8 per 1000. So they would much rather pay 20 to 24 bucks, as opposed to tune $2,500 in security deposit. And over the over the year, it comes out a lot cheaper for them. And we're safe and secure, knowing that as long as they're paying that Rhino insurance. If we have to make a claim, it's there, we've got it, they'll take care of it. So we're we're layering insurance, on insurance, on insurance with every everything we can do. So not only from a corporate standpoint of the company, and the asset, but also the tenants and the security deposit. So that's four layers of insurance. Michael: Run that by me again, what rino does so so they are basically ensuring the security deposit, then you can make a claim for damage against that security deposit up to that limit. Brian: Yes, yes, absolutely. That's exactly what they're doing. Michael: And what about the tenant that goes haywire, decides I'm gonna stop paying rent? I'm not paying this right. No nonsense. So they stopped paying it. They've paid six months to date. How does that work? Brian: Yeah, we make a claim. Like if, and so we're, we're on top of our rents and our tenants. And it's in our lease that you have to pay all this stuff. And they do. And if they don't we just make a claim immediately. Michael: And how is your claim experience spin with those folks? Brian: We haven't had to make a claim yet. But the person Yeah, the person I learned this from, he turned us on to it. And we're like, what, have you ever made a claim? He's like, Yeah, they paid us in four days. I'm like, done. You know, Michael: Yeah, I'm sold. I gotta go check this company. What's it called? Brian: Say Rhino. Okay. And, you know, we looked into it. I did my research on it. I think they just did another round of fundraising. And we were sold. We've talked to him, they're easy to work with. They won't reject any of your tenants regardless of credit. As long as you approve them, they're approved. So I take it look, yeah, no longer holding escrow and no longer dealing with security deposits. Let them deal with it. And our experience so far has been great. Let's knock on wood. I don't have to use it. But if I do They'll also pay attorneys fees. So, if you have to let somebody Yeah, go make a claim. Michael: Man, this podcast just took a wild left turn, but I love it. I've totally here for it. Brian: Yeah, it's, it's, it's great. And that all goes into ensuring our company, ensuring our tenants making sure everything's taken care of, but also protecting us, because we have put a lot of money a lot of time into these assets. And, you know, we want to protect those assets. Michael: Yeah, no, it makes total sense. Speaking of Brian, let's talk about this topic for a minute, because you're another good person to ask because you have both short term and long term rentals. Do you see a difference in risk exposure between the two and grouping both asset classes in us in the same LLC? Brian: No, I don't. The only risk that you run with short term rentals is the seasonal market. In that, you know, we were just talking about Gatlinburg, you know, and people don't realize that the high season is actually summer in Gatlinburg, and it's not winter, which is kind of weird. But yeah, people don't want to go to cabins in the winter. So you've got to be able to weather those low months. But no, I would keep both assets in the same LLC if it's in the same geographic area for me. Now, that's not to say it's not right for you. And you know, we could also talk about what's best for you. But no, it doesn't matter to me. Because for us, as everything flows up into our tax structure, we've created this, this LLC step tax structure, that everything flows to the top as a pass through. So everything's flown to the top and the parent company pays all the mortgages on everything. So if you have long term rentals that are just, you know, clicking along and you have a week, month, say in Gatlinburg, like we both know that January, February is a week, month in Gatlinburg. You know, there's plenty of money just to go ahead and pay that note. So that's, that's how we do it. And that's what I encourage clients to do. Because you're, you're not really breaching the corporate veil of everything flows up in the parent company's paying for everything. And that's how we structured it. So we're still, you know, adhering to the corporate formalities, respecting those corporate formalities, and everything is paid from the parent company. Michael: Okay, cool. And then from like a legal risk mitigation perspective, short term rental doesn't sound like it poses any additional risk as compared to a long term rental. Brian: No, I wouldn't think so. Because the the management companies and I don't know, if you use the management company, but they have them sign all these documents, and they have their own attorneys, or all these waivers in there, and they have to put a security deposit down, you know, to rent the property and, you know, a cleaning deposit. And there's so many different deposits that we tend to get good renters at all the properties. Michael: Okay. Okay, fantastic. And as someone is thinking about scaling their portfolio into multiple properties, maybe some different asset classes, from an entity structure, is there anything that they should be aware of, or they should be doing differently, if they've already, you know, started using LLC us in the past? Brian: I would stay with LLCs. If you if you turn to like a C Corp, you get the double layer double layer of tax. If you turn to an S corp, I think you're gonna have to deal with more corporate formalities than you are with an LLC, an LLC is very flexible with what you can do with it. I wouldn't go with a partnership, a general partnership doesn't tend to have the protections nor does a limited liability partnership. You really want the corporate structure of the LLC to stay in place. So there is no other entity out there that I would encourage people to use other than the LLC. You know, reasonable minds can differ on that. I wrote a chapter in the book on it. But at this point, I am not advising clients to use any other structure other than the LLC, it's very flexible, it's easy to buy and sell assets through and quite frankly, you know, it's it's easily respected in the state of Tennessee and in other states as well, I'm sure you know, LLCs are just common now, you know, as common now as s corpse were in the 60s 70s 80s and up to the 90s. I would also encourage people to look at Wyoming, Wyoming is on the cutting edge of LLC formation. You know, they recently came out with a new type of LLC that has to do with crypto currencies and blockchain protections. It's it's crazy what they're doing out there. Tennessee follows shortly thereafter and we're all still trying get our heads around it because one, I'm not a crypto guy. I don't know a whole lot about it. But you're starting to deal with like blockchain technology for the way people can vote. It's, it's really fascinating. So I do like Wyoming, I have a Wyoming LLC for one of my assets. And, you know, it's a great state as well. Michael: I dig it. You mentioned your book, let's talk about that for a minute. What's it called? Where can people find it? And what should they expect to find if they get a copy? Brian: Sure. It's, it's called replace your income, a lawyer's guide to finding funding and managing real estate investments. And they can find it on Amazon. Or they can go to www.BrianTBoyd.com. And they can order it through there. So the reason I wrote this book is because I'm having conversations very similar to what we're talking about now, about, how do I form things? What do I form? Why do I form it? Should I put all my assets in one LLC? And this book came about as a compendium of all those conversations I've had over the years with, with clients in real estate investing, how do they get started? How do they find properties? How do they get a loan? You know, what kind of loans are available? What platforms do I use? Do I do I use, Say Rhino? Or do I use Bildium? Or, you know, what's available? How can I do this using technology to leverage efficiency here? And so it's 13 chapters on all of that, including tax benefits, finance tips, how to structure an LLC, what you need to think about when you're putting together an operating agreement? You know, what's the difference between an operating agreement and bylaws? What's the difference between a charter and an articles of organization. I try to break it down. As if I'm talking to my 11 year old son, anybody can understand it. And that's what I want people to know about this book. It's, anybody can invest in real estate. You don't have to be a professional or have, you know, a six figure income, you can be a college student and start house hacking. You can easily you know, get a loan go buy a small two bedroom, one bath apartment somewhere, and get a roommate, move a roommate and then charge them rent and now your house hacking and now your real estate. And so it's possible for everybody. Michael: Yeah, I love it. I love it. Brian, curveball question here. What's the best compliment you've ever received? Brian: That I married up? Michael: Is that Is that a compliment to your wife? Is that a sort of backhanded compliment to you? Brian: It's probably a backhanded compliment to me, but I I, I could not do what I do without my wife, my wife is, you know, she's an inspiration. She basically runs the entire company. She only lets me talk to people if she can't figure it out. And she is the backbone behind this company. And the funny thing is, I had to drag her into real estate investing, I kept telling her about all the tax benefits of this honey, we can, we can make passive income. And, you know, let me tell you about appreciation and depreciation and how we can, you know, offset some of our income taxes. And she didn't believe me. Now, mind you, I have a master's degree and like, I went to school to do this. And I actually did this for a living for years. And somebody handed her Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and she read it and we're lying in bed when I was like, Hey, did you know that? If we did this, we could pay for a car? I was like, yeah, she's like, did you know we could write our phone bill up? I'm like, Yeah, I did. She's like, did you know like, we could buy a computer and write it off in one year? I'm like, yes. I've been telling you this. And she doesn't believe it coming from me, the guy who has two graduate degrees and does it for a living, but she believes it from the guy that wrote the book, and I'm like, Okay, well, maybe I need to write a book and she'll she'll listen to, but she still doesn't listen to me. So it is what it is. But she she runs this company. And you know, I couldn't do without her. So when somebody says, I'm married up, I'm like, Yeah, I did. And I'm very lucky I did. Michael: Amazing. So amazing. Well, Brian, that brings up maybe my last question for you. Before I let you out of here. I think there are a lot of folks probably listening to this that have a partner significant other that aren't interested or aren't involved with a real estate investing, but they would really like them to be or they need them to be. And so you went through this struggle with your wife, how how should people be thinking about bringing their other partner into the fold? Brian: What I would tell them is you don't have to buy the book. You can look online and see the tax benefits of it. Is that You're going to create positive cash flow. And you're going to create tax deductions that's going to offset not only your cash flow, but your current income tax liability. So if you would like to pay less in income taxes every year, look at real estate investing. Look at it. You know, if you decide not to do and it's not for you, okay, don't do it. There are other things you can invest in. But our Congress has codified our public policy of investing in real estate in our tax code. It is there for you to take advantage of, look, when it comes tax time every year, I always kind of get a little tense, but then I'm like, Okay, well, let's go go buy another property. And then we can cost segregate that property, accelerate the depreciation, and create a larger tax deduction for ourselves, and it's not so painful come tax time. I'm sure you know that as well that, hey, we can cashflow this property. And, you know, the government actually is encouraging us to go buy real estate, the government is encouraging you to succeed. And that's all I want for anybody is to succeed. You know, this book, I think it's 19.99. It's a lot cheaper than sitting down with me for an hour. And this is everything I've already talked about with people, and I do on a regular basis. So if your spouse is struggling to get on board with your idea of real estate investing, you know, maybe buy the book for them and show them that, hey, this is possible. You're talking to a guy who worked two jobs to put himself through law school, and then two jobs while I was in graduate school on top of that, and I'm still paying off student loans. But you know what, I paid off a student loan last week. And I did it because we got a refund. That came back to me as a result of the deductions I have through real estate. And the first thing I did with that check was, hey, it's enough. I'm going to pay off that loan. And I did. So it's, it's a real example of how real estate can affect your bottom line. Michael: I love it. That is awesome. And congrats on getting that loan paid off. That's really exciting. Brian: Oh, thanks so much. Michael: You got it. Brian, we're gonna get you out of here. If people want to continue the conversation, learn more about you. What's the best way for them to do so? Brian: They can get in touch with me at the law firm. The website is www.BoydWills.com. And, you know, you can reach out to me on the Brian T Boyd, Facebook page and on Instagram. Michael: Okay, amazing. We'll be sure to do that. Brian. Thanks again for sharing some amazing wisdom man. Appreciate you coming on. We'll talk soon. Brian: Thanks, Michaels. Good to be here. Michael: You could take care. All right, everyone. That was our episode. A big thank you to Brian for coming on and sharing some wisdom about LLCs asset protection, tax benefits and some loopholes that we can take advantage of as real estate investors. As always, if you enjoyed the episode, feel free to leave us a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and we look forward to seeing on the next one. Happy investing
The U.K. Conservatives have elected a new PM, Lizz Truss, who doesn't like to look at solar panels. Battery fires get E-Bikes banned in New York City public housing. California pays poorer people not to own cars. General Motors offers to buy out Buick dealers who don't want to get with the electric future. A word for all the awefull people who fear a green future. California suffers its worst drought in twelve hundred years and you can't put gas in a gas car without electricity. Also this week: Pipeline patrol planes Russia cuts off the gas yet again American Top 40 used to get sent to radio stations on vinyl LPs says Brian Germany offers cheap train passes to offset high energy prices France is looking to cut energy use by 10% which means lowering the thermostat to 19 degrees/66 F. Ethanol plants can give off terrible pollution that is harmful. Tesla Canadian factory rumors. All about Metathesiophobia from a Chevy Bolt owner Feedback on our light pollution episode from May End-of-life batteries from electric vehicles are not likely to be the primary source of recyclable material until the mid-2030s, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence Trump goes on nonsensical rant about electric cars: 'We need to rid of them' Four years of Boston Consulting Group's US electric vehicle sales forecasts, compiled by RecurrentAuto show how bad EV adoption predictions are. Electric school buses in Massachusetts provided energy back to the grid for more than 80 hours this summer, helping to reinforce the grid during some of the hottest summer days when electricity was most in demand. 10 of 13 ‘Flagship' CCS Projects Failed to Deliver, IEEFA Analysis Concludes. Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show. Follow us on TikTok! Check out our YouTube Channel! Follow us on Twitter! Your hosts: James Whittingham https://twitter.com/jewhittingham Brian Stockton: https://twitter.com/brianstockton Email us at cleanenergyshow@gmail.com Leave us an online voicemail at http://speakpipe.com/cleanenergyshow Tell your friends about us on social media! Transcript of this episode (done by A.I.) News anchor: The United Kingdom Conservative Party announced Monday that Liz Trust was selected as its new leader. Lizz Truss: It's an honor to be elected as leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party. And I think one of the most depressing when you're driving through England is seeing fields that should be full of crops or livestock, full of solar panels. Various people: You got to be kidding me. You got to be kidding me. You're kidding me. You're kidding me. You're kidding me, right? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Yeah. Nope. Hell, no. Brian: Hello, and welcome to episode 130 of the Clean Energy Show. I'm Brian Stockton, James: And that must be I'm James Whittingham, and this week, British conservatives have indeed elected their new PM, and she doesn't like the site of solar panels. Oh, Boris. Who would have thought I'd ever miss your puffy ass? And you know, that thing on your head? In a shocking announcement, General Motors offers to buy out any Buick dealers that don't want to sell electric vehicles. It's shocking because I had no idea Buick still existed. I learned a new word that describes everyone you hate on Twitter. And it's not donkey knobbler. Nobler California suffers an unprecedented heat wave and the worst drought in 1200 years. Worst of all, it's become unfashionable to say, but it's a dry heat. All that and more on this edition of the Clean Energy Show. Also on this edition of I hope you're not wearing white, because it's after Labor Day. Brian, the pipeline plane that flies over my house is flying lower than expected. Much lower. Californians are asked not to charge their electric cars. Russia has a clog in their oil pipes again. And a wildfire warning in Alberta reminds people you can't run a gas pump without electricity. First of all, how's your back this week? Yeah, definitely better. I am walking without a cane for the first time. You literally walk with a cane. I was really walking with a cane. You were literally a hobbled old man for a while. Absolutely. But yeah, I think I'm doing okay. Although I will have to probably switch my seating position halfway through the show. All right. As we record this, our whole province of Saskatchewan in Canada is in international news. And I thought it would be weird if we didn't talk about that. Yeah, we've been having all kinds of emergency alerts on our phones night and day of a terrible tragedy that has taken place on the First Nation and around and for a while, the mass killer has been believed to be hiding in the city that we live in. If you listen to the show and you hear us talking about it while you've heard it in the news, and here we are. We're both here. Brian safe and his farm shelter. Our thoughts go to all the victims. And, yeah, it's not too often we make international news, and sometimes it's for good reasons and sometimes not so good. Let's hope for a good outcome and better things in the future. Yeah. So speaking of our hometown, it came up on a podcast this week. So remember when I retired, I said my retirement project was going to be making my own shoelaces? Yeah. So I learned that from a TV show called Going Deep with David Reese, one of the greatest TV shows of all time. I absolutely loved it. It covered things like how to tie your shoes. Fantastic show, right? Anyway, David Reese and John Kimball have a podcast called Election Profit Makers, and it's a humorous podcast about political commentary, American politics. But they go off on a lot of tangents on the show, which is why I like it. And they started talking recently about the old American Top 40 show with Casey Cases. And so I decided to write them a letter. And they read my letter on the show this week, which was a lot of fun for me. And it mentions our hometown, and we have a clip. Clip of another podcast: Brian writes in: Dear Kidmitas and Long John Silver. As a teenager in the early 1980s, my first real job was as the overnight DJ on CK CK, the Top 40 radio station in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. In addition to overnights, I would often operate the American Top 40 show on Saturday afternoons, and it would come in on four vinyl LPs every week. Incredibles per side. I can't believe they used to do the radio shows on records. Yes. Now he says, I managed to keep a souvenir from my time at this station, and that's the complete vinyl set of the 1983 Top 100 Countdown from American Top 40. And he attached pictures along with a picture of the skyline for Regina, Saskatchewan. It's pretty sweet. I'm telling you. Canada, pretty much every city in Canada has a great skyline. James: That one guy sounds like me. And going off on tangent sounds like us. Brian: Yeah, there's a very similar dynamic on the show there, I would say. And perhaps I'm the straight man, you're the funny man. But, yeah, they like to talk about skylines. That's one of the tangents, the aesthetic qualities of city skylines. And so they appreciated the skyline of our city. And, yeah, in their opinion, most Canadian cities have a fantastic looking skyline. And I don't know, I would have to kind of agree. Yeah, sure. They're not bad. I remember somebody from going through town once, I told the story in the show before. I was going to a newspaper conference, a student newspaper conference in Winnipeg. And he went through Johnny, he said, hey, your town looks brand new, because he just drove by to look at the skyline. And it's all glassy towers. At least it was 30 years ago when I was in university. And apparently wherever they were from didn't have that. And the other nice thing about our skyline, it rises out of a completely flat prairie. It's very unusual to have a city built on a completely flat thing. But then the other part of the call so, yeah, it makes me sound super old to be relating this story, but I used to operate the American Top 40 show. It came in on records. They would make a record every week, four LPs. And that's how we would play the show on the radio. That is amazing. In the mail, I guess. I don't remember, but so I have the complete Top 100 countdown from 1983. It was usually meant to be played, like, on New Year's Eve. You start at 04:00 p.m.. The show wraps up at midnight top 100 hits of the year. So next year it'll be the 40th anniversary of this 19 8100. So I've always been ready to have like a New Year's Eve party or something where we play the 1983 Top 100 countdown. But I don't know. Then I'd have to stay up till midnight, which I don't think I would. Oh, that's tough for you. That's tough for you. You'd need an injection of some sort. Yeah. So huge. Thanks to David and John and the election profit makers show. That was a lot of fun. And you can go on ebay and discogs and you can find them for sale. You can buy them. Sometimes I think the one I've got is probably worth a couple of something. Was it like the Casey case I'm talking was on vinyl too? Oh, yeah, everything. So you didn't have to do anything. I would have to insert the commercial break so he would say, and coming up next, right after this and then you'd have to pause the turntable, play the commercials and then start the turntable back up again. Have you ever paused a turntable while it was playing someplace? And I went, don't remember doing that. No. But we used to play songs on carts. They were sort of like eight tracks. That's how all the songs were played on the station. So sometimes there's a few songs that have pauses in them. Like the music stops for a second. So sometimes for fun, we would pause the pause for a little extra. You dirty bastards. On late night radio, screwing is a lot of fun. You rebel. That's funny and weird. So that's our broadcasting heritage here at the Clean Energy Show. Well, that is so weird. Like, you've never mentioned that to me before. That's such a weird thing. I wonder if it was just practical because they could stamp them out at the time. Like nowadays they could stamp a CD, I suppose. Yeah. There were enough stations to play the show. There must have been a lot they would have had to make. Yeah, like 1000 or 2000, maybe, who knows? Well, I was driving into my North Regina subdivision, I guess, made in the late 70s so it's still at the edge of the city. And I saw a plane flying over the subdivision here. From a different perspective, it was the pipeline plane, from a different perspective, wasn't flying over here. I thought the damn thing was landing like it was so low. So I was kind of curious. And I used a flight Tracker 24 software online than in my app to track it sometimes to see where it's going. And it says Calibrated 2100ft, but I thought that was 2100ft because that's where the air ambulance, helicopters fly. It's not, though. It's not above terrain. It's above sea level. And we're 1900ft above sea level. So that sucker is 200ft above the ground. Yeah. And this is the plane. I've got a toy drone, Brian, that almost goes that high. And if I hacked it, it would like it's a very serious subject, but it's not out of the question that anybody could be flying a drone at a couple of hundred feet and run into this airplane, which, by the way, inspects the pipeline for leaks. Yeah. So I did some research on pipeline inspection planes. They call them pipeline patrol pilots. And apparently in the old days, not that long ago, they would fly 50 to 100ft off the ground. Now, I'm sure they wouldn't do that over a city because there would be cell towers and things like that. And by the way, a cell tower is probably that high in some cases, so that's interesting. But somebody died in Edmonton in 2013 doing it because they were taking pictures. Their job is to take photographs and fly the damn plane by themselves. Wow. Well, I remember I made a film one time where we rented a helicopter and we filmed some stuff from a helicopter. And my recollection back then was a thousand feet was as low as the helicopter was allowed to go over the city when we were flying over the city to take some shots. So the pipeline planes must have their own special kind of regulation. It gives us PTSD here, it sounds like World War II because they sound like they're flying right over your head. Incoming. Always yell incoming when it comes to my family, just as a joke. Nobody gets it, but I am using myself. And that's how it goes. That's all that matters. Yeah, this plane just does the pipeline through the small city we live in of 200,000 people or so. Just does that stretch. So it takes off and lands in about less than 15 minutes and it's done its whole work. Wow. The other day, though, I tracked it and it took off and did it twice, and then it took off down the pipeline, which also splits our bedroom community of Emerald Parkwite City diagonally. Just splits it in half. You're on the wrong side of the pipeline. I know, but, well, it's still fun. And there's lots of golfers out there. And I heard on the radio that they're going to stop poisoning the little bastards. They can be annoying, the Richardson ground squirrel, which we have here in abundance, and they will reproduce. They will come into my yard and eat my strawberries and assert themselves and get cocky. I've spent lots of time staring at them and they chirp. They make this high pitched chirp and it's just really irritating after hours. It's kind of bad, like having a really nasty crow around or something. By the way, the crows disappeared. I mentioned that. We started the summer, lost the crows, they're gone. I don't know who shot them or ate them or whatever. So they're gone? Yes, they're moving on. CBC had a new story that perhaps my ears up on California. I guess the government down there asked them to not charge your EVs. Try not to use too much electricity in those key hours. And the key hours are between 04:00 p.m. And 09:00 p.m.. Even electric cars, supposedly a long term solution to fossil fuel usage, are part of this problem. Owners of Tesla's and other Ecars are being asked not to charge their vehicles during that five hour period, prompting some to ask questions about an eventual complete conversion to electric cars. Severn. Vormstein is with the University of California. There's no way we could keep up right now if we suddenly went to 100% clean cars. What do you think of that? Yeah, well, it's annoying because of course we can't immediately switch to 100% electric cars. It's a gradual thing, but there's certainly a number of factors being stacked on top of one another that is turning this into a much more difficult year for energy grids than I think we ever expected. So with California, it's this massive heat wave. They're well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in California and the worst drought in 1200 years. Did you see that? No. This is the worst drought in 1200 years in the western United States. Well, it's been a weird pattern. And I heard somebody say that it was El Ninja. The ocean current was sticking around for a second and possibly third winter. Wow. And that has done weird things. And one of the things is bunched up the systems in North America. So we got this big ridge going way up to Alaska, and that gets hot. And we get hot here in central western Canada. And yesterday was the hottest day on record for Regina for this day. Yeah, it was the second hottest day of the summer. The hottest day of the summer was also in September, where it got to 36 deg. It's crazy. I mean, that's never happened before, ever. I've lived here almost all my life, and I was at a weather geek when I was a kid. I paid attention to these things and yeah, it's weird. So I heat my pool with solar panels, like thermal solar panels, and it's the first time I've ever been in the pool in September without a gas heater in my pool. And it's weird because it doesn't work as well as it does in June. The sun goes down early, and it goes behind trees, my neighbors trees. So the pool itself gets shaded. And it's unpleasant to be in there when you're not in the sun. So it takes a longer time to heat up anyway. It's just weird. Yeah. And of course, the other thing that's happening with a massive drought and this is not just California, but places in Europe is happening, too, is the hydroelectric cannot run at full capacity because they just don't have the water behind the dams that they normally do. So the Hoover Dam, lake Mead. There was another mob body found the other day in Lake Mead. So Lake Mead is the reservoir for the Hoover Dam. Produces lots of hydroelectric power, but it's down to something like 30% of its maximum level now. And so they can't generate as much electricity as normal. And, yeah, they're finding bodies now. The water is so low, they're finding bodies in there that have been there for decades. And the rivers are low in Germany, so you can't transport coal. And the water is too hot to cool some of the nuclear plants in, I believe, France. And now, this isn't a hundred years from now, this isn't 50 years from now. All this weird stuff is happening now. Posing problems for non solar and wind. I would say yes. And the only thing I would mention here is I think we talked about it, but there's a Tesla virtual Power plant pilot project going on in California. So they've run it three times now, and they're probably running it again today. So today is expected to be perhaps the biggest peak of this energy crisis in California. They may have to go to blackouts today in California as we record this because they may not be able to produce enough energy. But anyway, it's not enough to save the grid. But these virtual power plants in California can output up to 50 MW, which is a promising start. Imagine eventually when every home has a backup battery that would be enough to kind of stabilize these problems with the grid. But I thought that was super encouraging. And when called upon, they can all shoot power to the grid at up to 50 MW, apparently. And 50 MW is five times the peak capacity of the solar plant that I visited in Saskatchewan. What are the first ones that came on? The only ones that they're allowing now is 10 MW. So 10 is five times what that is. And that just further illustrates how puny that solar farm from SAS power is. Yeah. So they're expecting rolling blackouts is expected to be 115 deg today in Sacramento. That's 46 Celsius. That would be a record. And people are going to turn on the air conditioners. They're telling people not to charge their electric cars, especially during peak hours. I don't think people do because in California there's like peak energy demand, right? Yeah. I was posting this on Twitter. If you have an EV, you can get a special plan on the grid. There the utility and they'll charge you less overnight. So if you have an EV plan, you pay, I don't know, it's a third or something like that of what the demand is during the day, in the early evening, and then you can charge all you want from eleven on or something. Yeah, and that's a good example of how we are going to adapt and we're not going to switch to 100% electric cars overnight. But that's one of the strategies going forward as we slowly transition to electric. And I should say I think it's like $0.25 overnight. So that's almost twice what we're paying. I guess ours are creeping up too, but twenty five cents per kilowatt hour per kilowatt hour. That's still kind of pricey. It's not like the $0.03 that some places are talking about charging EV owners to charge overnight. But that is one way your neighbors will say, well, the grid can't handle it because they write it out a meme on Facebook, that's BS. If we charged overnight, we have the capacity to meet what the peak demand is and it falls off overnight. And there's lots of buffer there between what overnight use is and what the peak is that you could charge in some grids right now. You could just charge all the electric. If everybody had an electric car, you could charge them all and it'd be fine because they're only charging for a couple of hours too, like at most usually. Yeah. And it's an example of how these grids just need to plan and manage. And just the extreme weather that we're having this year is kind of revealing, maybe, who has done the best planning and who has not. I mean, the governor could have easily said don't cook supper in your oven or don't do a load of laundry. But they went after electric cars and said don't charge them. And very few people are charging them anyway. What they need to do is say turn up your thermostat by a degree or two and just take it easy because the peak we don't want to rolling black. And do your thing if you can, if you want to, and then the industry can help with that as well. They can slow down their shifts at factories or whatever, but yeah, so we'll see what happens if there are in fact, I guess there are 5000 MW short of its power supply, peak demand, that's forecasted by the computers. And that will hit at 05:30 P.m. Pacific, which is a couple of hours after we're recording this. Yeah, we'll see how that goes. Russia has again stopped supplying gas to Germany through the pipeline that we've been talking about over the past few weeks on the show. So again, Russia has said, no more gas for you. Germany, they were trying to build up gas reserves in Germany. And Germany has said finally, that they are still planning to close those three nuclear power plants that are scheduled to close by the end of the year. They're going to go ahead with it, but the kind of compromise is they're going to keep two of them on standby, whatever that means. I guess if they completely mothballed everything, they couldn't start it up again. But they're going to not completely mothball everything and have two of the three on standby until April so that they possibly could be restarted if they need to. There's a remarkable thing that you talked about last week. If you missed last week's show, you might want to go listen to that because there's a lot of stipulations going on with those plants that they have to fix or not fix. And it's a challenge. Yeah. No, I often think about Mad Max. The Mad Max movies, which I love. And it's all based around gasoline because it's the wasteland in Australia and gasoline is the precious resource after society has collapsed. But if we were to have this Mad Max future now, it'd really be solar panels and batteries would be the precious resource. And it's a much, much simpler thing than having to make gasoline and store gasoline or process it or whatever you have to do. And the same thing with nuclear power plants. Like, a nuclear power plant is not going to be much use in a post apocalyptic world because it's too complicated to run. And yeah, so I did enjoy that segment on last week's show. It's not as simple as just deciding to keep a plant open or close it. Nuclear power plants have so many rules and regulations and laws, they would literally have to change the laws in Germany to keep those power plants open. And hats off to the employees of the nuclear power plants in the Ukraine, which are essentially prisoners of the Russians and who have decided, because speaking of not being used in an apocalypse, well, you have to have the expertise there, and they're basically forcing them to be there. It's just a horrible situation. And Brian, speaking of emergency alerts, we've gotten a whole bunch of alerts, but Alberta has some emergency alerts that I'm going to make fun of or at least make light of because Jasper National Park in Alberta straddling the Alberta BC border. It is arguably one of our national park's best areas. It's amazing. So beautiful and less touristy than bank because it's a bit more out of the way. It is experiencing, unfortunately, a wildfire due to the heat wave that we've been talking about. And it was started by lightning. But here's what the CBC news story said about it said before Jasper lost power Sunday evening, the Alberta Emergency Alert System advised residents to prepare for a possible power outage in the town of Jasper, including advising people to fill up their vehicles fuel tank as gas stations rely on electricity. And people come to us and say what do you do with the power comes out? They come up with those parking lots with their EVs and they say what do you do if the power goes out? As if they run out of extension cords. The fact is you charge them and you have hundreds of kilometers of range if the power goes out. And then you drive like you would. And if the gas station has no power, if you had no power, you could drive to where there is power and charge it up if you needed to. Yeah. And Jasper has always had kind of an isolated electricity system because it's in kind of a remote place and I think there's only kind of one power line going in and out. So they have frequent blackouts in Jasper. So perhaps the residents are used to this. But I remember being in Jasper a few years ago and the power was out. It was out for hours. But where did we go? We went to the one restaurant or there was a couple that had generators like this happens frequently enough that this restaurant had a big enough generator to keep themselves running. Well, it's wilderness. It's mountain wilderness. You have power lines that are hard to get to. You have to helicopter people in there. That's a perfect place for a battery backup system when they become available. Yeah, and I think they are working on that. They're running generators to do the well, I think the power is out right now. So if anybody in Jasper is listening to us. Hello. Yeah. So General Motors is going to offer buyouts to their Buick dealers. So this is very similar to a story we had last year where they were offering buyouts to Cadillac dealers. So these are sub brands within General Motors. When they offered it to Cadillac dealers, about 320 out of the 880 retailers accepted the offer. And apparently the buyouts for the Cadillac dealers was in the range of $300,000 to a million dollars a payout to get them to stop selling Buicks or stop selling Cadillacs. And this is because General Motors realizes they have too many dealerships. They cannot go forward with this many dealerships in an electric vehicle future. So this is a sign of the times and good on General Motors for planning for the future like that and we'll see how it goes. So there's about 2000 Buick dealers and they're all going to be offered this deal and some of them will have to go away. And of course switching to an EV dealership is going to be perhaps an expensive proposition. There'd be money involved and so I think this is a buyout, really, for the kind of the smaller dealerships that don't think that they can make enough money off of EVs. As we've discussed many times, they don't need oil changes, they need much less maintenance. It's for those dealerships that just think they don't want to make the effort or spend the money to go to EVs because they don't think it's going to be worth it. My elderly neighbors will be disappointed because they bought a Buick recently. Oh, really? That's what I said to myself. Oh. I didn't know Buicks existed anymore. Yes. I don't know why they don't just shut out the brand. Because the average age of the buyers got to be in their seventy s. Seventy s? How about one hundred eighty s? One hundred. I'm thinking old people who are living in the don't want to buy a Cadillac or a Buick. But you know, the Cadillac lyric is pretty. It checks all the checkboxes. It takes off a lot of things, fast charging range. But maybe I'll end up with just one of those one of these days. Some more news from Germany. So over the summer, they introduced this really interesting deal for cheap rail in Germany. And they did this because of the high fuel prices in Germany. This is really part of the whole strategy energy crisis in Europe. Fuel is just too expensive. And of course, also the more people drive, the more it contributes to greenhouse gasses. So over the three months of the summer, germany offered for $9, which is about €9 a month, a train ticket to go anywhere in Germany. And this has worked really well. It has saved about one 8 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. And yes, people took advantage of this. It makes a lot of sense. And of course, it's not necessarily as possible where we live in the isolated prairies, but when you have a proper rail system, like they do in pretty much all the countries in Europe, why not offer incentives and get people to use it? And it benefits everyone. I wonder if that will spread through Europe just because there's a big crunch coming on energy and maybe that idea will spread and that will also maybe change some people's habits. Yeah, I hope so. And of course, it's also just a bit of a help because gasoline is just so expensive. So it's a way to help out your population and give them a break on the high fuel prices. This is a clean energy show with Brian Stockton and James Whittingham. Brian. The UK finally has a new Prime Minister to replace Mr. Boris Johnson. Right. So, Liz Truss, I haven't seen a picture. What's her hair like? It's more organized, I would say. Definitely more organized. Okay, that's a good sign. It doesn't seem to have a life of its own. It seems fine as every other person in England has normal hair. But not Boris. Yeah, so she's weird. She doesn't like the sight of solar panels. And I think one of the most depressing sights when you're driving through England is seeing fields that should be full of crops or livestock, full of solar panels. The hell is wrong with her? She started as a Social Democrat and she was an anti nuclear activist when she was young, but at some point at university, a switch went off and she became hard. Right. And she's vowed to be a very Conservative Conservative because that's what she campaigned on. I always think it's fantastic when I see a field of solar panels, but also Agravoltaics, which you talk about frequently. You can have both. You can have crops and solar panels. You can have sheep grazing, you can have goats grazing. It's a win win. It's sad that she's insane. It's sad that she's dumb about this, as many people in her party are, but, you know, there's only 14% of Brits are against the net zero plan for us. Johnson 14% of people are against sunny days. That's unheard of. Like, there's a very strong support for clean energy in that zero. Yeah. So that's a weird stand for her to she's making it a sort of culture war, using the climate as a culture war thing. She doubled down on her comments during the leadership campaign that farmers feel shouldn't be full of solar panels, and several Conservative MPs have raised it. And solar farms in the UK currently account for 0.8% of total land use. That's very little land use right now under the government's net zero plan. Solar farms. This is getting rid of climate change, right? Addressing climate change, Paris Accord targets and all that over the next 30 years would be .6% of all land use. About half of 1% of land use would be solar in the UK. And that's not accounting for efficiency improvements as we move forward. We'll need less panels, and maybe there'll be different ways to deploy them. Yeah, it's a strange thing to plant a flag on. Anyway, Brian, I just want to add one thing. Solar energy. UK says that this amount of land use will be less than the amount of land currently used for golf courses. That is the .6% of UK land. And saving the freaking planet is less than golf courses. No. And golf courses are kind of notoriously bad for the environment because they take up so much space for the enjoyment of so few people and they take so many resources to water and maintain those lawns that apologize to golfers. Let's take all the golf courses in the world and just put solar panels on them. That would be great. All right, so, staying in Europe again, European energy crisis. France is looking to cut their energy use by about 10% this year. So, again, energy crunch. France is having problems with their nuclear plants. They aren't able to share as much energy back and forth with other countries like Germany who's having their problems. So coming into the winter, they have said that they want to cut energy use by about 10%. So in the winter, this is going to mean setting your thermostat in your house at about 19 Celsius or 66 Fahrenheit, which is a genuine sacrifice. I would not want to do that. We've been very spoiled of just being able to kind of set the temperature. So 19 would be freezing for me. Yeah. Where am I? I'm around 21, I think. Winter has been so far behind us and yet so close to tennis. But that's up. It's up. When I first moved to this house, I was a 20 degree man. Brian. Yes. Now that I'm old, I'm not making energy anymore in my body. I'm just getting old. I'm supposed to eat less. That's why the seniors menu 55 plus is cheaper at Denny's, because I'm supposed to eat less. Yeah, I don't feel like you feel like you do the same thing I did when I was 20. There's going to be a lot of sweaters sold in France. That's all I got to say about that. Yeah, get into the sweater business and Brian from the Nebraska examiner and I know you have subscription, Brian. Do you have a subscription to that one? No, but next time I'm on the PressReader app, I will look for the Nebraska shout out to the Nebraska examiner staff. A southwest Iowa ethanol plant has been ordered to pay $10,000 fine for its repeated air emissions of excessive cancer causing compounds in the last five years. I live near an oil refinery, heavy oil operator refinery. And I complained about the smell and I told you that there's an author and a team of journalists looking at that over four years and they're looking to go to ethanol and stuff like that and biofuel fuel for planes and stuff like that. They're trying to diversify and there's even canola crushing plants going up around it. But this proves to me the reason why I mentioned it is that even these plants can have horrible emissions like formaldehyde. This plant was spewing out formaldehyde and other byproducts of its fermentation process that are known to have adverse health risk like cancer. So actual harm to the environment and public health may have occurred since this order from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and due to the amount of pollutants that were and are being admitted. So, yeah, it's just something to keep in mind when you think that, oh, good, your refinery is going bio. It can be bad for you as well if you live near one. Yeah, no, I've never been a fan of the bio fuels. It's a stop gap that we probably don't need. Okay. So rumors are heating up about a possible Tesla factory here in Canada. Public companies have to disclose their lobbying efforts. So Electric and others have reported on this. Apparently Tesla is looking at Quebec and Ontario for some type of factory. I mean, it could be a car factory, could be a battery factory, could be both, who knows? What's your bet? Where's your bet going right now? I'm thinking it will be a car factory, and I'm thinking Quebec. There is a long history of not only automobile production in Ontario and Quebec, but also mining a lot of the minerals. And of course, Tesla is trying to local source as many of the minerals and metals and stuff needed for electric cars for the batteries. So, yeah, best case scenario, a battery and car plant. And I'm leaning towards Quebec, but that's really just a guess. I'm leaning towards not being a normal car plant. Like not XYZ three, not a full blown thing. No, it could be batteries or it could be something weird like cyber trucks and semis. That's my guess. Yes. Because they both take up a lot of batteries. So maybe they'll just make the batteries for those two things and I don't know, they'll be able to transport them to the east coast because that's kind of one of the challenges of the Texas plant, is having to transport all that stuff to the other half of the country and the eastern half. Yeah, and like I say, there's a huge history of doing this. Like all the major car brands have factories or have had factories in Ontario and Quebec, in Canada. So clearly there's a decent reason to do it. If others have done it, then probably it'd be a work for Tesla. And on the Great Lakes, that's a port. That's access to a port. So if you wanted to ship to Europe, that's another option. Yeah, it's not just the eastern part of North America is a shorter shipping route to Europe where a lot of these things are going to be bought over the next little while. So, once again, I know I mentioned this a lot, but I was on the Chevy Bolt user group that is largely the United States. There's so many people there compared to Canada. That is a post every couple of minutes and it eats up my Facebook feed, but I always find it interesting. Brian there's a guy named Randy Moffatt, which is interesting because I went to high school with the person with that name and the fear of change. This is something that he pointed out in a Facebook post talking about all the hate that EV owners were getting. And so he came into this and he said, the fear of change has a word, it's called oh God. Meta the SEO phobia. No. You do. Finland pronunciations. Why can't you do this? No, I think you did it slowly, but you did it above. So it is the fear of change. And I hadn't heard of this one before. Have you heard of that? One. I've heard lots of phobias. Yeah, this is basically what's going on in the world. If you were looking at Facebook hate and people uncomfortable with DVS. So why do they give a crap? I mean, you could say, well, they're forced to in 2035 or in California and other places, but that's not really a pressing issue right now. It's not here before us. Why do people hate on EV so much? And it is a fear that people are going through, a fear of change. And the fear of change is evolutionary in humans. Our internal predispositions teach us to resist change, mainly to always feel in control. So these people are feeling out of control on these people who like to feel in control the most in our comfort zone. Yeah. And of course, it isn't just a hatred of EVs. It's just a reaction to people are scared about getting off fossil fuels, which seems like a weird thing to us because it's a whole new dawn of a fantastic new day. It's nothing but good news getting off fossil fuels. But yeah, people are just scared about change. And you see it a lot in Alberta, our neighboring oil province, where people are just absolutely dead set on sticking with what they know, which is oil and gas. Here's a quip from YouTube. We are all afraid of the uncertainty that comes with change. We would rather things be not so great then go through the risk and process of change. This specific phobia can reduce one's will to live. So this is pretty extreme. Wow. The phobes who have this often feel like they have no control over their lives on the cost and changes. She tends to live in the past and may also be depressed. So there you go. Therefore, you make them unwilling to move. So Randy says on this Facebook post, I became interested in computers in the early 1970s and learned a program so that's very early, like, very few people were doing it back then. I was always on the cutting edge of technology. The amount of hate was palatable with people accusing me of being a Satanist. Randy S from the States, where there's lots of, you know, Baptists and religion and stuff, people said they would never own one. This is a computer. Okay, yeah. So we are going through this again. He says. However, now the government is issuing mandates for this transition to EV is making the fear even worse. When I got my first EV almost nine years ago, I had neighbors calling me crazy. My next door neighbor said he would never own one. Last weekend he told me he just ordered his third. So be patient, be nonconfrontational, just set a quiet example and someday, just like computers, they will figure it out. And I thought that was a great post. I wanted to share with their listeners. This happens all the time. Like, I follow photography and cameras and stuff. And there's a move now from optical viewfinders to electronic viewfinders and cameras, and it's progressed enough that people have accepted it. But two or three years ago, you had people just hatred for electronic viewfinders on cameras. Like, people just hated the idea of it, and one by one, they're all moving to it. It happened too quickly for them to comprehend. I don't know. As soon as I found out about it, I thought it was fantastic, and I couldn't wait to switch. So, yeah, this is definitely a mindset. Conservatives versus progressive. I had one on a point and shoot camera 15 long time ago, a lot of years ago in the digital camera age. Didn't care for it, of course. They weren't focused. You couldn't do anything. I'm sure they're getting a lot better, and I've not actually used one myself. It was very clear to me early on it was the way of the future. But, yeah, people just take much longer, generally speaking, to catch on. All right, let's stick it to the mail bag. The user feedback this week comes from Doug in Colorado, who wrote about our May 2 show. Doug, you're behind. You put a lot of catching up to do. Take some time off work if you have to. Binge listen our show. So he says to us, thank you for highlighting the problem of light trespass from harsh, glaring Led street light fixtures. And he says an excellent resource is the International Dark Sky Association. They have everything people need to know about light pollution, including model lighting ordinance. And also, thanks for coming to Ups. Replacement gasoline, mail delivery, van, contract debacle. Hoping canada learns from the United States. US is making big mistakes and hopefully pushes Canada to do much better. Yeah, so I vaguely remember talking about Led lighting back in May. That was a long time ago. Led lighting, I think what we said at the time, it's a fantastic opportunity to upgrade things and make it better and reduce light pollution. But since Led lights are still kind of new technology, a lot of the designs aren't great. Cities don't quite know how to implement them yet. And yeah, a lot of the times they're just too harsh. But, yeah, my pet peeve is the brightness. We have the ability now to put them on timers and control the brightness. So street lights could come on at full power, kind of in the dusk times, and then you could eventually back those off at three in the morning, just turn all the street lights down. And if you've ever been out in the middle of the night, you don't need a whole lot of light to see once your eyes are adjusted. I'm surrounded by a ridiculous amount of light pollution. I'm thankful that they changed the street lights in our neighborhood here to Led that have a slight warmth to them, and they're less bright than the previous, I would say overall they disperse them better, and they even that out, and that's fine. However, my neighbor across the street, across the boulevard, he's the person with the police stickers all over his house, he's scared of getting killed. And he's got this bright white LEDs just glaring on his property like a landing strip for an airport. And then across the Pipeline Field, which is, I don't know, 50 meters across, 50 yards across, there's another guy who has a giant white light in his backyard, and it shines, and I can see the gophers and anything going around in the night. And then there's a school there as well, which is further away from me, but they have this anti never do well lighting to keep people from doing things there, because people do do things. But it's blindingly bright, and it shines in my drapes, and it's a long ways away, and it's light pollution. And all these lights that I speak of are not on the spectrum of warmth. So they're the bluer side, and they bounce, and those are the wavelengths that bounce up into the sky the most. And I think I talked about this on the show, but I've got a street light just right outside of my house. And a couple of years ago, the ball went out, and it was the greatest, because I don't want that giant street lamp shining in my windows at night. It was so great. I was very disappointed when they should have rented a bucket truck and went up there and put some tape over it just a little put in a low wattage bulb. And also yesterday I was coming home from Home Depot and I saw two pickup or two trucks with Amazon delivery vehicles on them, like there was four Amazon Delivery Prime trucks, the kinds that look like the EVs that they're coming out in the States. So, of course, I went and checked them out and saw the giant tailpipes on them. Was very disappointed. But they looked those four transit vans converted, and they should look they should be EVs, and they're not. We don't have those around here. We have a third party delivery service, don't we, in Virginia? No, it hasn't been great for electric sort of trans advance around here. Yeah, but there was one place remember last week we talked about a place in Saskatoon? They got one for delivering at a bakery, and it's just and they're saving money, handover it's free. They said there's paying for the payments to save money. They save for the payments for the new vehicle. So how great is that? And of course, we'd love to hear from you. So right now, get out your pen. Get out your typewriter. Cleanenergyshow@gmail.com. Write us with an angry letter. Tell us when we're wrong. Tell us when you agree or disagree with us. We're on Twitter. We're on TikTok Clean Energy Pond as our handle. And don't forget to check out our YouTube channel for all kinds of things going on. We got two YouTube channels. I dare you to find the second one that has the audio on the podcast. Probably can't do it. Leave us a voicemail@speakpipe.com cleanenergyshow. You know, it's been ages since anybody left us a voicemail at SpeakPipe, so be fantastic if somebody did that. Yes, we'll mention your name and your birthday. So mention your birthday. We'll mention your birthday. Here we go. Brian. The Clean Energy Show Lightning Round, where we breeze through the headlines and end the show on a fast pace. End of life batteries from electric vehicles are not likely to be the primary source of recyclable material until the mid 2030, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Yeah, I think we talked about that last week of the week before that. It's going to be a very slow ramp up because electric vehicle batteries are just lasting way longer than people thought. Our friend Donald Trump has gone on a nonsense, cynical rant about electric cars the other day at a rally. He says we need to get rid of them. The story was on electric and we have a clip, but I'm not going to play the man, okay? I said to myself, how can we cover this and not hear his stupid freaking voice? You already said his name. Which gives me I'm sorry. I like how Steven Colbert does it. They have Twitter. People come up with nicknames, which always makes for him every. But this is very similar to the British PM with the rant about solar panels is kind of the same thing. This is trying to make it into a culture war type of issue. Well, speaking of Britain, I had a computer read his text in a posh British accent. So here it is. A friend of mine wanted to do something for the environment. He went out and bought an electric car and he made a certain trip, I won't say from where, kentucky. And he is a good person. He wants to do what's well, and now he understands, hey, not so good. He bought an electric car and he made the trip often from Kentucky to Washington. And he made it. He would drive down, put the car away and drive back. He was getting like 38 miles per gallon. It took me more time to charge in the damn car than I could spend in a drive in. It took me two and half times. My name is Donald J. Trump, and I'm an idiot. A complete and total idiot. Please enjoy listening to the Clean Energy Show. Hopefully Brian isn't drunk this week. Okay, well, that was a bit added on at the end there, but you get the idea. It makes no sense at all. Yeah, and we all know electric cars work great for road trips. They do. And the author of that electric piece, Freslinber, pointed out that he went from New Orleans up to Quebec, didn't have to stop for more than 30 minutes and he had to dine anyway. I had to eat something and go to the bathroom and stretch his leg. Yeah, it wasn't an inconvenience at all for him and his Tesla. Yeah. With the caveat that the Tesla charging network is definitely the best and the third party charger is maybe not as good and you might still have some issues there. Have you heard of Boston Consulting Group before? Often it is quoted in the news on different things. It is a major consulting group. So four years. This is four years of Boston Consulting groups. US. Electric vehicle sales forecasts. This is something that Wall Street relies on, consulting groups like this. And this is an evolution of how their forecasts have changed. We talked about this type of thing on the show, that people are always revising their forecast and we could have told them differently. So in 2018, they said 21% of sales will be EVs in 2030. This is the United States. Two years later, they said, Oops, 26. Year after that, 42. That's a big jump. And then this year, they're now saying 53%, which is a lot more common. And even that is like, we doubt that. We think it's going to be more than that. Things are going to tip. This is an S Curve adoption, and we're at the steep part of the S Curve. This is going to go up way faster than people think. Just think back to when smartphones were first introduced and everyone's like, that's kind of a weird thing. And then you blink and a couple of years later, everybody had a smartphone. And that's how fast it goes. You're looking at the chart now on our script. Look at where it levels off. It levels off between 55 and 75%. Yeah, they're still kind of doing it wrong. They're still underestimate. Curves of adoption don't level off until around 90%. Like color TVs, cell phones, stuff like that, when the last 10% is the hard to get. Yeah. And I will say, like, manufacturing cars, electric cars, is a lot more difficult, probably, than manufacturing something like a smartphone. So it maybe won't go as quickly as the smartphone, but it is going to go fast. From carbon tracker. Just over 30 solar installations are being carried out every week in Britain, and that is up from 1000 a week just two years ago. So it's tripled the home. That's a lot. The home solar installations have tripled in two years. That's crazy time for CS. Fast fact hawaii produces more renewable energy than all of Canada. Were you sitting down for that? Oh, yes. Your posture is excellent this week, by the way. I'm happy to see your back is better. Yeah, I haven't had to change position, but yeah, we reported a couple of weeks ago they got their last shipment of coal for their last coal fired electricity plant. And that plant did close down just the other day. So that's great. So, yeah, the regulatory consequences are clear. If utilities fail to meet their renewable targets, they are forced to pay penalties, which must be covered by company, the shareholders, and rather than the taxpayers. And that's the way it should be. That should be the lesson for everybody. The shareholders should have to cover it, not the ratepayers. Electric school busses in Massachusetts provided energy back to the grid for more than 8 hours this summer. That is a lot of hours of emergency heat wave protection from buses that weren't doing anything because they are electric. They were sitting around all summer. And this is a great use case in the United States where they have less severe winters, but summer heat waves need that grid backup. And those electric buses which are just starting to trickle in, really, for schools, are there and useful. So that's awesome. Fantastic. Ten of 13 flagship CCS that is carbon capture and Sequestration Rhine SEQUEST projects failed to deliver, according to IEFA analysis, and that's 50% of goals haven't even been reached. And that's what our boundary dam they mentioned. The boundary dam is the first thing they mentioned right here in this catch one. Yeah, we had one of the first carbon capture on a coal plant, and they have captured some carbon, but nowhere near what they thought they were. Mars Technica ebike battery fires are pushing New York City towards a ban in public housing. That is, public housing is banning ebikes. This is quite disturbing, but so is the reason why so poorly made cells, tough work and lack of space, I guess, in these places, are causing deadly rise of fires. A deadly rise of fires in the New York City. That was a lot. I mean, laptops can do that, too. Ebike battery is made up of dozens of individual AA sized batteries wired together and managed by a battery management system. And you were talking last week how you were told that you have to unplug. You can't just keep charging us. Maybe that's the reason. Yes. My ebike doesn't have a battery management system, so you're not supposed to leave it plugged in. But yeah, I could see where this could turn out to be a huge problem. By the way, my partner shops at Shoppers Druckmart, and they had an ebike in there for $250 for the weekend, but it was just this tiny little thing that didn't have pedals, it just had spikes to put your feet on. Yes. Anyway, that's interesting. Sometimes those things are mismanaged. The charging is mismanaged, the faulty, they are damaged, they're waterlogged. But a five year old was killed in a fire, and it's very tragic. And just be careful. If you have an ebike battery, don't read the manual and be aware that you're not supposed to leave it. In many cases, you're not supposed to leave them charging indefinitely, but they're not inherently dangerous either. But anything that is a battery that charges I mean my charge and lead to acid battery in my house for my RV. So you got to be careful. Washington Post amid a bonanza of measures passed to cut the state's carbon emissions in California as fast as possible, the legislature in California approved $1,000 refundable tax credit to poor Californians who don't own vehicles. So it's paying people not to own vehicles if you are poorish. I might even qualify. It will head to the desk of Newton soon and he's going to sign it. He's expected to sign it. The bill offers the tax credit to single filers earning up to $40,000 in joint filers up to $60,000 who live without personal cars. And you can get it whether you make a lot of tax money or not. And you can just get that $1,000 regardless. Yeah, that sounds great. And maybe that's something we'll start to see other places. I've heard the concept before, but this is the first time I've seen it getting passed. Another CS fast Fact from Nat bullard from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. There are 148,026 convenience stores in the United States. OK, 148,000. What he's saying is look out. Change is coming. And Brian, that is our time for this week. It's been fun as always. Glad you're feeling better. We'd like to hear from you. Remember, contact us at cleanenergyshow@gmail.com and all the rest of the places. And if you're new to the show, remember to subscribe to get our podcast cast every week, and we'll see you next time. See you next week.
“Selling any kind of knowledge or expertise is completely different than selling a shoe. When you sell a shoe, use a physical object, you're talking about the attributes of the object, is it the right size, the right color? Does it have the right fit, and you're judging the shoe. And even if you don't like this one shoe by Nike, you don't hate Nike, you just don't like this shoe, right? So it is abstracted already. When you sell knowledge and expertise, it feels very, very close to who you are right? And when someone rejects you, it can feel like they're rejecting you, not your offering.” - Chris LemaWatch this episode on YouTubeChris Lema:Chris's Website: chrislema.comChris on Twitter: @chrislemaBrian Casel:Brian's company, ZipMessageBrian on Twitter: @casjamThanks to ZipMessageZipMessage (today's sponsor) is the video messaging tool that replaces live calls with asynchronous conversations. Use it free or tune into the episode for an exclusive coupon for Open Threads listeners.Quotes from this episode:Quote 01:Chris Lema:Any kind of knowledge or expertise is completely different than selling a shoe when you sell a shoe. You sell a physical object. You're talking about the attributes of the object the right size the right color, and does it have the right fit? And you're judging the shoe. And even if you don't like this one shoe by Nike, you don't hate Nike.You just don't like this shoe, right? So it is abstracted already. When you sell knowledge and expertise it feels very, very close to who you are, right? And when someone rejects you, it can feel like they're rejecting you, not your offering. And that can be painful. It's also difficult to know how you sell, right?How do you close the deal when it's abstract and there's nothing to show? Like you don't have the physical shoe. Right. And my answer to that is forever, right? Has been you needed to use a story or narrative? You need to be able to tell, you know, rapid versions of case studies. Here's what here's where they were and here's what happened at the end you need to be able to tell prediction stories.Here's what you're about to experience, whatever, because that makes you feel like a magician. But the most important part of that is you're not going to close those deals on email. You're not going to close those deals on the phone. You're going to need to get on video because people are buying someone they can trust. They're buying someone that they feel good working with if it's like their movie product is the communication, is the relationship, right?Yep. And they may there be 100 coaches and the bottom line is they got to be comfortable with you, right? They got to feel like I would like you on my team. I want you on my team.Quote 02:Chris Lema: Product strategy isn't just let's go build stuff. It's about what you say yes to and what you say no to. More often than not, saying no is what's really critical because saying no allows you the freedom to have the time to go say yes to something valuable. And then and then you go, Okay, let's go from here. What I will tell you as a coach is right now all of my frameworks. So files are Dropbox links, right? And you can imagine if you're a coach wanting to be able to load up, which makes Zipmessage stickier. If I say, oh, I've loaded all my frameworks in here so that I can share a ZM link, but that also means, oh gosh, I don't want to leave that message because it has all my stuff already preset.Brian: Yeah, right. Chris Lema: And so things that make it stickier, having that file archive that allows me to share in my frameworks easily becomes interesting.Quote 03:Chris Lema: Different clients function differently. Some will come and say, I want to grow in this way or I want to drive this specific change and then we'll go, okay, so let's break out how we do that. And I will tell you, okay, you need to do A before being B, before C and C before D. And so that's what we're going to cover over the three months.Others will come in saying, listen, I've talked to these other people. They say that you're the most indispensable part of their team. I want you on my team. What things can you cover? I rattle off 20 things we can cover. They go, Are these three feel important right now? So we go into those three for a period of time, and then they're like, Hey, let's talk about this other one now, and then let's talk about this other one.And we just keep moving, right? But it's because what I promised them upfront is that they're not going to go through a coaching program. So I am not against other people. There are other people that have very specific models. Right. And that model maybe I have a coaching program at 16 weeks and each week we're going to talk about something.
“There are basically two things in my life that have held my interest for longer than anything else. One is music, and the other is programming. And I think they're actually kind of the same in an important way. And the thing that makes them the same is what I think keeps me interested in them, which is that they are both rigorously analytical and creative at the same time.” - Ben OrensteinWatch this episode on YouTubeBen Orenstein:Ben's Company, TupleBen on Twitter: @r00kBrian Casel:Brian's company, ZipMessageBrian on Twitter: @casjamThanks to ZipMessageZipMessage (today's sponsor) is the video messaging tool that replaces live calls with asynchronous conversations. Use it free or tune into the episode for an exclusive coupon for Open Threads listeners.Quotes from this episode:Quote 1:Ben: He raised my mom and her sisters and like a household, there was a lot of singing, singing. It was a big part of them. And also they are there's a big chunk of my mom's family as Welsh and Wales have like a big singing culture to it as well. Hmm. So the end result was I grew up in a household where singing was just a common thing.Brian: Um, so the family is just like breaking out in song.Ben: Just kind of. Yeah, like we were just, yeah, my mom would sing stuff. She would sing songs to me. We would sing songs together. Like, we would sing a cappella Christmas carols at Christmas School. Um, there's like a lot of, a lot of singing going around. Um, and when I was pretty, I was probably like eight maybe. Maybe even younger.Brian: Um, my parents put me on piano lessons, so I was like, getting exposed to piano from a pretty early age, and I studied for that for maybe four or five years.Brian: You know, my mom forced me to, to start with piano lessons, and I, I was, I sort of had a good feel for it, but I also hated going to lessons, and I, and I wasn't really into learning classical stuff, but, like, looking back on it, like, as a foundational instrument, I feel like you can't do better than piano because you're like, literally looking at music theory, like on the keyboard, you know?Ben: Yeah.Brian: And now with my, my daughter is eight years old and she's getting into a piano, and like, I'm teaching her a thing or two on guitar, too, but like it, a lot of that doesn't make sense until you get a feel for a piano. I feel like, you know.Ben: Yeah.Brian: It's a great start.Ben: It's so yeah, it has, like, a nice visual element to it where it's like, you can kind of see the intervals in front of you, and they get wider and smaller and. Yeah, I still sort of thing, like, I think even when I'm a sight reading vocal stuff, I think I'm still kind of translating it to a piano in my head.Brian: Yeah, for sure.Quote 2:Brian: And you know, it's such a weird thing with music, how it runs in the family. Ben: Mm-hmm. Brian: I mean, it's and it's so crazy, like, literally see it. I mean, my grandfather, you know, was he directed an orchestra, you know, and then and then my... mom and other grandfather played piano a little bit. I had a pretty natural feel for it from the beginning with both piano and guitar.Brian: And then now with my daughter. And she's only learning the very basics of, of like in terms of, like, lessons, but she's in there making up her own songs and just has such a natural ear and feel for it. Like, you could just see it from day one. And it's just incredible to see, you know, it's like literally in the genes, you know, I just like something about it.Ben: Go back and I go back and forth between how much of that is like inherent versus your exposure. Like, if you do think there's a lot to like about growing up in a household where you get piano lessons at a single-digit age. Yeah. And then lo and behold, you're 15. You're like, oh yeah, I have a knack for music.Ben: It's like, well, you know, you invested hundreds of hours before you're even a teenager. Like, I know there is no certainly is. You know, there's some of it, right? Like something if there's a natural ability on there, too.Brian: For sure. And I think the lessons and practicing go along. I also think that just listening like being exposed to hearing lots and lots of music on a daily basis, is yeah, is a huge, huge one. You know.Quote 3:Brian:With my work, I'm always thinking about the future or whatever it might be or worrying about this or that. With that, it's like, I mean, I'm in a zone and I've tuned out and I'm just playing. And just the sheer number of hours of being in that state makes you a better player, you know?Ben:Mhm. Yeah. I think it's, I think to do music well you have to be in the moment. So it is kind of meditative like that or like it has an effect on your brain. Like unless you'd, I'm just like hopelessly distracted by something really significant. If I am performing and singing or something like I am paying attention to what's going on because you have to keep paying attention to what's happening.To do it well at all. I think there's, so there are a few things that I get out of music. What is it that I really enjoy? I enjoy performing. I enjoy putting on a performance. Like, to me, being on stage is really gratifying. Making something impressive or interesting or moving to happen on a stage I find just, like, really enjoyable. I like giving the audience a cool experience that feels really fun to me. I like being proud of the thing I put out there. Um, but there's also this other thing that I've been kind of on for a while. Um, I noticed that there are basically two things in my life that have held my interest for longer than anything else.One is music and the other is programming. Yeah. And I think they're actually kind of the same in an important way. And the thing that makes them the same is that what I think keeps them keeps me interested in them, which is that they are both uh, rigorously analytical and creative at the same time. Brian: Yeah.100%.
“Being able to immigrate to another country ever. It's very hard. And it's very complicated. And, as an American, I think we just often don't have any concept of it.” - Laura Roeder Watch this episode on YouTubeIn this conversation:Laura Roeder:Laura's Company: PaperbellLaura on Twitter: @lkrBrian Casel:Brian's company, ZipMessageBrian on Twitter: @casjamThanks to ZipMessageZipMessage (today's sponsor) is the video messaging tool that replaces live calls with asynchronous conversations. Use it free or tune into the episode for an exclusive coupon for Open Threads listeners.Quotes from this episode:Quote 1:Laura: Yeah. It's like once we got here, we just loved it. You know, sometimes a place clicks and you're like, okay, this is. This is the place for us. I mean, I love not living in America.And, you know, Brighton was just an hour south of London. So you can still go to London for events and theater and stuff like that. But Brighton is pretty small, like when you. What I love is if I meet someone in Brighton, I can walk to their house. It's just like it's dense. It's not that big. It's on the seafront, but it's big enough that there's still tons of, like, shops and restaurants and stuff like that.It's known as a kind of, like, creative place Yeah.Brian: Yeah. Super cool. We did, like, around the country, Airbnb thing. We had our first, uh, our second. We were pregnant, like, on our way back. We were like, All right, now we have No. Two. Looks like took it back to Connecticut, but we were sort of like, toying with the idea of, like, settling somewhere else. Maybe Austin and maybe Colorado.We just came back here because, my parents are here and having, like, the local babysitter is so huge.Laura: Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean, what once you have kids, you understand why everyone just, like, moves back to their parents?Brian: Yeah, exactly.Quote 2:Brian: I was going to ask about the... This might be super boring but I like the process of moving abroad. I mean, I guess your husband is... is a citizen. Yeah.Laura: Yeah.Brian: And like, getting the visa and everything was like, I probably not. I mean, you don't need a visa.Laura: But. Oh, you are so wrong. It is so hard. So, yeah, I had no idea. I had no idea about this before. A lot of people think that you just, like, marry someone from another country, and then you can just go to their country. That is 0% of how it works. That's not how it works at all. I thought that, too.So one I mean, so you can so if you marry someone from the UK, you can apply to be a British citizen. It's an extremely expensive process. It's an extremely long process. You're not... The way it's designed is actually to have you living in separate countries like we ended up traveling, so we didn't have to do that. But it's like, what?Like, so it's designed that one person has to be there already because the person who's the sponsor has to prove that they can provide an income for the other person, which is also crazy. So like if one of you were a stay-at-home parent, like women often are, right? Like, so if the mom was the British one and you had a baby and the, you know, the guy was the income earner, that wouldn't work, they'd be like, Nope, too bad for you.Like Mom's mum's going to get a job and has to show the W-2 earnings. And that's if you're from like a quote-unquote good country that they like. There are lots of countries, so they're just like, no, we don't like the likes of you. We're not going to let you come or like, God forbid, you have some sort of criminal history.Like if you sold marijuana when you were 20, good luck being able to immigrate to another country ever. It's very hard and it isn't very easy. And yeah, as an American, I think we just often don't have any concept of it.Quote 3:Laura: In America. Schools have started starting really early in the morning. Does your kid's school do that?Brian: They're in kindergarten and then second grade, and they're going to school around the bus, picking them up at like 7:40 a.m.Laura: Yeah, that's so, so 7:40. So, so many kids in America just don't get enough sleep. It's just like literally impossible. The math doesn't work out. I mean, maybe when they're little, they can, but not if they're older and they have to be off the bus, you know, at seven 40. Like, if you get up at seven, it's like a mad dash.Brian: I would imagine it. It's crazy sleeping, though. I mean, they're like sleeping by like 8:30 p.m. So they're getting like 11 almost twice sleep sometimes. But like crazy. I mean, what else about like kids? Well, I guess they're really like growing that have a UK accent. So like they, they, I was going to ask about like being like a foreigner in a country as a, as a child, right?Like I had a friend who had moved to France but like the kids were you know, they grew up part of their lives in America. Anything like that sort of like come into play with was like growing up and.Laura: Well, my kids are not foreigners. I am. Yeah. You know, but they don't really have any kind of identity like that, especially of course with the language being the same. So they're not, of course, having to learn a new language or speak a new language. I did realize the other day that they'll have British accents as adults, which kind of blew my mind like I'm used to it now.Then I was imagining my daughter being like, 25, but I'm like, Oh, she's just going to be like a full-blown English person, which does seem a little bit funny to me. But I mean, the language thing makes it so much easier. It's and this is another thing Americans just don't realize, like, learning another language to the level where you can have friends in that language is literally like a ten-year process.There's a huge difference between being able to go to a shop and having friends that you're like making jokes and cultural references. I mean, even here a lot of things are called different things. And just little things like especially at school, they're like, oh, we're having a tombola, what is a tombola? And then they said, Oh, you bring a bottle.And I was like, Of alcohol, like, I actually I'm still not sure because you bring a bottle of something and it's I think it can be like shower gel or something. And then you like when a bottle. But I'm like, can it be alcohol or is that in poor taste? I don't know. But there's, yeah, there's just a lot of little things like that that like, I'll have to text someone and be like, explain to me how this works.
Ben Orenstein joins me to talk all about before being “known on the internet”"Being next to a person who cares a lot about the craft of programming was really what turns me into a software engineer like someone who can make it a happen for real" - Ben OrensteinWatch this episode on YouTubeBen Orenstein:Ben's Company, TupleBen on Twitter: @r00kBrian Casel:Brian's company, ZipMessageBrian on Twitter: @casjamThanks to ZipMessageZipMessage (today's sponsor) is the video messaging tool that replaces live calls with asynchronous conversations. Use it for free or tune into the episode for an exclusive coupon for Open Threads listeners.Quotes from this episode:Quote 01:Ben: My dad was also in sales in the high-tech industry. He worked for AMD the chip maker for most of his career. And so that was actually really nice because he was in the tech industry, I got into computers at a young age, like we had a computer at our house before. A lot of people did, I think.And yes, I discovered at a quite early age that I was obsessed with this particular thing and wanted to play with it all the time.Brian: That's cool. Yeah. I mean, my dad wasn't in the tech industry, but he was sort of like, you know, one of the like the early like early adopters of computers getting really excited about it. So, you know, like the old school, like Prodigy Service and.Ben: Oh, yeah, yeah. Prodigy, yeah. Yeah. I forget sometimes that, that was like - really that was lucky. I had a lucky break there was exposed to this thing early on.Quote 02:Ben: College is really fun. I think you should probably go. There are not a lot of times where you're going to get to do what you get to do in college, and it's an amazing life experience, so you should probably do it from that perspective. Try not to go into a ton of debt to do it because it's probably not worth that unless you're in a... I mean, if you're a major in computer science, you can probably pay off your loans to probably be successful there.But I think you should mostly like my opinion of college is like it's mostly a boondoggle financed by your parents slash the government. And so you should like go and have that incredible experience because it is really fun and like living by yourself for the first time, it's great. So I think there's a lot of lessons and like enjoyment to be had there, but if you're not that into that idea and you're just like, I want to know how to like make it make things like I would, I would say like a computer science degree is probably the slowest path to that And like a boot camp is going to be a much betterthe choice for you. Brian: Yeah, for sure. I agree with that.Quote 03:Ben: In terms of like workflows or skill sets that kind of unlocked super powers that lasted the rest of your career like that. Like, for me, that's one of them was like the ability to, figure out how to build something, you know? Hmm. It's hard to break it down I mean, I learned so many. I feel like I basically went from programming because it's like I touched on there really was not that much programming in my computer science degree.There was some, but not a lot Um, I was doing some programming at Meditech, but not like, not any sort of modern programming. And so when I joined this place, it's called Dana-Farber. It's a cancer research institute, but I joined Dana-Farber. I was actually writing Ruby-on-Rails app next to somebody kind of all day long, and we would like like a program like, like, I would plug a keyboard into his computer and we would sit next to each other, and we were like, tackle things together.And he would review all my play requests and gave me a ton of feedback and, um, being right next to a like person that cared a lot about the craft of programming and knew a lot about it was really what actually turned me into. Like a software engineer, like someone who could make something happen for real because there's like, there's, there's like 5000 things around programming that are involved to like, actually like get a product out the door.And so it's not just like, do you understand Ruby syntax? Do you know what the object hierarchy looks like? It's like, yeah, sure. That's part of it. But there's like a million other things along that goes with it. This is around when I started learning them, for example, which became a pretty core part of my toolkit.I'm still a VIM user today, like years later. More than a decade later.Brian: Yeah.
Joe Howard joins me to talk all about Daddin' out & taking a hiatus“The reason I like got into startups was like, I wanted control over my own time. I never liked this idea of this job you like work eight hours a day.” - Joe HowardWatch this episode on YouTubeIn this conversation:Joe Howard:Joe's Company: Driftly AppJoe on Twitter: @JosephHHowardBrian Casel:Brian's company, ZipMessageBrian on Twitter: @casjamThanks to ZipMessageZipMessage (today's sponsor) is the video messaging tool that replaces live calls with asynchronous conversations. Use it for free or tune into the episode for an exclusive coupon for Open Threads listeners.Quotes from this episode:Quote 01:Joe: A lot of people are nervous to travel with a kid that young especially today when he is not vaccinated yet. And, you know, there's still the risk of COVID.Well, what we did was we traveled places and stayed for long periods.Yeah, we weren't on like a flight every week. We weren't going backpacking through Southeast Asia. You know, we're going to places with good health care, with good, you know, Internet access and staying there for enough time to get a home base there so we could get a little help with child care so that we could form our lives in a safe in the safest way as possible. Obviously, like in Mexico, we're flying down to Mexico. So, mask up the distance in the airport trying to go in family bathrooms where there aren't like a million toilets flushing. You know, it's like there are thingsthat you can do to minimize your risk. And then once we got there, honestly, like living our lives as same as we did in D.C.and being as safe as possible.Brian: That's great.Quote 02:Joe: Everyone is going to develop at a different stage, right? Every kid. Yup. At two, he was starting to like chatter, and now he's like, pronounce certain things correctly. Like, like, like a full sentence, like sentences.Brian: I remember there's a phase in the twos where they start to verbalize but there's good like six months there were only the parents can understand what, what they're saying and everyone else thinks.Joe: It's like, yeah, before I was a parent, I was like, that's such bullshit. Like that. You don't know what they're saying. Like, you do. Yeah, come on.Brian: The parents know every word, like, six months before everyone else can hear it.Joe: That's right. Like, all the time you hear these repeated words Yeah. It's funny because my wife and I were both so there are a couple of things, and he says, we're like, What? What are you talking about? Like, what is that?Quote 03:Joe: That idea of like taking six months off was always really appealing to me because like the last generations as they worked for 30 or 40 years and they took retirement at the end. Brian: Yeah, Joe: And people have heard this before. Like, that's just not I'm not into that. Like, I want to enjoy like right now, like, I need, I want to enjoy part of our retirement right now.Joe: Like, why would you why would I wait? Unless I really enjoyed working on what I was doing. Like, I'm like you. I would, I would probably keep working if I was really enjoying it. But and now I've found that in Driftly, right? So, like, now I'm on this path again. I'm like, here we go. I forgot to shower today.I must really be looking, but I'm working on it now, so I totally get that day-to-day. People ask me this all the time because I, like, listen to the starts, the rest of it all the time. It's like most people don't want to like, you know, hang out and just sit on a beach after they're done with, you know, a semi-successful venture.I'm at the beach right now. I've been at the beach for six months, so I do enjoy the beach I don't think there's anything, anything to do with that. But I filled up my day, did a lot of reading, and did a lot of listening to podcasts. I did a lot of cooking. I spent a lot of time not just with my family but like working on my like role in my family.
David Gilmore, known as the LDS Prepper on YouTube. Posted his first video 10 years ago. He was inspired by other YouTube prepper channels and wanted to share what he was doing and learning on his journey and preparedness. Today his channel has over 210,000 subscribers and over 44 million video views. Please checkout his quality videos and products at his website and YouTube channel, linked below! Website - https://ldsprepperstore.com/ Youtube Channel – LDSPrepper Show Notes How LDS Prepper Got Started A Passion for Helping People Be Prepared Value of Building Rapport With Your Customers “Once You Educate Customers, Your Going To Get Sales” Knowing Where Your Customers Congregate – Online / Offline Top Seller – LDS Prepper Premium Micro-Nutrient Mix Mittleider Gardening Course Book What I Like About Having an Online Business in the Prepping Industry Continued Education and Growth for Sustainability is Needed Around The World Personal & Business Goals For The Next Year Other People's Traffic: Tips for Growing Your Online Youtube Channel / Business Transcription David: I found that really I can ship anywhere in the world. And I do so I need to make myself available to the world. So I started on YouTube. And then when I make a YouTube video I also put a link on my Facebook profile because I've got 5,000 friends, okay, I've never met. But however, they feel like they know me because they've watched the videos right? They say this all the time, I feel like I know you, I've watched 300 of your videos. Podcast Intro: If you're someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family. If you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing. You may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman. We are here to celebrate you whether you're looking to improve your maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel. From selling chicken eggs online, to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure, life off the grid. Brian: David Gilmore, known as the LDS Prepper on YouTube. Posted his first video 10 years ago. He was inspired by other YouTube prepper channels and wanted to share what he was doing and learning on his journey and preparedness. Today his channel has over 192,000 subscribers and over 42 million video views. He has become a true YouTube influencer. His passion has turned from a hobby to a seven figure a year business as an affiliate for preparedness products and producer of his own product. Today he shares his insights with us on how to start an online business with zero capital zero risk and a mobile phone. David Gilmore, welcome to the Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast. David: Thank you Brian. Glad to be here. Brian: Yeah, I really appreciate it. How did you end up at this point? How did the whole journey start with you, David? David: Great question. I'm really a visual learner. My wife reads lots of books, her nightstand is piled with books and she just goes through the books. And I get to watch a video I get it. I gotta see physically. Instead of me googling things for answers, I go to YouTube. I call it YouTube University. And it really helped me out and I am preparedness-minded. I feel it's my responsibility as a father and as a husband to provide and protect. I was always looking for solutions and YouTube just seemed like a great place to do that, and I appreciate what others put up. So I thought, well, maybe I should share some of the things that I'm doing. First of all, had to come up with a YouTube name.
Welcome back to Artbeat Radio! We had the opportunity to interview Ricky Mena! Ricky dresses up as Spider-Man, taking a therapeutic approach to enhance the quality of life in children who are terminal, battling life threatening illness, special needs, fostered, abused, bullied, and more. He has touched countless lives in his time as Spider-Man and has big plans to continue in the future. Listen in as we talk about his life, his work and his future plans. You can find Ricky and learn more about him through his Instagram @Rickymena Thanks for listening and tune in next time! For more information about our organization, please visit our website www.ableartswork.org Audio Transcription: (Please listen on Podomatic or Spotify to view the full transcript) *Intro music by Artbeat Radio staff* Music, stories, and more! You're listening to Artbeat Radio, a program of Able ARTS Work. *Instrumental spiderman theme plays* Renee: Ricky! Ricky: Hi Renee. How you doing? Renee: Hi! My name is Renee Morneau and how are you? Ricky: *laughs* I'm doing pretty good this morning. It's good to finally get on here and meet you guys. Renee: Nice to meet you too! What is your favorite movie of Spider-Man? Ricky: My favorite Spider-Man movie? Renee: Yeah Ricky: Oh, man. That's a tough question. There are some good ones out there but my favorite is one that is not a lot of other people's favorites, which is The Amazing Spider-Man two with Andrew Garfield. Renee: Wow! Ricky: Yeah. I've said that on other podcasts that are famous for like, you know, actual Marvel podcasts? And people are always blown away by that answer but- because not a lot of people like that one, but that's my favorite one. Renee: Mine too! Ricky: It is? Oh my gosh! Renee: I think me and you are a good common Ricky: Yeah, that's true. We're a good team. Hi Alison! Alison: Hi. How how did this all start? Ricky: Well, it got started when I was at a very low point in life, so I wasn't doing good with money. I had just like, got out of a relationship where I thought I was gonna get married with this person and it didn't work out that way, moved across the country. Back to my hometown of Pittsburgh, California Alison: I've been there! Ricky: You've been there? Alison: Yes! Ricky: It's a small place that no one knows exists, so man, so many connections today. But my friend said, hey, come on back to your hometown and you will help you get back on your feet. And they said you could stay on our couch until you get back on your feet. And for the first time in my life, I had to do that. And it took a lot off. A lot of pride for me to swallow, to do that, and after a couple months I was getting back on my feet. I became a personal trainer. I was training people in the gym and doing all that cool stuff and getting really in shape myself. And then I fell asleep on the couch one night and I had a dream that my grandmother, who passed away a couple months before, came to me. She put on this movie projector that put this like movie in the sky and it showed me Spider-Man visiting these kids in the hospital and he's just making them so happy in the dream. And I looked at my my grandma, who I called, who I called my nana. And I said, Nana, what does it have to do with me? And she said that is you when you wake up, that's what you're that's what you're gonna do. And so, I woke up with $300 in my name and I, you know, to my name. And I only had a car that I had paid off. And I looked at the car in the parking lot and I said I knew I was going to sell it. And because the dream felt so real. And yeah, so I've got a suit and two months later 'cause it took the gentleman 2 months to make it and I got it. And I started doing my work there. And then, you know, that's just the short of it. It was really hard getting started getting into visit children or, you know, special needs children or children on the spectrum and that's where my work really started. But it was hard to get started. 'cause everyone said no and then that all changed with how persistent I was and how much I showed- showed my intent on what I was doing it was not for me it wasn't for money it was just to help and I think it really after that. Alison: Guess what? I was born in Oakland! Ricky: You were born in Oakland? Can I tell you a guess what too? Alison: Yeah. Ricky: The first hospital that I-I had to sneak into my first hospital, which I will not advise anyone to do! but I had to sneak into my first hospital at the orders of a mom who really wanted me to be there for her son. And it was in Oakland. I won't say which hospital, but I'll just tell you it was in Oakland. How long have I been acting like Spider-Man? So how long have I been Spider-Man? I've been Spider-Man since 2014. Renee: Wow, that's a long time. Ricky: Yeah, it feels like a long time. You know what's crazy? In Spider-Man, in the movies, keeps getting younger. And I keep getting older, so it's tough. Renee: I'm in a relationship. I have a boyfriend. Ricky: That's cool. You would love my wife. She-I don't know if this is any one question later and I hope I'm not spoiling it- but she dresses as spider Gwen! Renee: Cool! Ricky: Yes, she's awesome! Renee: How many kids did you save when you visit the hospital? Ricky: Oh well, I like the word you used, save? But I will say that, you know, one of the things of me being Spider-Man is that I don't. I don't have the ability to actually save anybody. And I really think that's important for people to know because that's part of real life, you know, there's the there's the movies, and then there's real life, you know, And so, my job. When I go into the hospital is not to save anyone. It's just to be there for the times that are really hard. And even though it's really hard to help people smile and to help kids really smile and that can feel sometimes like being saved. You know what I mean? It's like, if you have 30 days in a row that are just really dark and bad, and you don't feel good and then someone comes along or something happens in your life to where you're like “Oh my gosh this is the first time in a long time that I could feel the sun, you know that I could that I feel warm and I feel good about something” And one thing that does is it gives you hope. And. And the hope itself can save people, I believe, but I'm just a messenger of the hope. But to answer your question, I've been there for over 15,000 kids in seven years. Yeah, from uh, from the Bay Area, California, all the way to London. I did long time...a long time! it gets, it gets tiring, so you gotta pace yourself, you know? Renee: Tell you why I said hi. That's all. Ricky: She's teaching right now. She's actually a teacher, so- Renee: Wow! Ricky: And she's out there, teaching. So, she's double awesome. She's going for her masters in school, and yeah, she's amazing on so many different levels. I wish she was here so you guys can meet her. But maybe that's for another time. Renee: That's so awesome. Thank you, Ricky! Brian: Hi Ricky! It's nice meeting you. Ricky: It's great to meet you too. Brian: How has your journey been? Ricky: My journey has been a very long journey. It feels like it's been a very rewarding journey and also a very difficult journey. And if I'm able to elaborate on that just a little bit- Brian: Yeah, please! Ricky: Yeah, it's difficult. Because I visit, like I said before, there's children that I cannot save. I walk into the lives of children who are sometimes, you know, they're at the end of their life. And I know that's a hard topic, but that's something I do. And so that's when it gets difficult that it starts feeling-the journey starts feeling long. At that point, it's hard to come to terms with those realities, and especially when I become so close to everyone I come in contact with, I'm just-I'm a person who likes to open my heart to everyone. And but, the most rewarding is actually seeing that my presence there, even though it's just dressing as Spider-Man, you know, and being there as a friend. And you know, kind of giving these therapeutic services. In this unique way that I'm doing it- to see so many my presence just matter so much and I'm doing the smallest, most simplest thing. It's just being there holding hands, encouraging people and just kind of like implanting that hope. So, it's been a rollercoaster to sum all that up. It's been a lot of ups and downs. And uh, I just-the one thing I work hard towards every day is to find that new balance every day it's something new. Every year, it's something new. And I have to continually just try to find that balance for myself between my personal life and the life of Spider-Man. To balance those things, to still be able to retain an amount of joy for myself, to do the job, but also be myself, my joyful self and in real life too. So it's been hard, but it's been rewarding at the same time. Brian: Yeah. Well, how do you about how do you balance all that? Ricky: That's a very good question. How to balance those kind of things? And I'm sure you guys deal with that too. Brian: Yeah. Ricky: It's like, you know, it's balancing like this, that's something that's for everyone, not just me. It's difficult and it's a balancing act that will-if you can think of the balancing act as juggling and you have three balls that you have initially, right? And that's very difficult. And you're like, “Oh my gosh, it's difficult”. And so the more practice you have with those three balls juggling, you're juggling the better you'll get, the better you'll get. But then all of a sudden, life will throw a 4th. And so you're like, “Oh my gosh”, and you gotta rebalance and you got to-and so it's just not freaking out. When something new enters the-your juggling act and just allowing yourself being kind to yourself, give yourself some time. The world can make you feel like you have to rush and kind of and kind of be OK quickly. But that's not...That's not the path you wanna take. You wanna take your own time and do you wanna just-you know, I always say, listen, I always talk to people outside yourself. And if it helps talk to a therapist. That has helped me-has helped me so much, you know, talking to friends. But one thing that's helped me outside of that is exercise. In any way. Listening to music has been huge for me. Um, and then redefining your work. Your purpose. For me it's being Spider-Man. But for me, if I stay doing the same thing. Just all the time-if I did sit the same thing all seven years without any growth or kind of like throwing something new in there to challenge even just myself, or to just change the landscape of what I do for children. Then it would have just kind of got boring. I would have been in the same-I would have offered nothing new to myself or the kids, so it's like it's about challenging yourself. It's about all that. The juggling act changes every day, so don't get discouraged. Every day is a new day and instead of looking at it like, “Oh my gosh, I'm so overwhelmed by the day and how new it is” Change is very hard every day. But look at it as like a new opportunity, a new adventure. And even though it's hard, it's something that whatever is hard can sculpt you and help make you a stronger person for tomorrow. And shoot, you guys, you guys have been being sculpted your whole lives and so, oh my gosh, you're probably so strong and I am in my own way and I know that. And so, it's like you're being prepared for something great. Your purpose is just is just far greater than so many other people on this planet. 'cause you're being thrown so much right and I feel the same way and it's like stepping up to that challenge every day. So. The juggling act is tough, but it's very doable. It's very doable. Brian: I've got another question. Now that we've got this Omicron, how is it possible to balance life like you're talking about? Ricky: Right, it becomes very hard. It is as far as like the coronavirus in general. If I could share my little experience very briefly-when the coronavirus first hit California, I was standing in a hospital. As Spider-Man, my wife was next to me, as spider Gwen and we just left the room and we were immediately swept away into a room that no one was saying and we were told that the last visit we just did, the little girl had been, or may have been around someone with the coronavirus, and that our visit was done and we were to visit no more kids. Then we had to actually quarantine and they kept us there for an hour. All my volunteers-they had our bags. They dropped them at our feet in this room. It was very scary. And at that moment, I didn't know it at the time, but everything changed for us, just like it did for everyone else and for us. You know, we visit terminal-or excuse me, children who have immune-compromised immune system, so we can't-we have not been able to visit any children in two years. I have not been able to do the work that I love doing with all my heart to the full capacity that I've loved doing it in two years, so. It's been very trying for us just like it is for you and to find that balance. These challenges, if you look at them as-as these obstacles as walls, then they're kind of they're a lot-it's a lot harder to visualize yourself overcoming like a wall or a dead end because it's like hard to visualize going through a dead end. So, what we've had to do, and I encourage anyone else to do, is look at all these challenges that the coronavirus is throwing it all of us and look at them as obstacles. So, when we couldn't visit children in the hospital, we saw that as an obstacle instead of a dead end. So how can I still bring hope to children? We're in a time where, look, we're not in the same room. Guys and girls, we're still talking. So we have technology. Let's utilize that. How can we be creative to get what we need to nourish our souls, to survive and kind of like still tap into that like evolution of self? Yeah, we all need it, like we all need to grow human beings. So amazing. We're like plants. We need the water, we need the sun. We just need that, right? Brian: Yeah! Ricky, So whats crazy is-I'll tell you even more, Brian. Like, Speaking of clients, he's like, I used to be a tree trimmer before, before I was Spider-Man. I was a tree trimmer for 10 years. And one thing I thought that was so amazing about trees is that if you plant a tree, Somewhere where there's no water source at all, right? Or let's say a tree grew really big and then had this great water source. This river was nearby and it's roots grew to the water. But the river dried out and there's no more water anywhere the tree doesn't say to itself, “You know what I give up, I'm going to die”. The tree's roots actually become that much more persistent and resilient underground. And will break even concrete. You've seen it. Brian: Yes! Ricky: There's sidewalks that are just. Broken. Right, because it won't let anything in its path. And this is a tree that cannot move it's relying on food coming to it. Right. So it's like “I gotta find it. I gotta find water” and it will. It will find pipes. If it has to and it'll bust those pipes to get water. It'll find-It'll find a water source. And it's been amazing. 'cause I actually like I said. I you used to do trees. And so we would have to-We would remove roots sometimes, and we would find out that the tree is like some- I mean it's like 100 yards away. And that's that tree is so far. Wow, it came all the way here to get water and itself could not move. And I think we need to be like the tree, right? We need to utilize. We need to grow our roots, we need to we need to expand on our foundation and it's easier said than done. I'm not gonna lie. I've been going through a lot of hard times in the last two years. A lot mentally, uhm, you know I've had to work out at home. It's a lot harder to do that, but I've done it. I've had to change my diet because ,listen. Guys and Girls, I gained 20 pounds. The first you know, two years of the pandemic, I guess gained 20 pounds. And then recently I was contacted by a hospital and they said, “Hey, just prepare yourself, prepare yourself. We're getting it under control. You might-We're going to call on you as soon as its time go back in”. Man, I panicked because, oh, shoot, I, being Spider-Man, I need to be 167 pounds and really fit. And at the time, I was 188. And I freaked out, and I looked at my wife and I said, I said my wife's name is Kendall, I said, “Kendall, I'm jiggling in places I've never jiggled before. What do I do?” *laughs* So I kinda had a little meltdown there, but I had to grow my roots and I said it's time to buckle down. It's time to tap back in and I and I, she helped me with a meal plan and I got back to it and I made it happen. But the coronavirus has affected all of us and all I can say is we're still here. Brian: Yeah. Ricky: Brian, Brian, you're still here, buddy. And here we are. And let's-it's part of the adventure and we can do it. Anything you wanna do, you can utilize this technology. You can ask and reach out to friends. There's ways to accomplish things. I think the world has, really adapted to this coronavirus thing and so- Brian: Yeah! Ricky: So, I hope that answers your question a little bit, sorry I went on a little bit of a rant there but- Brian: No, that's all right, Ricky! Ricky: Yeah *laughs* Brian: I asked a really good question. Ricky: You did and it has, it is levels to it. There's layers like an onion and I and that's really deep. I like that. Brian: Yeah. And I know where you're coming because I've had-I recently lost three family members. Ricky: Yeah. And loss is extremely hard, especially when it hits so close to home, right? Brian: Yeah Ricky: If you would ask yourself one question, you know, and I've dealt with a tremendous loss myself, is how do you think those people, whether-wherever you believe that they are now in the spirit world or in heaven, whatever you believe, that you believe that you should ask yourself, you know, when times get hard is how do you think they would want you to honor their name? Brian: Well, as soon as this Omicron is over my sister-in-law knows a guy that has a boat and we're going to dump his remains. Ricky: Oh, so you're gonna throw the ashes? Brian: Yeah. Ricky: Nice. So, you getting on a boat, it's something to look forward to. Brian: Yeah! Ricky: Yeah, and living life is what it's all about. Brian: Yeah Ricky: And it's OK to be sad. You gotta cry when it's time to cry when you feel like that. And it's OK to talk to others. It's OK to reach out to others. I'm sure you know that. And then when the time comes, and this is the hard part, It's like when you one day you'll find yourself smiling. You'll find yourself smiling, right? And then and then you'll go, “*gasp* I feel bad. I feel guilty because I've had so much loss. I actually feel guilty that I'm smiling and and my family member who passed didn't get to”. Or maybe another family member who's still dealing with the-going through the grief process and not cannot find this moment to smile. I want you to remember what I said when I said this like when you go “oh, wow, I'm smiling. I feel bad”, Remember when I'm saying this don't feel bad. Take that smile and put it in your, put it in your gas tank and and use it to smile again and get to the next spot in life and get to that boat. You have something to look forward to and then get to the next thing. That's like the boat and just keep going. And one day you'll be smiling all the time and you'll and you'll look at their picture and you'll smile and you'll realize this is how they wanted me to honor their name. Brian: Nice meeting you, Ricky. Ricky: Nice to meet you too. I love your story! Stephanie: Would you be satisfied being in another profession? Ricky: Will I be satisfied in a different profession or career? No, not now that I've done this. I was in many different professions prior to being Spider-Man so, I've known a lot before this and it's like once I started doing this... I just don't-I don't know how to- and that's that's part of the struggle. At some point I have to retire, right? And that just means hanging up the Spider-Man suit myself. But what I want to expand our organization to have other folks suit up. I want to get a a program together outside of just a background check and make sure everyone safe to visit, kids and all of that. I wanna put together like a very comprehensive program and like that people can actually go to like a schooling that I can teach the process and the science of visiting children as a suited character of whatever they choose, and teach, you know folks how to do that, who want to do the same thing. And I think it's important to know that you know, what I do and what my organization does is not from an entertainment standpoint. So, we don't visit-to do like-we don't do birthday parties or things like that. We only visit children who are children in need or even young adults or even. We've even visited adults and so I cannot think of another profession that's actually-that's actually something after seven years and being 38 years old I now think to myself like how hard and how hard it is, like emotionally and mentally at this point, I think myself, you know. From me, from you know, a wellness standpoint and energy standpoint and just how much I how much do I think I have to give personally out there to children. How? How long can I do this? And so it it's kind of daunting to think about. Like what would I do after this? Because I'm like shoot, this was everything. This is everything it takes. It really is my passion. So, I have not said this on social media. I have not like, told my parents even so, this is like-I'm sharing this with you guys. My wife and I have been talking about-I didn't go to college at all. I have a high school diploma and just a lot of life experience. My wife, you know, was saying she's going for her masters and she said, “Hey, maybe you should go for your masters and get and get it in child psych- I mean, child counseling”. And I think I really wanna do that because when the day comes to hang up the Spiderman suit, I don't wanna have to stop. You know, I already now have seven years of experience if you add six years of experience while I'm going to school out and hang up the Spider-Man suit and actually having degree. And be like approved as an actual, you know, therapist. I think that I would have so much to offer. At that point, you know, and I think that's what I wanna do. So, I'm kind of telling you guys here today that I'm kind of searching for a college that I'm gonna, then I'm gonna go to. And that's going to be what I'm going to do. So, it's not really like. I guess I'm not stopping this profession, so I can't see myself doing anything else. I just kind of want to elaborate on it because that's how special it is to me. Stephanie: Awesome. Thanks for coming, Ricky! Ricky: No problem. Thanks for having me. Stephanie: Bye Ricky! Brian: Bye, Ricky! *Instrumental Spider-Man theme resumes* *Outro music by Artbeat Radio staff* We hope you enjoyed this episode of Artbeat Radio. For more information, please go to our website. Ableartswork.org. Thanks for listening and tune in next time!
Welcome back to Artbeat Radio! You're listening to our 100th episode! We started in 2012, posting about one episode a year. In September of 2020, quarantine inspired us to find a way to interact more with our greater community. Unable to go on community outings or leave our homes, we decided it was time to post on a weekly basis to maintain our connection. Listen in as we share our favorite moments, our hopes for the future, and interview one another on our accomplishments! Thanks for listening and tune in next time! For more information about our organization, please visit our website www.ableartswork.org Audio Transcription: (Please listen on Podomatic or Spotify to view the full transcript) *Intro music by Artbeat Radio staff* Music, stories, and more! You're listening to Artbeat Radio, a program of Able ARTS Work. Stephanie: Hello and welcome to Artbeat Radio! My name is Stephanie! This is our 100th podcast episode. Wow, that is crazy. Our 100th episode! Looks like we made it! Thank you for listening to our podcast. Hope you like the episode. Alison: Okay, now I remember there was one time when we were doing something and it didn't turn out right and somebody dropped a box. I don't know what was in the box but somebody accidentally dropped a box and then in class somebody got the words backwards. Like they accidentally screwed up the words and that was my favorite part. Brian: Well, I loved Katie Jo also. Interviewed her about her country music and she actually performed for us live. My favorite was interviewing the guy who played Spiderman. He was really interesting. Eric: Guess what folx, the interview with spiderman will be available as of next week! Brian: Stephanie. Stephanie: Yes? Brian: What podcast did you enjoy? Stephanie: I liked “Summer Sounds” because it was really upbeat and it was really nice and I also like that I have my professional headphones. I would like, in the future, to meet my goal, which is to be a person on the radio but talk about my play, which is going to be awesome. Hey Renee. Renee: Yes? Stephanie: What's your favorite part of the podcast? Renee: I loved interviewing Spider-man, Ricky because we have a lot in common and are the same age. Brian: Yeah, I really enjoyed the interview with Ricky Mena, who played Spiderman. Stephanie: I think the interview with Julianna and Matthew was my favorite. And I just like podcast because I just like it. I like it because I get to produce the episode about my play. That's why. My goal is to be on a radio station and be the head podcast talker and to talk about my musical and my jewelry business. And that's going to be fun. Go podcast class! Brian: What I love about working with KLBP a lot is getting my voice heard. Getting my thoughts across. To have some of my thoughts that I have not illustrated before and that's very important to me. It's a terrific radio station to air what we've learned. Tim: Well, I like the guests that we have and then talking about our program and sharing all our details. I enjoyed interviewing our staff and then others from- different staff from different sites and music instructors. I like the most about it how we come together as one. Alison: This is our 100th episode! Well, what do you think of it? Stephanie: I think that it's amazing so far. Alison: I didn't think we'd go this far. Stephanie: I know right? Brian: Aaron, what do you think about the 100th podcast episode? Aaron: I like it. Brian: Did you think that we would make it this far? Aaron: Yes. Brian: It's a real honor to interview you, Aaron. Stephanie? Stephanie: Yes, Brian? Brian: What do you think of the 100th episode? Stephanie: I think it's cool. Brian: Did you think that we would make it this far? Stephanie: No! That's crazy, Brian! Brian: Yeah! Stephanie: Wow. Brian: I'm-I'm with you. I can't imagine that we're up to the 100th. Stephanie: We gotta' keep going. It'll be 101! Brian: Yeah! *laughs* and maybe 102, 3, 4, 5 and so on. *laughter* Stephanie: How do you like this class? Brian: I love it. So much so that I took it last semester and I'm taking it this semester. I can't remember if I took it the semester before. Stephanie: Yeah. Brian: How do you like this podcast? Stephanie: I think it's great! I like- I like my first- I like my classes this year. They're fun! Renee: How long have you been on the podcast, Stephanie? Stephanie: Um...not very long but I think I like it. How long have you been in podcast? Renee: I'm not sure. I just started *laughs* Stephanie: Just started? Renee: Yeah. Stephanie: I wanna keep working on podcast! Renee: Me too! Stephanie: Sorry, I'm just stoked! I'm so sorry *laughter* Artbeat Radio was created in 2012 at the TAP II location in Gardena California. Brian: Here's a clip of our first podcast! *Dead Man's Bones cover plays softly behind voices* Alison: This was made in 2012. This was the first podcast of Artbeat Radio. it was posted on October 18th 2012. *Dead Man's Bones cover plays louder* *Song fades out* Stephanie: I thought it was awesome. The way that it was presented and the way that they were singing. Brian: I liked it! Alison: It was beautiful. I think the song was great considering it was our first one. Brian: Hope you enjoyed our 100th episode! Have a wonderful day and thank you for listening to our podcast. Stephanie: Thank you! Renee: Thank you for listening and thank you for coming. Have a beautiful and wonderful day. Brian: Here's to 100 more episodes! Thank you very much ladies and germs. *laughter* Renee: Gentlemen! Stephanie: That's so funny, Brian! Renee: I like that Brian: Thank you! Renee: “germs” that's so funny! I like that *laughter* *Outro music by Artbeat Radio staff* We hope you enjoyed this episode of Artbeat Radio. For more information, please go to our website. Ableartswork.org. Thanks for listening and tune in next time!
Brian Hollins is the Founder of the Takeoff Institute and Founding Managing Partner of Collide Capital. The Takeoff Institute is focused on equipping Black undergrads with the resources and mentorship they need to build a young professional career. Chad talks with Brian about providing students with necessary skills like etiquette and polish to break into Tesla and McKinsey-level companies and facilitating facetime, communication, and mentorship with other Black people within those companies who are at executive levels. The Takeoff Institute (https://takeoffinstitute.com/) Follow Brian on Twitter (https://twitter.com/BHolls1) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-hollins/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Brian Hollins, Founder of the Takeoff Institute and Founding Managing Partner of Collide Capital. Brian, thanks for joining me. BRIAN: Chad, I'm pumped to do this. Thanks for having me. CHAD: So you are obviously the Founder of the Takeoff Institute. So let's start there. Why don't we give folks a brief overview of what the Takeoff Institute is, and then we'll dive right in? BRIAN: Absolutely. Happy Black History Month. Let's start there. I'm a Black undergraduate student in the past, and I'm building something for Black undergraduate students today. So Takeoff Institute is focused on equipping Black undergrads with the resources and mentorship they need to build a young professional career. I was lucky enough to go to Stanford for undergrad and almost get thrown over the wall, if you will, by mentors and people that could advise me as I broke into my young professional career. And I, unfortunately, noticed that that wasn't the same for a lot of other folks. I ran diversity recruiting at Goldman Sachs for a few years and just saw some of the mistakes and little things that people who don't have advisors, people who don't have mentors, people who don't have an older brother in private equity. I saw the mistakes they were making and knew I wanted to build something to help bridge that gap. So we focus on providing the types of things that I think you need to break into a Goldman Sachs or a Tesla or a Facebook or a McKinsey today that might not have been true five years ago. And unfortunately, I think a lot of career development offices and programs out there are helping students break into a job that doesn't exist anymore, and that's more focused on some of the skills that we've tried to tap into. CHAD: And what are those skills? BRIAN: I'll point to a few off the top of my head. One is just polish. If you've never had an internship, you don't know cadencing on scheduling or sending an email to a direct report or really focusing on your LinkedIn, and your resume, and your social media being clean and disciplined. And so we bring to light a lot of the things that I think employers are looking for today. I'll use a good example with our students. If you don't have 500 connections on LinkedIn, the number of connections you have shows. But if you have more than 500 connections, it just shows 500+. And as a recruiter, when you really think about it, at the top of the funnel, they use these little things to guide a lot of their decision-making. For better or worse, I'm not sure it's a great way to decide who should be a good candidate for your company. But when you get 5,000 applications, and you need to get it down to 100 in a couple of days, there are little things like sending your resume in a Word Doc instead of a PDF or having spelling errors in your application, or not filling out some of the boxes that matter. And so we really train them on that etiquette and polish. Another bucket that I think is super important we built a speaker series at the Takeoff Institute called You Can't Be What You Can't See. And I think for a lot of Black undergraduate students, you go through a Superday at some of these places. You might meet 10, 15 people. Most of the time, you're not going to meet anyone Black. And you're definitely not going to meet Black people that are at the executive level. And so we really pride ourselves on bringing in managing directors from banks, and founders and CEOs from growing companies, and leading venture capitalist investors and just help our students see that there are people out there doing what they did. There are people that come from their backgrounds that also weren't sure who they were going to be when they were a sophomore or a junior in college. And so, building confidence is another key pillar of the program that we really pride ourselves on. And we're very lucky we have students at Tesla, at Apple, at Facebook, at Goldman, at NBC Universal. These students have broken into really exciting roles. And as we think about building the full flywheel around Takeoff, now those students become advocates. Now those students become mentors and advisors. And we build proximity for our students to help them realize there are people that very recently went through a very similar program and are now doing the things that they aspire to do. CHAD: That's great. It sounds to me like it really is a combination of things that they might not have the opportunity to have done before or gain the experience and because they're marginalized, historically. And also just things that are good to have that, in general, aren't taught in school regardless of your opportunity. BRIAN: That's right. CHAD: And sometimes people who have more opportunity are getting that exposure in the jobs that they have along the way and that kind of thing. That makes it certainly easier for them to succeed later on, let alone what they look like when they show up to the interview. BRIAN: Yeah, I completely agree. And I think the anecdotal use there is most of the things that I'm teaching these kids you can find on Google. The problem is they don't know what to look for. And when we think about fast-tracking these students or getting them into these rooms quicker, getting them through those interviews more effectively, it's almost like bringing all of these resources right in front of their face and allowing them to soak and absorb them in a very efficient manner. So there's a guide somewhere on the internet of how to break into consulting, and there's a guide on how to crush a product interview. And there's a guide on how to build a perfect resume or a perfect LinkedIn. But we find that most of our students, one, don't know that they should be looking for that stuff, and two, don't know how to go get it all when it matters. And that's really what we focus on, bringing all that stuff in front of them at a more efficient clip and help them build that confidence so that when they do get in front of that interview, they're armed with all the things they need to succeed. CHAD: Well, I know you're already solving a big problem. But is there anything in particular that you do to then make sure that once these people are in the workforce, in the workplace, they're going to companies that are going to treat them right where they're not going to face bias as much as possible and those kinds of things? Or are you mostly focused on getting them ready right now? BRIAN: No, it's a great question. I'd put that in a 2.0 Takeoff University, Takeoff Institute, but it's absolutely critical. It's super important. And we have a long way to go. Chad, I don't want to pretend like the world is ten times better than it was five years ago. But the transparency through which some of this data is being recorded, the accountability that's being held in rooms that matter, so C-suite, executive suite, board meetings, it is changing. And I'm very excited about that because I think for the students that can, and this is in every student, and I don't want to pretend like it is, but for the students that can choose where they go, they're going to choose to go to those companies. They're going to choose to go to the companies where there is active, positive feedback from underrepresented people, so Black, Latin, female, people that don't look like the rich, white guy that runs the company. They're going to look for that feedback. And they're going to look for companies that very, very clearly advocate for supporting those types of communities. And, again, I think we're in the early innings of that. But I think that we're definitely on a path towards that being more and more important and that tailors who we partner with and who we spend time with. And if you look at a lot of our partners, they are people that care about that stuff, and they are people that are actively working on doing something about it, which we certainly appreciate. CHAD: So the core of the Takeoff Institute is the fellowship. Is that right? BRIAN: Yeah, that's right. CHAD: What exactly is that? BRIAN: The Takeoff Institute Summer Fellowship is an eight-week program, again, designed to advance and equip Black undergraduates with the resources and mentorship they need to launch a young professional career. So the first thing that I think about is what we had talked about earlier, just aggregation of resources. So we have a partnership with Wall Street Prep, and so our students have to do an Excel and PowerPoint tutorial within the first two weeks of the program. And that's in after hours, and they have to do it on their own. And we track their progress, and they have to submit it. Because I cannot think of a single role in a post-undergraduate career where it is not important to be literate in both of those platforms and also, maybe more importantly, where top performers are not very good in both of those platforms. So the first piece is resource aggregation. CHAD: And this is happening remotely? BRIAN: This is all remote. This is all remote. I started the Takeoff Institute in 2020. Chad, I hope there's a day where I say that none of it is remote, but it's the world we live in. CHAD: [laughs] BRIAN: And it's what allowed us to scale it the way we did. We had over 500 kids apply for our first fellowship two years ago. We took 50 and had a little over 600 apply for the second year and took 50 again last summer and have some really exciting things coming up for this summer. So we can talk about the goal and where we're headed later. But the second piece is the speaker series that I told you about. And so, bringing in folks during our weekly meetings and allowing them to ask questions and be vulnerable and share that experience. The third piece is mentorship. And so, I wanted to recreate the feeling of having a direct report. I think too many Black undergrads get to their first job without any real internship experience. And I think in an internship, one of the things you do is you make a bunch of dumb mistakes where your direct report tells you they were dumb because you're an intern. And you check that box, like, whoops, I did that I'm never going to do it again. And unfortunately, when you get to your first job, and that's some of the stuff you're doing early on, it just doesn't go well. It doesn't lead to you being ranked highly. It doesn't lead to you getting an offer a year later. It doesn't lead to you getting the advocacy and support of people internally to say that you're a top performer. So we almost try to recreate that direct report internship experience and allow them to make some of those mistakes. And so every student is paired up with a one on one advisor. And so, for folks that are listening, if you want to be an advisor, I'd call it anywhere from 25 to 50-year-olds with a desire to help undergraduate students succeed. We have a variety of different types of advisors. And again, it's really about challenging our students to make sure they send the email to check-in. They send the email to let them know that they need to meet. They send a calendar invite. And if it's in ET, they remember, oh wow, I need to send that in PT. So just giving them that experience. So resources, access to people that look like them in seats that matter, and mentorship and guidance are the three main pillars of the Takeoff Institute. CHAD: I love that idea of learning from experiencing failure. One of the things as someone speaking for myself coming from a place of opportunity and privilege and being a white male, I might approach certain circumstances where I'm just not as afraid of failure. I'm a big believer in learning through failure, and so because of that, I'm less afraid of that. Someone who hasn't had that opportunity and is underrepresented might be much more scared of what might happen if they fail, and that's just missing the opportunity to do that. BRIAN: I think you're absolutely right. And I want to, if you're open to it, have a little fun here. I'd love to flip that question on you and just think about what are some of the things that you would be sharing or guiding to underrepresented ecosystems to help them bridge that gap, to help them kind of get that confidence to know that they do have the right, they do have the skills; they do have the knowledge to break into those places? And it's about quieting that imposter syndrome and going after some of those opportunities. CHAD: Yeah, I've always believed it's really difficult to tell people not to feel something that they're feeling. [laughs] It's really hard to change someone's feelings. And so I would put it on the mentors that they need to work to create the environment where people understand that it's okay to make mistakes. That's certainly the experience that I had in my internship when I was just getting started out. I saw my manager making mistakes, and they owned up to them. And we talked about them. And we were doing a lot of the same work. We were working alongside of each other. And so that close working relationship is one thing. I don't know if you're aware, but at thoughtbot, we have an apprentice program where new people are paired with an experienced mentor, and it's almost entirely working together on work. So creating that opportunity. So assuming you have a mentor that's supportive and wants to work with you, great. And if not, I would say try to circumvent that as much as possible and get yourself working with them as much as possible so that you can get close to them and see them working, and see them failing, and really gain that first-hand experience, which in and of itself can be uncomfortable to force that. I totally recognize that. BRIAN: Totally. Part of the program is they do a research report with their mentor. And so it's sort of this guided I'm here to answer questions, but I am not here to do this for you. And I'm very intentional with our mentors about that. I think a lot of these students, especially the ones who have never had a direct report, they wait until they're told what to do. And they don't know how to turn on that proactive brain. And I think it's a super important muscle to flex, especially at that age. How do you teach a kid to do the thing that he thinks his boss is going to ask for as opposed to the thing that his boss asked for? CHAD: Well, this is sort of a pet peeve of mine because I think that, in some ways, there is a flaw in our educational system. It's centered around people telling people what to do. BRIAN: Do what you're told, yeah, absolutely. CHAD: Right. And so, I was very fortunate that I had some teachers that did more project-based learning and then chose to go to a college that was project-based. And the difference when you're in charge of something, and you're responsible, and people aren't telling you what to do, that really creates the environment where you can do that great work. BRIAN: Totally. What's pretty cool is we keep a repository of all their presentations. And so, a lot of them, after the program is over they'll actually share their presentation on their LinkedIn or through their socials. And just having a body of work that early in your career, mapping the Esports competitive landscape, or how to build a D2C skincare business for people of color. I mean, really cool projects that they're very proud of, that they worked hard on, and now that they can share. And, again, part of what we do is build that LinkedIn, build that thought leadership, help them become experts in their own craft because I think it builds that confidence that we just talked about missing for so many of them. And it's doing all these little things that really just unlock their inner self. I'm not giving them anything that they don't already have. I'm just unlocking it. Mid-roll Ad I wanted to tell you all about something I've been working on quietly for the past year or so, and that's AgencyU. AgencyU is a membership-based program where I work one-on-one with a small group of agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. We do one-on-one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. We start with goal setting, advice, and problem-solving based on my experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As we progress as a group, we all get to know each other more. And many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and even referring work to each other. Whether you're struggling to grow an agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in my 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot, I've seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and I'd be happy to work with you. Learn more and sign up today at thoughtbot.com/agencyu. That's A-G-E-N-C-Y, the letter U. CHAD: Let's take a step back. And I'm curious what it takes to start something like Takeoff Institute. How difficult is it to set up a non-profit? From when you decided to do this, what steps did you take as a founder getting off the ground? BRIAN: I'll give you context of how I started it at first. I was a student at Harvard Business School. Nine months into my MBA program, the world blew up. And so what was a trip to Shenzhen or Tokyo turned into hanging out in my apartment. And I think similar to what you described around that participatory learning environment and how that helped you, HBS is known for what's called the case method. And the case method is a very, very powerful way to learn. It's, by far, in a way, my favorite way to learn. And I knew nothing about it before I got to HBS. And the repeat experience of being presented a problem and having to choose a side and then gathering information after the fact around whether that was not necessarily right or wrong but whether that was educated or insightful and then repeating that process over and over again. You just learn a ton about your biases and the types of things that you can and can't accomplish on your own without thinking of other parts of your brain or using other kinds of tools in your toolbox. And so I found myself really challenged after my first year of school, saying, I've never built anything, and I've never put my mind towards some of the problems that I think exist in the world. And I mentioned while I was at Goldman running diversity recruiting at Stanford for a couple of years, and I saw so many problems and flaws in that model. And then my youngest brother was a Marine. So he served in the military for four years and then took the GI Bill, and he's now a junior at Columbia University in New York. And I saw his journey very recently and a lot of the flaws in the system. And so I just knew that this problem wasn't going anywhere. And I knew that I really, really wanted to be a part of the solution. And I think unfortunately, our generation is taught that you're supposed to turn 50 and be rich before you start giving back and before you, whatever, consider building a non-profit, and I sort of call bullshit on that, to be honest. I think I will never be more proximate to the problems I'm trying to solve than I am right now. And I'm 30 years old. I'm seven, eight years out of school, but I still very, very intentionally stay close to the undergraduate ecosystem and understand what it takes and what the problems are with breaking into the industry right now. So I think it was a combination of being a student of the problem, knowing the problem, knowing it exists, building confidence and desire to become a leader while I was at HBS. And third, COVID, just realizing that a lot of these problems were actually being exacerbated, and they were getting worse, not better. I'm sitting at HBS watching some of the smartest kids I know lose internships. And all I could think was, what does that mean for the Black community? What does that mean for Black undergrads who already don't have the internship that's high paying and kind of seasons through these types of things? And so I wanted to do something about it. And I knew it was going to be bootstrapped. I knew I didn't have a million bucks to put towards it, but I knew I could put something together. And like I said, when I saw the demand for 500+ kids applying, I knew we had something. And in the last two years, we've done a lot and have a long way to go but are really excited about some of the things around the corner. CHAD: That's great context. And so, how did you go from zero to something? BRIAN: The first part was just surrounding myself with people that I thought wanted to be contributors and collaborators and building it, so that's both students and mentors, so building an operating board and people around us to help us do it. I can tell you the process of launching a 501(c)(3) is not fun, and it's not for the faint of heart dealing with the government. And I caveat that by saying towards the end of the process, I almost appreciated how difficult it was because it forced me to get a lot of things in place that were not fun to put in place. And as a result, if I wasn't that serious about building this, I think I would have been paused multiple times throughout the journey. While it's a frustrating manual, kind of nasty process, I do think it's a filtering mechanism for the government. Because the last thing you want to do is allow corporations to give people money that they think is going somewhere good and then it not go somewhere good, so I definitely appreciate that. But yeah, the journey is not fun. I think anything that's bootstrapped...I'm sure you've had plenty of guests on here that have experience at bootstrap companies. If you can't go out and raise $10 million like some of these seed companies on day one, well, then you can't hire five people, and you can't set up all of the right systems online that you want to someday. So I think that's another component that I just learned a ton from was how do we put the things in place to allow us to do this thoughtfully but not necessarily the things in place that we want to have in year three when now we have a 500k P&L and can flex into some different things and bring people on full time? So it almost forced us to build a bare-bones mechanism that just went out and really focused on the product, really focused on is this something that Black undergraduate students need and want? And only very myopically focused on that in the early days. Because all of the other stuff, the infrastructure of a non-profit, the operating board, who we bring around, and what money we raise, none of that really matters if Black undergrads don't see it as valuable. And so I very intentionally spent a lot of our time with the students and was very hands-on, still very hands-on. But really spent time getting feedback and gathering feedback from our first cohort around what are the things you love? What are the things we should change? Who are some of the speakers you wish you heard from? What are some of the ways we can engage you guys now that you have graduated? It's been a fun journey. I'm learning a lot still. As you know, I run a venture capital fund alongside this. And so just finding ways for those two things to talk to each other and to support one another. We back predominantly underrepresented founders. And these founders come from the same ecosystems where our students come from. So it's a really unique opportunity to see synergies exist across the two things I'm building. CHAD: As you were getting started with Takeoff, like you said, the most important thing was the students. So was there anything in particular that you did that you thought worked really well to let people know about this and spread the word? BRIAN: Yeah, I'd say less so in season one, chapter one, whatever you want to call it. Less so in that season than last season. And so what I did is I really turned on our brand ambassador program SO taking the students who graduated from the first cohort and using them to push us into career development offices, help them share on their campuses. We had 50 students, but it wasn't 20 from Harvard and 20 from Stanford. We probably had 35, maybe 40 schools represented where we had a few kids from a few different schools. But the network effects of allowing the students to go out, and there are 100 things on a job board at a school that people are trying to get access to these students. But there's not that many students actually advocating for the programs and saying, "Hey, I went through this, and it was valuable, and here's why it was valuable. And here's why you should go through it." We have a ton of our students who are very proud of the program and share what we're building with other students. And I think that that was a really cool unlock because I think that's the most authentic way to get to know your customers is go through people who really have experienced what you're building and allow them to tell the story for you. CHAD: You said you get 500 applications, 600 applications for the latest cohort, and you're choosing 50. How do you do that? BRIAN: We use a couple of different filtering mechanisms, so the first is the application. So there are questions in there around why they would join the program, things like do you have another internship lined up? We tend to focus on kids who either couldn't get an internship or don't have a Goldman Sachs banking internship already lined up. We tend to find that they're just more absorbed by the program. They're more focused. The second thing is there are a couple of questions around just what their aspiration is. I try to look for students who at least have spent some time thinking about who they want to be when they grow up. That doesn't mean you need to know. But oftentimes, if you're not curious or aspirational on your own, regardless of whether you have confidence, if you're not curious or aspirational on your own, it's very hard for me to elicit that in an eight-week program. And so we really try to filter out the students that we think are excited about getting to the other side or are excited about breaking in or excited about challenging ceilings. That's a little harder to search for than did they fill out their LinkedIn? Did they submit their PDF the right way? So that's the second component. The third component is honestly being very intentional about matching with our mentors. So I try to find mentors that are at least somewhat lined up with the ecosystems these students want to go to. So if I have someone that wants to break into product, I actually think it's super-valuable to get some of our friends that work at Facebook or some of our friends that work at Pinterest who are in product as their mentors, regardless of whether they work on a product-related research project. And so, using our mentors to guide that journey from 100 to 50 students to make sure that they all feel like they are getting someone that can really help advance them. And it's funny; it's pretty incredible. At the end of the program, a lot of them will come and say, "I can't believe how similar I am to Tyler, or Stacey, or Rebecca." It's really incredible how connected they become. And I just like to say, "Oh yeah, I can't believe it too." We are very intentional in the background on making that happen. But our mentors stick around with our advisors, and I hear two years later they are helping each other find a job. Or I'll get a picture of them out to brunch because they check in once a quarter. That's the stuff that just gets me super jacked up to keep doing it is recognizing that these people continue these relationships long after the fellowship program is over. CHAD: And that's great and really shows one of the great things about programs like this, and you already alluded to it earlier, is that they compound. As more people go through it, the value of the overall program hopefully goes up. BRIAN: That's right. CHAD: So are there any interviews or anything as part of the process of getting? BRIAN: There's not. That's new this year, which we're super excited about. The first two years were, again, really just us in the background making that happen. And I wouldn't have known what to interview for, to be completely honest. I think now I have just a better understanding of the type of student that succeeds in our program. I didn't entirely understand that before. And I think regardless of whether you're diverse yourself, I think there's implicit bias that comes with jumping on a Zoom with someone and seeing how they interact. And I don't know that those biases always lead you to the best candidate. And so, I think we tried to take a thoughtful approach but didn't want to over-engineer the early days of building our cohorts. And we beta-tested a bunch of different stuff. So we had freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, and first-year out, as well as Harvard, Stanford, Arkansas State, two-year community college, really just the full gamut. There are 1.1 million Black undergrads in the country in every given year. So finding students from all these different places and then kind of honing that in and figuring out, you know what? I think if you do this program right after your freshman or right after your sophomore year, it's super valuable. And it really sets you up to have that strong junior year internship because that's the one that matters. That's the one that changes your trajectory if you go get a good one. And so just learning those types of things over the first two years, I think, really helped us hone in who we focus on, and why we focus on them, and what resources we provide for them. Because it just, again, it just helps us build that treadmill to really accelerate their trajectory into their young professional career. CHAD: You mentioned undergrad, so the program is specifically focused on people in college going to a university of some kind. BRIAN: It's specifically focused on Black undergraduate students. I struggled with this a little bit because there are a lot of people that need help. I grew up in some underprivileged ecosystems as well. And there were plenty of poor white kids that also should get this or underrepresented Latinos that I knew. And while I wanted to build that, I also knew there's just a lot of noise. There's a lot of resources and advice and people out there trying to help. And I kind of said to myself, "This is the demographic that I understand best." And instead of pretending like I know how to build a platform to help someone from an ecosystem I don't truly understand break-in, I'm just going to focus all my effort on getting more people that look like me because I know that there's a need for that and know that there's a gap for that. And I know that historically, companies have not been good at doing that on their own. So that's been our focus. And I hope there's a day where we have the privilege to expand that horizon and spend time because we have the resources to do it. But for now, I still have a long way to go within the Black community. And I'm going to keep focusing our time there. CHAD: Yeah, I was thinking more about the kids who aren't even getting the opportunity to go to college. So they're 1.1 million Black undergrads. There are probably even more people who don't even get the opportunity to go to college. There are so many people you could help with this. What are your goals for growth? And how do you serve more people? BRIAN: Yeah, I'll tell you the one that's top of mine because we're super excited about it. And this hasn't been released to many places, and so for our lovely thoughtbot community, I'm super excited to share this early, but we're building something called Takeoff University. Takeoff University will be the largest resource repository in the world for Black undergraduate students. Again, I think that the positioning is Black undergraduate students. I don't think that there's a paywall set up where if you don't have a .edu you can't use it. And so, I'm still thinking about how we provide access for some of the people you're describing. But regardless, the idea being our fellowship is very hands-on and very intentional, and specifically focused on accelerating 50 people a summer. But how can we build something that more effectively brings in anyone in their undergraduate ecosystem development? Whether you're a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, how can we deliver resources to you and get you some of the things that we know you need at the time that you need them and allow you to more effectively become part of the Takeoff ecosystem? Because what we believe is we can build a pretty unique flywheel around the broader TakeOff University ecosystem and some of the content and curriculum and thought leadership and just sharing that can occur there. I think a lot about our older students. When we talk to them about how they engage with younger students, it's oftentimes younger students are sent to them. So they have a classmate who says, "Hey, you should talk to this guy. He broke in, or he had an internship somewhere." And those students come, and one of the first things they ask is, "How do I do it? How do I become you? How do I do the thing you did?" And I think for a lot of students, they don't have a good answer for that. It's hey, let me send you these 2009 PDFs that someone sent me on banking recruiting. Or "Hey, have you checked this out at the career development office?" But they don't send them to anywhere, at least in a concentrated manner. And that's really what got me excited about building Takeoff University was there is not a centralized resource repository where any and every Black undergraduate student should go to prepare themselves for their young professional journey. And so some of the things that'll be a part of that are the first thing is you come in as a career exploratory quiz. You answer a bunch of questions on what you're interested in, what stage you are in your internship development, what stage you are in your academic tenure. And it just helps guide us towards some of the resources that we know you should look at. And it doesn't mean you can't spend time in the whole library but help us guide you in the early days. And then from there, dynamic ways for students to engage, so building community and allowing them to share resources, ways for companies to engage. So allowing companies to come in and identify students that might be top candidates for their program. So really just building an inclusive ecosystem for Black undergrads where they can come and know that they'll give valuable resources. And so we're really excited. We have some really cool things in the oven around this and excited to launch it to the world later this year. CHAD: That's great. What would it take for you to grow from 50 fellows to 100? And is that something that you want to do? BRIAN: Definitely. If you had used the number 500, I might have paused. [laughter] Again, 50 was like, get it right, do it right. I have 100 kids. I don't want to speak for all of them, but I have a lot of students that love what we did over their summer and really shout it from the rooftops to their community. And that means a lot to us. And I'm not entirely sure that if it had been 100 and then 100 that I'd have 200 students who shout that. I think we were able to build a very intimate and hands-on experience for our first two cohorts. And as we grow, and as we introduce technology, and platform, and resources, I think there are ways for us to expand the number without getting out over our skis. And so 100 is in a very near-term goal for us. I'm not sure that it goes much past that. I think instead, like I described with Takeoff University, we start introducing other opportunities. We start putting more things under the Takeoff Institute umbrella. I think a lot like the Aspen Institute. There are so many different ecosystems and community-building efforts going on underneath the larger umbrella. And so long as Takeoff Institute is known as just advancing opportunities, I think we can build a ton of cool ways to have touchpoints with students across the country. CHAD: Are there specific blockers you would identify? Or you have an attentive audience here, are there things you would ask for to get to that 100 fellows? BRIAN: It's a great question. I think folks that have had any experience building, you know, call it Twitter University, Pinterest University, Plaid University, folks who have been on the internal teams that help stand up curriculum and training for employees, again, that's a large part of what we're standing up with TakeOff University. And I'm very, very fortunate to have the funding now and not be in a place where we're looking for money to do that. And so we have the resources to make this really special, and just getting some of the design and product folks that might be listening who might be interested in helping build a community like the one that we're building, we'd appreciate it. We'd love to chat. You can email me at brian@takeoffinstitute.com. I'd love to chat and learn. And even if you don't have time to chat, if there are platforms that you know that look really cool and look like the type of thing that we should be mocking or mimicking, I think it's always helpful to see comparisons and benchmarks. So I think that that'd be a great one. And the other thing I'd add is if you want to be a mentor, please apply, takeoffinstitute.com. It's an incredible experience. I wish I could say I had 100 advisors, but I probably only have 60 because most of the ones who did the first cohort did the second cohort. And they loved it, and they're doing the third cohort. It's an hour a week. It's a very light touch, eight weeks of the summer. It's a very light touch, but I think it's impactful. So we'd love to have some of the folks. CHAD: Do you specifically look for Black mentors? BRIAN: We don't. We don't. I think that that's a really important part of this experience. Like I mentioned, you don't get to choose who your direct report is. And so your direct report might be White, Asian, Black. I don't care what they are. You need to get used to having that direct report experience and building rapport, and building that relationship regardless of what they look like. And so we appreciate having mentors that are male, female, and come from all different walks of life. CHAD: Great. And that website again was? BRIAN: www.takeoffinstitute.com CHAD: Awesome. Well, I think that's a very natural and great place to leave it. I hope folks will contact you and get involved. And there's so much work to be done in this area. And it's a great opportunity to have an impact. BRIAN: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Chad. CHAD: Thank you. You can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @cpytel. Brian, if folks want to get in touch with you, you want to say your email again and any other channels they should do that? BRIAN: Yeah, perfect. brian@takeoffinstitute.com. And you can find me on Twitter @BHolls1, B-H-O-L-L-S-1. CHAD: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening and see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: Brian Hollins.
On today's episode of the ACCEL Podcast, Scott, Eric and Alex welcome Brian and Matt from the ACCEL Gaming Division. On Part-One of this Two-Part Series, Brain and Matt discuss Blockchain, Play-to-Earn (P2E) Games, NFTs and how their integration with blockchain technology is not only growing, but accelerating to new heights of adoption across multiple chains. For more information on ACCEL , please visit www.acceldefi.com or our Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/AccelDefiFor educational resources related to ACCEL and Crypto in general, please visit ACCEL University on YouTube using the following link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJDNIqPTp9kjsMPmPo119Zg Episode Transcript:[Alex] Welcome to the ACCEL Podcast. Today we have very special guests for you, Matt and Brian. They head the gaming division here at ACCEL. [Alex] Can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, your background in gaming, and how you found yourself developing P2E Games in the crypto space? [Brian] Thanks again. As you said, my name is Brian. I've been an avid gamer pretty much my entire life. I've just been working into project management and programming for a few years now, and basically I've just brought everything together when forming this division as it appealed to all of my skills that I've built over the years. And I've been working on building this division from the ground up. So I am very excited to have a couple of people in our team. And honestly, it's been pretty much a dream of mine. I've always wanted to be kind of a project manager programmer for a small indie company. That's kind of something that's always been a dream of mine. So the simple fact that now I finally get to do it is fantastic and I'm looking forward to the future. [Alex] Thank you very much for giving us a little bit of information on your background. Is game development something you went to school for, or were you self taught? [Brian] That's a great question. I was self taught. The only kind of experience I have is some coding classes when I went to University, but I never really used them for gaming. It was just got through the courses and at the time that wasn't something that I planned on using. But now that I'm here, I'm really glad that I decided to stick with it. Those late hours of going through code, it's finally going to pay off. [Alex] Wow, that's fascinating. Hey, Matt, can you also give us a little bit about your background and how you got involved with ACCEL? [Matt] Absolutely. I've been in eSports. I was an eSports pro in my 20s. I actually have been involved in gaming for about 18 years now. Always dream. Just like Brian, we've been friends for ten years. We've gone through a lot. We've discussed a lot of things that we want to do, and this is sort of like making all that happen. I personally come from an engineering background. I am pretty good with numbers and like I set up both developed games simply and I've worked on different games just through the variable aspect. And I've been very involved with technology for the last ten years. So when Brian told me about this opportunity, I thought it was a great time to come in, materialize all the things that we've discussed over the years, just bring them together and make this an amazing environment. [Alex] Thank you very much for giving us that information. [Scott] So I guess that kind of leads us into our next question. I think there's a lot of kind of confusion around gaming in the crypto sphere and kind of how everything ties together. There's a lot of different words thrown around that I think kind of confused people between these console games and these mobile games that you can play on your phone, ones where you can actually earn rewards, ones where you can't can you kind of just give us a little bit more insight on what exactly you guys are going to do in the gaming division, how that ties into crypto? [Brian] Yeah, absolutely. So mobile and console games, they all use a standard protocol, and basically there's going to be a way that we can be able to connect them to the blockchains. As of right now, that's the challenge. But I believe that what we can do is it's definitely coming along. It's faster than you think. Right. People have been playing games for virtual tokens for years, and really the only change now is that they be playing with a stake and earn real world assets. So, you know, you basically instead of farming your own Gill, gold, whatever the ingame currency is, basically. Now what you can do is not only can you throw money in there, but there are also ways to earn the money through various tasks, et cetera. And it's basically a great community effort because you're going to have people that are going to be let's say all I want to do is be a blacksmith. Right. Well, everybody's going to need a sword. So you're going to have those one on one interactions in transactions with people just like you and me. And we'll be able to use centralized token or coin or what have you. And we'll be able to do all kinds of trading. And I think Matt can actually elaborate a little more. [Matt] Absolutely. What basically is happening here is that before, if you went to any game, you'd earn that game's currency, right? You could earn gold, you could earn Gill, you could earn, like, little jewels and Candy Crush, et cetera. And all those things actually allow you to participate or buy items using that in game currency. But those items and those things are only limited to that game, and you could never translate it into something outside of the game. You could be the best player in the world in Candy Crush, but you're still going to get beat up at school if you're a nerd happened to be honestly, it was an experience. And the good thing about these games, the strong thing about these games is they can appeal to both the time and skill that you can put in. And that skill doesn't always have to be related directly to one task. Right. Like, for example, you have people with different careers in the world that do different things. And in the gaming, in the meta verse itself, you can tie all this together that people are going to be very good at. Some people are going to be very good at racing, some people are going to be very good at guessing a number off of a deck. And some people are going to go more into the creative side. You know, they are going to design characters, they're going to build certain items, they're going to build a lot of different things. So there's always going to be a discipline that appeals to anyone. And like, as with horse racing, where one person wins and everyone else loses, you actually have all these opportunities for different people to come together and use the things they are good at, use the things they want to do, and they all have the same possibility to earn something that they can just take back with them after. [Scott] Okay. So I guess my follow up kind of question to that then is these Play-to-Earn games have kind of been around a while. Why do you think you're seeing this trend kind of catching on now? What is kind of that ignition behind it? Do you think it's the blockchain interaction? Is that kind of that big selling point that's really bringing the play to earn games, too? We're seeing them really rise to the top right now. [Matt] Yeah. I think one of the key reasons is exactly what you mentioned. Because for everything that happened before, one of the big elements was that there was always, well, not really in games, but like, if you take it to real world, there's always going to be someone in the middle regulating transactions between players. So, for example, this is a very simple example. If anyone out there has played RuneScape, I'm sorry for you. But Besides that, if anyone out there has played RuneScape, you've gotten like scammed at least once. Like, some person comes in and they want to sell you something and you give them your gold because like, okay, I want the site, I may give you my goal and then the person just disconnects and disappears and you basically got stiffed. Truth be told, it's just a game currency. So it wasn't really that much of a hurt on you because you really feel bad when it happens. And Blockchain Technology just has had its peaks since 2019. If I'm not mistaken, it was first developed around 2009, but it's really seeing the strong adoption today. And the important part of Blockchain Technology is that it can do two things that usually didn't happen before. A it can regulate transactions between two parties without having like a physical third party having to exist. And the second one is that is a trust system so you don't actually have to go and trust the other player to make your transaction. Because it's going to be written in code, it's going to be hashed and there's no way you're getting out of that. No one can really stake a different item in transaction than they originally did. Scams are there like scams happen every day, but it's mostly like 99% of them are mostly due to a human factor. And that's why the fact that you can now actually have people playing against something that they don't need to trust, they know there's no way to go around it and they're going to get the returns of what they're putting in. It's not a scam, it's going to be like written code. The smart context is going to be there. It makes people a lot more confident to stake money or stake different sort of assets in these games. Kind of like when people in the 90s were afraid to put their credit card information anywhere because they all thought like they were going to get cloned and scanned. And now like you'll just go to a Russian site because you wanted to buy that PDF, that one book that you need to print for your son and just put your credit card info in weird Russian site with like not thinking about it twice. [Brian] Also, one thing I'd love to add is I believe now more than ever people actually want to feel like they're a part of something bigger, right? So let's say you've got your avatar, you're going in the Metaverse and you want to buy paranike, whether it's going to be for your avatar, like The Sims where you can dress your avatar, or maybe Nike will have a special NFT for X amount of sales. So either way you've got the people who, I just want to make my avatar look cool, I want to spend it on this, that or the other. And then you've got other people that are, I'm doing this for the money. As far as like, this is a really cool limited edition Nike NFT. I can only imagine we're going to be bringing in some big names very shortly. And one of the cool things is you don't necessarily have to be quote, unquote whale to own a piece of the pie, right? You could have in the Metaverse, you own a piece of land and then that land has the shoe store in there. So someone who comes in and say 1000 people purchase that land, anybody who gets sales from that Nike shoe is going to disperse equally. And so everyone's going to be able to not only say that they've got some connections with brand management, but also just sales get X amount of tokens or whatever. And then you use those for basically whatever you'd like. So it's just really cool. [Eric] So Brian and Matt, you guys have done a diamond explanation of giving us a little bit of your background, how you're now starting to tie into ACCEL. So for our subscribers and maybe a couple more of our more veterans in the ACCEL game–I'll put myself in that category–give me a little more insight if both of you could, or a little more understanding on exactly what P2E Games are, and with that being said, exactly how they are going to now tie into The Blockchain, and I know you started to get into how we pay for it. I know, Matt, you had alluded to your son or your daughter can tie in a credit card, but bring it back a little more to the basics, and just let me know about the P2E Games, how they tie into The Blockchain, and exactly how it's being monetized. [Matt] P2E or like Play to Earn is just basically any game that gives you a reward for playing it. You can even define like, if you loosely define it, you can even call P2E to those little machines in Japan where if you exercise, you do ten squats, you actually get a train ticket. And it's sort of the same principle that comes in there. And people relate this a lot to casinos for that reason, because you basically go in, stake your money, make some bets. Betting is one of the many forms that P2E has. And I think there's a hidden gem that NFCs will bring that still hasn't been tapped into and relates directly with fractal ownership. There's a lot of artists that have talked about this. It's basically sort of selling a part or selling a piece of, for example, the right to your music. Like, if you have a favorite artist, how cool would it be if you could own a small percentage of the rights to their music? [Brian] Right. And NFT's in general, all these tokens would actually make for a strong case in which people can bring their resources together. We can form a pool of 30,000 people, and we can all pool our ETH. And the good thing is no one has to trust anyone else and get that pulled resources and get that pulled money to let's say we're all a big fan of Nike. You want to buy a percentage of Nike and sort of be able to bring the Nike brand into the Metaverse or get some dividends out of the Nike shares and et cetera. That's a strong point of NFTs and I think it's going to be seen a lot more because people are starting to realize there are a lot more uses to this than they thought originally. [Scott] Yeah, I think that's one of the craziest things we're kind of seeing in the blockchain and crypto areas. A lot of people don't really want to jump on this innovation and it's one of the things we're really seeing is everything is tied together and in our next episode we're going to kind of touch on this, but we want to leave you guys on a little bit of a cliffhanger. But in the next episode we're going to kind of explain to you guys how this all ties back together. The Metaverse, the NFTs, the Play-to-Earn, the blockchain and how they're all in one. So we're looking forward to this next episode. Please join us again with Brian Matt. It's going to be awesome. Bye.-----------------------------------------The Information presented in this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, and without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The Information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The Information provided from or through this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. 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In this episode, we cover: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:00:38 - Death to VPNs 00:02:45 - “I do not like React hooks.” 00:03:50 - A Popular (?) Opinion TranscriptPat: Good thing you're putting that on our SRE focused pod.Brian: Yeah, well, they can take that to their front end developers and say, well, Brian Holt told me that hooks suck.Jason: Welcome to break things on purpose, an opinionated podcast about reliability and technology. As we launch into 2022, we thought it would be fun to ask some of our previous guests about their unpopular opinions.Zack butcher joined the show in August, 2021, to chat about his work on the Istio service mesh and its role in building more reliable, distributed systems. Here's his unpopular opinion on network security.Zack: I mean, can I talk about how I'm going to kill all the VPNs in the world? Uh, VPNs don't need to exist anymore. and that's stuff that I've actually been saying for years now. So it's so funny. We're finally realizing multi cluster Kubernetes. Right? I was so excited maybe two years ago at Kubecon and I finally heard people talk about multi cluster and I was like, oh, we finally arrived! It's not a toy anymore! Because when you have one, it's a toy, we have multiple, you're actually doing things. However, how do people facilitate that? I had demos four years ago of multicluster routing and traffic management on Istio. It was horrendous to write. It was awful. It's way better the way we do now. But, you know, the whole point that almost that entire time, I would tell people like, I'm going to kill VPN, there's no need for VPNs.There's a small need for like user privacy things. Right? That's a different category. But by and large, when organizations use a VPN, it's really about extending their network, right. It's about a network based trust model. And so I know that when you have reachability, that is that authorization, right? That's the old paradigm. VPNs enabled that. Fundamentally that doesn't work with the world that we live in anymore. it just doesn't, that's just not how security works, sorry. Uh, in, in these highly dynamic environments that we live in now. and so I actually think at this point in time, for the most part, actually VPNs probably cause more problems than solutions given the other tools that we have around.So yeah, so my unpopular opinion is that I want them to go away and be replaced with Envoy sidecars doing the encryption for all kinds of stuff. I would love to see that on your machine too. Right. I would love to see, you know, I'm, I'm talking to you on a Mac book. I would love for there to be a small sidebar there that actually is proxying that and doing things like identity and credential exchange in some way. Because that's a much stronger way to do security and to build your system, then things like a VPN.Jason: In April, 2021, Brian Holt shared some insightful, and hilarious, incidents and his perspective on Frontend Chaos Engineering. He shared his unpopular opinion with host Pat HigginsBrian: My unpopular opinion is that I do not like react hooks. And if you get people from the react community there's going to be some people that are legitimately going to be upset by that.I think they demo really well. And like the first time you show me some of that, it's just amazing and fascinating, but maintaining the large code bases full of hooks just quickly devolves into a performance mess, you get into like weird edge cases. And long-term, I think they actually have more cognitive load because you have to understand closures , really well to understand hooks really well. Whereas the opposite way, which is doing with react components. You have to understand this in context a little bit, but not a lot. So anyway, that's my very unpopular react opinion is that I like hooks and I wish we didn't have them.Pat: Good thing you're putting that on our SRE focused pod.Brian: Yeah, well, they can take that to their front end developers and say, well, Brian Holt told me that hooks suck.Jason: In November, Gustavo Franco dropped by to chat about building an SRE program at VMWare and the early days of Chaos Engineering at Google, we suspect his strongly held opinion is in fact, quite popular.Gustavo: About technology in general, the first thing that comes to mind, like the latest pet peeve in my head is really AIOps, as a term. It really bothers me. I think it's giving a name to something that is not there yet. It may come one day.So I could rant about AIOps forever. But the thing I would say is that, I dunno, folks selling AIOps solutions, like, look into improving, statistics functions in your products first. Yeah, it's, it's just a pet peeve. I know it doesn't really change anything to me day to day basis just every time I see something related to AIOps or people asking me, you know, if my teams ever implement AIOps it bothers me.Maybe about technology at large, just quickly, is kind of the same realm and how everything is artificial intelligence now. Even when people are not using machine learning at all. So everything quote unquote is an AI like queries and keyword matching for things. And people were like, oh, this is like an AI. This is more like for journalists, right? Like, I don't know if any journalists ever listen to this, but if they do, not everything that uses keyword matching's AI or machine learning.The computers are not learning, people! The computers are not learning! Calm down!Jason: The computers are not learning, but we are. And we hope that you'll learn along with us.To hear more from these guests and listen to all of our previous episodes. Visit our website at gremlin.com/podcast. You can automatically receive all of our new episodes by subscribing to the Break Things on Purpose podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Our theme song is called Battle of Pogs by Komiku and is available on loyaltyfreakmusic.com.
About BrianBrian is an accomplished dealmaker with experience ranging from developer platforms to mobile services. Before InfluxData, Brian led business development at Twilio. Joining at just thirty-five employees, he built over 150 partnerships globally from the company's infancy through its IPO in 2016. He led the company's international expansion, hiring its first teams in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Prior to Twilio Brian was VP of Business Development at Clearwire and held management roles at Amp'd Mobile, Kivera, and PlaceWare.Links:InfluxData: https://www.influxdata.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by my friends at ThinkstCanary. Most companies find out way too late that they've been breached. ThinksCanary changes this and I love how they do it. Deploy canaries and canary tokens in minutes and then forget about them. What's great is the attackers tip their hand by touching them, giving you one alert, when it matters. I use it myself and I only remember this when I get the weekly update with a “we're still here, so you're aware” from them. It's glorious! There is zero admin overhead to this, there are effectively no false positives unless I do something foolish. Canaries are deployed and loved on all seven continents. You can check out what people are saying at canary.love. And, their Kub config canary token is new and completely free as well. You can do an awful lot without paying them a dime, which is one of the things I love about them. It is useful stuff and not an, “ohh, I wish I had money.” It is speculator! Take a look; that's canary.love because it's genuinely rare to find a security product that people talk about in terms of love. It really is a unique thing to see. Canary.love. Thank you to ThinkstCanary for their support of my ridiculous, ridiculous nonsense. Corey: Writing ad copy to fit into a 30 second slot is hard, but if anyone can do it the folks at Quali can. Just like their Torque infrastructure automation platform can deliver complex application environments anytime, anywhere, in just seconds instead of hours, days or weeks. Visit Qtorque.io today and learn how you can spin up application environments in about the same amount of time it took you to listen to this ad.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at InfluxData. And my guest is titled as the Chief Marketing Officer at InfluxData, and I don't even care because his bio has something absolutely fascinating that I want to address instead. Brian Mullen is an accomplished dealmaker is how the bio starts. And so many of us spend time negotiating deals, but so few people describe ourselves in that way. First, Brian, thank you for joining us. And secondly, what's up with that?Brian: [laugh]. Well, thanks, Corey, very excited to be here. And yes, dealmaker; I guess that would be apropos. How did I get into marketing? Well, a lot of my career is spent in business development, and so I think that's where the dealmaker part comes from.Several different roles, including my first role at Influx—when I joined Influx—was in business development and partnerships. And so, prior to coming to Influx, I spent many years building out the business development team at Twilio, growing that up, and we did a lot of deals with carriers, with Cloud partners, with all kinds of different partners; you name it, we worked with them. And then moving into Influx, joined in an BD capacity here and had a couple different roles that eventually evolved to Chief Marketing Officer. But that's where the dealmaker comes from. I like to do deals, it's always nice to have one on the side in whatever capacity you're working in, it's nice to have a deal or two working on the side. It kind of keeps you fresh.Corey: It's fun because people think, “Oh, a deal. You're thinking of mergers and acquisitions, and how hard could that be? You just show up with a bag of money and give it to people and then you have a deal closed.” And oh, if only it were that simple. Every client engagement we have on the consulting side has been a negotiation back and forth, and the idea is to ideally get everyone to the point where they're happy, but honestly, if everyone's slightly unhappy but can live with the result, we'll take that too.And as people go through their own careers it's, you're always trying to make a deal in some form: when you try to get a project approved, or you're trying to get resources thrown at something—by which I generally mean money, not people, though people, too—it's something that isn't necessarily clearly understood or discussed very often, despite the fact that half of what I do is negotiating with AWS on behalf of clients for better contractual terms. The thing that I think takes people by surprise the most is that dealmaking is almost never about pounding the table, being angry, and walking out, like you read the world's worst guide to buying a car or something. It's about finding the win for everyone. At least that's the way I've always approached it.Brian: That's a good point. And actually that wording that you described of finding a win for everybody, that's how I always thought about it. I think about it as first of all, you're trying to understand what the other party—and it could be an individual, it could be a company, it could be a group of companies, sometimes—you're trying to understand what their goals are, what their agenda is and see how that matches with your own; sometimes they're opposing, sometimes they're overlapping. And then everyone has to have some perceived win in a deal. And it's not competitively; it's more like you just have to have value, that is kind of what the win is – having value in that deal.And so that's the way I always approached it. And doing deals, whether you're in BD or sales, or if you're working with vendors and you're in a different functional role, sometimes it's not even commercial, it's just about aligning resources, perhaps. Our deal might be that you and I are both going to put a collective effort into building something or taking something to market. In another scenario might be like, I'm going to pay for this service that you're delivering, or vice versa. Or we're going to go and bring two revenue-generating products together and take them to market. Whatever it might be, it doesn't matter so much what the mechanics are of the deal, but it's usually about aligning those agendas and in having someone get utility, get value on the other side.Corey: I think that people lose sight of the fact as well, that when you're talking about a service provider—and let's be clear, InfluxData has launched a cloud platform that we'll talk about in a minute—this is not the one-off transactional relationship; once the deal is signed, you've got to work with these people. When they host parts of your production infrastructure, whether you want to admit it or not they're your partner more so than they are your vendor. It has to be an ongoing relationship that people are, if they at least aren't thrilled with it, can at least be happy enough to live with, otherwise it just winds up with this growing sense of resentment and it just sort of leads nowhere.Brian: Yeah, there really is no deal moment. Yes, people sign agreements with companies, but that's just the very beginning. Your relationship evolves from there. We're delivering a product, we're delivering this platform that handles time-series data to our customers, and we're asking them to trust us with their product that they're taking out to market. They're asking us to handle their data and to deliver service to them that they're turning into their production applications. And so it's a big responsibility. And so we care about the relationship with our customers to continue that.Corey: So, I first really became aware of time-series data a few years back during a re:Invent keynote when they pre-announced Timestream, which took entirely too long to come to market. Okay, great. So, you're talking about time-series data. Can you explain what that means in simple terms? And I learned over the next eight minutes that they were talking about it, that no, no, they couldn't. I wound up more confused by the end of the announcement than I was at the beginning.So, assuming that I have the same respect for databases as you would expect for someone whose favorite data store is Route 53—because you can misuse it as a beautiful database—what is time-series data and why does it matter in 2021?Brian: Sure, it's a good question. And I was there in that audience as well that day. So, we think of time-series data as really any type of data that's stamped in time, in some way. It could be every hour, every minute, every second, every half second, whatever. But more specifically, it's any type of data that is generated by some source—and that could be a sensor sources within systems or an actual application—and these things change over time, and then therefore, stamped in time in some way.They can come at different frequencies, like I said, from nanoseconds to seconds, or minutes and hours, but the most important thing is that they usually trigger a workflow, trigger some sort of action. And so that's really what our platform is about. It allows people to handle this type of data and then work with it from there in their applications, trigger new workflows, et cetera. Because the historical context of what happens is super important.And when we talk about sources, it could be really many things. It could be in physical spaces, and we have a lot of IoT types of customers and use cases. And those are things like devices and sensors on the factory floor, out in the field, it's on a vehicle. It's even in space, believe it or not. There are customers that are using us on satellites.And then it can also be sources from within software, applications, and infrastructure, things like VMs, and containers, and microservices, all emitting time-series data. And it could be applications like crypto, or financial, or stock market, agricultural type of applications that are themselves as applications emitting data. So, you think about all these sources that are out there from the physical world to the virtual world, and they're all generating time-series data, and our platform is really specially designed to handle that kind of data. And we can get into some details of what exactly that means, but that's really why we're here. That's what time-series is all about.Corey: And this is the inherent challenge I think we're seeing across the entire industry slash ecosystem. I mean, this is airing during re:Invent week, but at the time we are recording this, we have not yet seen the Tuesday keynote that Adam Selipsky will take to the stage, and no doubt, render the stat I'm about to throw at you completely obsolete. But depending on how you count them, there's somewhere between 13 and 15 managed database or database-like services today that AWS offers. And they never turn things off and they're always releasing new things, supposedly on behalf of customers; in practice because someone somewhere wants to get promoted by launching a new service; good for them. Godspeed.If we look into the uncertain future, at some point, someone's job is going to be disambiguating between the 40 different managed database services that AWS offers and picking the one that works. What differentiates time-series from—let's just start with an easy one—something like MySQL or Postgres—or ‘Postgres-squeal' is how I insist on pronouncing that one. Let's stay away from things like Neptune because no one knows what a social graph database is and I assure you, you almost certainly don't need one. Where does something like Influx work in a way that, “Huh. Running this on MySQL is really starting to suck.”Brian: When and why is it time to consider a specialized tool. And in fact, that's actually what we see a lot with our customers is coming to us around that time when a time-series is a problem to solve for them is reaching the point where they really need a specialized tool that's kind of built for that. And so one way to look at that is really just to think about time-series in general as a type of data. It's rapidly rising. It's the fastest growing data category out there right now.And the reason for that is it's being driven by two big macro trends. One is the explosion of all these applications and services running in the cloud. They're expanding horizontally, they're running in more regions, they're in many cases running on multiple clouds, and so it's just getting big—the workloads are getting bigger and bigger. And those are emitting time-series data. And then simultaneously, you have this growth of all these devices and sensors that are coming online out in the real world: batteries, and temperature gauges, and all kinds of stuff, both new and old, that is coming online, and those sources are generating a lot of time-series data.So typically, we're in a moment now, where a lot of developers are faced with this massive growth of time-series data. And if you think about some data set that you have, that you're putting into some kind of traditional database, now add the component of time as a multiplier by all the data you have. Instead of that one data, that one metric, you're now looking at doing that every one second in perpetuity. And so it's just an order of magnitude more data that you're dealing with. And then you also have this notion of—when you have that magnitude of data, you have fidelity, you're taking a lot of it in at the same time, I mean, very quickly, so you have batch or stream data coming in at super high volume, and you may need that for a few minutes or a few hours or days, but maybe you don't need it for months and years.And so you'd maybe dropped down to kind of a lower fidelity for the longer-term. But you really have this toggling back and forth of the high fidelity and low fidelity, all coming at you at pretty high volume. And so typically what happens is, is when the workloads get big enough, the legacy tools, they're just not equipped to do it. And a developer—if they have a small set of time-series they're dealing with, what is the first thing they're going to do? They're going to look around and be like, “Hey, what do I have here? Oh, I've got Mongo over here. I've got Splunk, or I've got this old relational database, I can put it in.”And that's typically what they'll do, and that works fine until it doesn't. And then that's when they come around looking for a specialized tool. So, we really sit in Influx and, frankly, other time-series products really do sit at that point where people are considering a specialized tool just because the workload has gotten such that it requires that.Corey: Yeah. Taking a look at most of the offerings in the space; anything that winds up charging anything more than a very tiny fraction of a penny—from what you're describing—is going to quickly become non-economical, where it's, “Oh, we're going to charge you”—like using S3: every, I think, 1000 writes cost a penny—“Oh, we're just going to use S3 for this.” Well, at some of these data volumes, that means that your request charge on S3 is very quickly going to become the largest single line item in your bill, which is nothing short of impressive in a lot of cases, but it also probably means that you've taken a very specific tool—like an iPad—and tried to use it as something else—like a hammer—and no one's particularly happy with that outcome.Brian: Yeah. First of all, having usage-based pricing is really important. We think about it as allowing people to have the full version of the product without a major commitment, and be using it in test scenarios and then later in the very early production scenarios. But as a principle, it's important for people that just signed up two hours ago using your product are basically using the same full product that the biggest customers that you have are using that are paying many, many thousands or tens of thousands per month. And so the way to do that is to offer usage-based pricing and not force people to commit to something before they're ready to do it.And so there's ways to unlock lower pricing, and we, like a lot of companies, offer annual pricing and we have a sales team that worked with folks to basically draw down their unit costs on the use of the platform once they kind of get comfortable with their workload. So, there's definitely avenues to get lower price, and we're believers in that. And we also want to, from a product development perspective, try to make the product more efficient. And so we basically are trying to drive down the costs through efficiencies in the product: make it run faster, make queries take less time, and also ship products on top of it that require developers to write less code themselves, kind of, do more of the work for them.Corey: One of the things I find particularly compelling about what you've done is it is an open-source project. If I want to go ahead and run some time-series experiments myself, I can spin it up anywhere I want and run it however I see fit. Now, at some point, if I'm doing this for anything more than, “Oh, let's see how I can misuse this today,” I probably want to at least consider letting someone who's better at running these things than I am take it over. And as I'm looking through your customer list, the thing that strikes me is how none of these things are quite like the other. We're talking about companies like Hulu is probably not using it the same way as Capital One is, at least I certainly hope not. You have Texas Instruments; you also have Adobe. And it sort of runs an entire gamut of none of these companies quite look alike; I have to imagine their use cases are also somewhat varied, too.Brian: Yeah, that's right. And we really do see as a platform, and with time-series being the common problem that people are looking to solve, we see this pretty broad set of use cases and customer types. And we have some more traditional customers like the Cisco's and the IBM's of the world, and then some relatively new folks like Tesla and Hulu and others that are a little bit more recent. But they're all trying to solve the same fundamental problem with time-series, which is “How can I handle it in an efficient way and make use of it meaningfully in my applications and services?”And we were talking earlier about having some sources of time-series data being in, kind of a virtual space, like in infrastructure and software, and then some being in physical space, like in devices and sensors out in the real world. So, we have breadth in that way, too. We have folks who are building big software observability infrastructure solutions on us, and we also have people that are pulling data off of the devices on a solar panel that's sitting on a house in the emerging world, right? So, you have basically these two far ends of the spectrum, but all using this specialized tool to handle the time-series data that they're generating.Corey: It seems to me that for most of these use cases and the way you describe it, it's more about the overall shape of the data when we're talking about time-series more so than it is any particular data point in isolation. Is that accurate, or are there cases where that is very much not the case?Brian: I think that's accurate. What people are mostly trying to understand is context for what's happening. And so it's not necessarily—to your point—not searching for one specific data point or moment, but it's really understanding context for some general state that has changed or some trend that has emerged, whatever that might be, and then making sense of that, and then taking action on that. And taking an action could mean a couple of different things, too. It could be in an observability sense, where somebody in an operator type of mode where they're looking at dashboards and paying attention to infrastructure that's running and then need to take some sort of action based on that. It also, in many cases, is automated in some way: it's either some series of automated responses to some state that is reached that is visible in the data, or is actually kicking off some new series of tasks or actions inside of an application based on what is occurring and shown by the time-series data.Corey: You know what doesn't add to your AWS bill? Free developer security from Snyk. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are, finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, repos, and pipelines. And Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like CodePipeline, EKS, ECR, and oh so much more.Secure with Snyk and save some loot. Learn more at snyk.io/scream. That's S-N-Y-K-dot-I-O/screamCorey: So, we've talked about, you have an open-source product, which is the sort of thing that most people listening to this should have a vague idea of, “Oh, that means I can go on GitHub and download it and start using it, if it's not already in my package manager.” Great. You also have the enterprise offering, which is more or less, I presume, a supported distribution of this—for lack of a better term—that you then wind up providing blessed configurations thereof and helping run support for that—for companies that want to run it on-prem. Is that directionally accurate, or am I grossly mischaracterizing [laugh] what your enterprise offering is?Brian: Directionally accurate, of course. You could have a great job in marketing. I really think you could.Corey: Oh, you know, I would argue, on some level, I probably do. The challenge I have is that I keep conflating marketing with spectacle and that leads down to really unfortunate, weird places. But one additional area, which is relatively recent since the last time I spoke with Paul—one of the cofounders of your company—on this show is InfluxDB Cloud, which is one of those, “Oh, let me see if I look—if I'm right.” And sure enough, yeah, you wind up managing the infrastructure for us and it becomes a pay-per consumption model the way that most cloud service providers do, without the really obnoxious hidden 15 levels of billing dimensions.Brian: Yes, we are trying to bring the transparency back. But yes, you're correct. We have open-source and we have—it's very popular—we have over 500,000-plus instances of that deployed globally today in the community. And that's typically very common for developers to get started using the open-source, easily recognizable, it's been out for a long time, and so many people start the journey there.And then we have InfluxDB Enterprise, which it's actually a clustered version of InfluxDB open-source. So, it allows you to basically handle in an environment that you want to manage yourself, you manage a cluster and scale it out and handle ever-increasing workloads and have things like redundancy and replication, et cetera. But that's really specifically for people who want to deploy and operate the software themselves, which is a good set of people; we have a lot of folks who have done that. But one of the areas that's a little bit more recent is InfluxDB Cloud, which is really, for folks who don't want to have anything to do with the management; they really just want to use it as a service, send their data in—Corey: Yeah, give me an API endpoint, and I want you to worry about the care, and the feeding, and the waking up at two in the morning when a disk starts filling up. Yeah, that is the best kind of problem from my perspective: someone else's.Brian: Exactly. That's our job. And increasingly, we've seen folks gravitate to that. We've got a lot of folks have signed up on this product since it launched in 2019, and it's really increasingly where they begin their journey, maybe not even going to the open-source just going directly to this because it's relatively simple to get started.It's priced based on usage. People pay for three vectors: they have the amount of data in; they have number of queries made against the platform; and then storage, how much data you have and for how long. And depending on the use case, some people keep it around for relatively short time, like a few days or a couple of weeks. Other folks have it for many, many months and potentially years in some places. So, you really have that option.But I would say the three products are really about how you want to run it. Do you care about running the, kind of, underlying infrastructure and managing it or do you just want to hit an endpoint, as you said.Corey: You launched this, I want to say in 2019, which feels about directionally right. And I know it was after Timestream was announced, so I just want to say first, how kind and selfless it was of you to validate AWS's market, which is, you know how they always like to clarify and define what they're doing when they decide to enter every single market anywhere to compete with everyone. It turns out, I don't get the sense that they like it quite [laugh] as much being on the other side of that particular divide, but that's the best kind of problem, too: again, someone else's.Brian: Yeah, I think that's really true.Corey: The challenge that I have is that it seems like a weird direction to go in as a company, though it is clearly based upon a number of press releases you have made about the success and market traction that you found, it feels, on some level, like it is falling into an older version of an open-source trap of assuming that, “Well, we wrote the software therefore we are the best people you could pick to run it.” That was what a lot of companies did; it turns out that AWS has this operational excellence, as they call it, and what the rest of us call burning through people and making them wake up in the middle of the night to fix things before it becomes customer-visible. But from the outside, there's no difference. It seems, however, that you have built something that is clearly resonating, and in a big way, in a way that—I've got to be direct with you—the AWS time-series service that they are offering has not been finding success.Brian: Thank you for saying that, and we feel pretty excited about the success we've had even being in the same market as Amazon. And Amazon does a phenomenal job at running products at scale, and the breadth that they have in their product lineup is pretty impressive, especially when they roll out new stuff at AWS re:Invent every year. But we've been able to find some pretty good success with our approach, and it's based on a couple of things. So, one is being the company that actually develops and still deploys the open-source is really important. People gravitate to that.Our roots as a company are open-source, we've been a part of and fostered this community over many, many years, and there's a certain trust in the direction that we're taking the company. And Paul, our founder who you mentioned, he's been front and center with that community, pretty deeply engaged for many, many years. I think that carries a lot of weight. At least that's the way we think about it. But then as far as commercial products go, we really think about it as going to where our customers are, going to where developers are. And that could mean the language that they prefer, the language of preference for them. And that could [crosstalk 00:22:25]—Corey: Oh, and it's very clear; it seems that most database companies that I talk to—again, without naming names—tend to focus on the top-down sale, but I've never worked in an environment where the database that will be used was dictated by anyone other than the application developers who are the closest to the technical requirements for the workload. I've never understood this model of, “Oh, we're going to talk to the C suite because we believe that they're going to pick a database vendor based upon who has box seats this season.” I've never gotten that and that probably means I'm a terrible enterprise marketer, on some level. But unlike almost every other player in the database space, I've never struggled to understand what the hell your messaging has meant, other than the technical bits that I just don't have quite enough neurons to bang together to create sparks to fully understand. It is very clearly targeted at a builder rather than someone who's more or less spending their entire life in meetings. Which, oh, God, that's me.Brian: [laugh]. Yes, it's very much the case. We are focused on the developer. And that developer is a builder of an application or service that is seeing the light of day, it's going out and being used by their own end-users and end-customers.And so we care about going to where those developers are, and that could mean going and making your product easily used in the language and tool that customer cares about. So, if you're a Python developer, it's important for us to have tools and make it easy for Python developers. We have client libraries for Python, for example. It also means going to the cloud where your customers are. And this is something that differentiates us as well, when you start looking at what the other cloud providers are offering, in that data—like it or not—has gravity. And so somebody that has built their whole stack on AWS and sure they care about using a service that is going to receive their data, and that also being in AWS, but—Corey: It has to live where the customers are, especially with data egress charges being what they are, too.Brian: Exactly.Corey: And data gravity is real. The cloud provider people pick is the one where their data lives because of that particular inflection in the market.Brian: Absolutely true. And so that's great if you're only going after people who are on AWS, but what about Google Cloud and what about Microsoft Azure? There are a lot of developers that are building on those platforms as well, and that's one of the reasons we want to go there as well. So, InfluxDB Cloud is a multi-cloud offering, and it's equal experience and capability and pricing on each of the three major clouds. You can buy directly from us; you can put it on any of your cloud bills in one of those marketplaces, and to us that's like a really, really fundamental point is to bring your product and make it as easy to use on those platforms and in those languages, and in those realms and use cases where people are already working.Corey: I'm a big believer in multi-cloud for the use case you just defined. Because I know I'm going to get letters if I don't say this based upon my public multi-cloud is a dumb default worst practice for most folks—because it is, on a workload-by-workload basis—but you're building a service that has to be close to where your customers are and for that specific thing, yeah, it makes an awful lot of sense for you to have a presence across all the different providers. Now, here's the $64,000 question for you: is the experience as an InfluxDB Cloud customer meaningfully different between different providers?Brian: It's not. We actually pride ourselves on it being the same. Using InfluxDB, you sign up for InfluxDB Cloud, you come in, you set up your account, create your organization, and then you choose which underlying cloud provider you want your account to be provisioned in. And so it actually comes as a secondary choice; it's not something that is gated in the beginning, and that allows us to deliver a uniform experience across the board. And you may in a future use case, maybe somebody wants to have part of what they're building data living in AWS and maybe part of it living in Azure, I mean, that could be a scenario as well.However, typically what we've seen—and you've probably seen this as well—is most developers are—and organizations—are building mostly on one cloud. I don't see a lot of multi-cloud in that organization. But we ourselves need to be multi-cloud in order to go to where those people are working. And so that's the distinction. It's for us as a company that delivers product to those people, it's important for us to go where they are, whereas they themselves are not necessarily running on all three cloud products; they're probably running on one platform.Corey: Yeah. On a workload-by-workload basis, that's what generally makes sense. Anytime you have someone who has a particular workload that needs to be in multiple providers, okay, great, you're going to put that out there, but their backend systems, their billing, their marketing, all the rest, is not going to go down that path for a variety of excellent reasons, mostly that it is a colossal pain, and a bunch of, more or less, solving the same problems over and over, rather than the whole point of cloud being to make it someone else's. I want to thank you for taking so much time to speak to me about how you're viewing the evolution of the market, how you're seeing your move into cloud, and how you're effectively targeting folks who can actually care about the implementation details of a database rather than, honestly, suits. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?Brian: They can go to our website; it's the easiest place to go. So, influxdata.com. You can read all about InfluxDB, it's a pretty easy sign up to get underway. So, I recommend that people get their hands dirty with the product. That's the easiest way to understand what it's all about.Corey: And if you do end up doing that, please tell them I sent you because the involuntary flinch whenever people mention my name to vendors is one of my favorite parts of being me. Brian, thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Brian: Thanks so much for having us on. It was great.Corey: Brian Mullen, Chief Marketing Officer—and dealmaker—at InfluxData. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a long, angry comment telling me that you work on the Timestream service team, and your product is the best. It's found huge success, but I've just never met any of your customers and I can't because they all live in Canada.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
About BrianI lead the Google Cloud Product and Industry Marketing team. We're focused on accelerating the growth of Google Cloud by establishing thought leadership, increasing demand and usage, enabling our sales teams and partners to tell our product stories with excellence, and helping our customers be the best advocates for us.Before joining Google, I spent over 25 years in product marketing or engineering in different forms. I started my career at Microsoft and had a very non-traditional path for 20 years. I worked in every product division except for cloud. I did marketing, product management, and engineering roles. And, early on, I was the first speech writer for Steve Ballmer and worked on Bill Gates' speeches too. My last role was building up the Microsoft Surface business from scratch and as VP of the hardware businesses. After Microsoft, I spent a year as CEO at a hardware startup called Doppler Labs, where we made a run at transforming hearing, and then two years as VP at Amazon Web Services leading product marketing, developer advocacy, and a bunch more marketing teams. I have three kids still at home, Barty, Noli, and Alder, who are all named after trees in different ways. My wife Edie and I met right at the beginning of our first year at Yale University, where I studied math, econ, and philosophy and was the captain of the Swim and Dive team my senior year. Edie has a PhD in forestry and runs a sustainability and forestry consulting firm she started, that is aptly named “Three Trees Consulting”. We love the outdoors, tennis, running, and adventures in my 1986 Volkswagen Van, which is my first and only car, that I can't bring myself to get rid of.Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/IsForAt LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brhall/ Episode 10: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/episode-10-education-is-not-ready-for-teacherless/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. Set up a meeting with a Redis expert during re:Invent, and you'll not only learn how you can become a Redis hero, but also have a chance to win some fun and exciting prizes. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense. Corey: Writing ad copy to fit into a 30 second slot is hard, but if anyone can do it the folks at Quali can. Just like their Torque infrastructure automation platform can deliver complex application environments anytime, anywhere, in just seconds instead of hours, days or weeks. Visit Qtorque.io today and learn how you can spin up application environments in about the same amount of time it took you to listen to this ad.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined today by a special guest that I've been, honestly, antagonizing for years now. Once upon a time, he spent 20 years at Microsoft, then he wound up leaving—as occasionally people do, I'm told—and going to AWS, where according to an incredibly ill-considered affidavit filed in a court case, he mostly focused on working on PowerPoint slides. AWS is famously not a PowerPoint company, and apparently, you can't change culture. Now, he's the VP of Product and Industry Marketing at Google Cloud. Brian Hall, thank you for joining me.Brian: Hi, Corey. It's good to be here.Corey: I hope you're thinking that after we're done with our conversation. Now, unlike most conversations that I tend to have with folks who are, honestly, VP level at large cloud companies that I enjoy needling, we're not going to talk about that today because instead, I'd rather focus on a minor disagreement we got into on Twitter—and I mean that in the truest sense of disagreement, as opposed to the loud, angry, mutual blocking, threatening to bomb people's houses, et cetera, nonsense that appears to be what substitutes for modern discourse—about, oh, a month or so ago from the time we're recording this. Specifically, we talked about, I'm in favor of job-hopping to advance people's career, and you, as we just mentioned, spent 20 years at Microsoft and take something of the opposite position. Let's talk about that. Where do you stand on the idea?Brian: I stand in the position that people should optimize for where they are going to grow the most. And frankly, the disagreement was less about job-hopping because I'm going to explain how I job-hopped at Microsoft effectively.Corey: Excellent. That is the reason I'm asking you rather than poorly stating your position and stuffing you like some sort of Christmas turkey straw-man thing.Brian: And I would argue that for many people, changing jobs is the best thing that you can do, and I'm often an advocate for changing jobs even before sometimes people think they should do it. What I mostly disagreed with you on is simply following the money on your next job. What you said is if a—and I'm going to get it somewhat wrong—but if a company is willing to pay you $40,000 more, or some percentage more, you should take that job now.Corey: Gotcha.Brian: And I don't think that's always the case, and that's what we're talking about.Corey: This is the inherent problem with Twitter is that first, I tend to write my Twitter threads extemporaneously without a whole lot of thought being put into things—kind of like I live my entire life, but that's neither here nor there—Brian: I was going to say, that comes across quite clearly.Corey: Excellent. And 280 characters lacks nuance. And I definitely want to have this discussion; this is not just a story where you and I beat heads and not come to an agreement on this. I think it's that we fundamentally do agree on the vast majority of this, I just want to make sure that we have this conversation in a way, in a forum that doesn't lend itself to basically empowering the worst aspects of my own nature. Read as, not Twitter.Brian: Great. Let's do that.Corey: So, my position is, and I was contextualizing this from someone who had reached out who was early in their career, they had spent a couple of years at AWS and they were entertaining an offer elsewhere for significantly more money. And this person, I believe I can—I believe it's okay for me to say this: she—was very concerned that, “I don't want to look like I'm job-hopping, and I don't dislike my team. My manager is great. I feel disloyal for leaving. What should I do?”Which first, I just want to say how touched I am that someone who is early in their career and not from a wildly overrepresented demographic like you and I felt a sense of safety and security in reaching out to ask me that question. I really wish more people would take that kind of initiative. It's hard to inspire, but here we are. And my take to her was, “Oh, my God. Take the money.” That was where this thread started because when I have conversations with people about those things, it becomes top of mind, and I think, “Hmm, maybe there's a one-to-many story that becomes something that is actionable and useful.”Brian: Okay, so I'm going to give two takes on this. I'll start with my career because I was in a similar position as she was, at one point in my career. My background, I lucked into a job at Microsoft as an intern in 1995, and then did another internship in '96 and then started full time on the Internet Explorer team. And about a year-and-a-half into that job, I—we had merged with the Windows '98 team and I got the opportunity to work on Bill Gates's speech for the Windows '98 launch event. And I—after that was right when Steve Ballmer became president of Microsoft and he started doing a lot more speeches and asked to have someone to help him with speeches.And Chris Capossela, who's now the CMO at Microsoft, said, “Hey, Brian. You interested in doing this for Steve?” And my first reaction was, well, even inside Microsoft, if I move, it will be disloyal. Because my manager's manager, they've given me great opportunities, they're continuing to challenge me, I'm learning a bunch, and they advised not doing it.Corey: It seems to me like you were in a—how to put this?—not to besmirch the career you have wrought with the sweat of your brow and the toil of your back, but in many ways, you were—in a lot of ways—you were in the right place at the right time, riding a rocket ship, and built opportunities internally and talked to folks there, and built the relationships that enabled you to thrive inside of a company's ecosystem. Is that directionally correct?Brian: For sure. Yet, there's also, big companies are teams of teams, and loyalty is more often with the team and the people that you work with than the 401k plan. And in this case, you know, I was getting this pressure that says, “Hey, Brian. You're going to get all these opportunities. You're doing great doing what you're doing.”And I eventually had the luck to ask the question, “Hey, if I go there and do this role”—and by the way, nobody had done it before, and so part of their argument was, “You're young, Steve's… Steve. Like, you could be a fantastic ball of flames.” And I said, “Okay, if [laugh] let's say that happens. Can I come back? Can I come back to the job I was doing before?”And they were like, “Yeah, of course. You're good at what you do.” To me, which was, “Okay, great. Then I'm gone. I might as well go try this.” And of course, when I started at Microsoft, I was 20, 21, and I thought I'd be there for two or three years and then I'd end up going back to school or somewhere else. But inside Microsoft, what kept happening as I just kept getting new opportunities to do something else that I'd learned a bunch from, and I ultimately kind of created this mentality for how I thought about next job of, “Am I going to get more opportunities if I am able to be successful in this new job?” Really focused on optionality and the ability to do work that I want to do and have more choices to do that.Corey: You are also on a I almost want to call it a meteoric trajectory. In some ways. You effectively went from—what was your first role there? It was—Brian: The lowest level of college hire you can do at Microsoft, effectively.Corey: Yeah. All the way on up to at the end of it the Corporate VP for Microsoft Devices. It seems to me that despite the fact that you spent 20 years there, you wound up having a bunch of different jobs and an entire career trajectory internal to the organization, which is, let's be clear, markedly different from some of the folks I've interviewed at various times, in my career as an employer and as a technical interviewer at a consulting company, where they'd been somewhere for 15 years, and they had one year of experience that they repeated 15 times. And it was one of the more difficult things that I encountered is that some folks did not take ownership of their career and focus on driving it forward.Brian: Yeah, that, I had the opposite experience, and that is what kept me there that long. After I would finish a job, I would say, “Okay, what do I want to learn how to do next, and what is a challenge that would be most interesting?” And initially, I had to get really lucky, honestly, to be able to get these. And I did the work, but I had to have the opportunity, and that took luck. But after I had a track record of saying, “Hey, I can jump from being a product marketer to being a speechwriter; I can do speechwriting and then go do product management; I can move from product management into engineering management.”I can do that between different businesses and product types, you build the ability to say, “Hey, I can learn that if you give me the chance.” And it, frankly, was the unique combination of experiences I had by having tried to do these other things that gave me the opportunity to have a fast trajectory within the company.Corey: I think it's also probably fair to say that Microsoft was a company that, in its dealings with you, is operating in good faith. And that is a great thing to find when you see it, but I'm cynical; I admit that. I see a lot of stories where people give and sacrifice for the good of the company, but that sacrifice is never reciprocated. And we've all heard the story of folks who will put their nose to the grindstone to ship something on time, only to be rewarded with a layoff at the end, and stories like that resonate.And my argument has always been that you can't love a company because the company can't love you back. And when you're looking at do I make a career move or do I stay, my argument is that is the best time to be self-interested.Brian: Yeah, I don't think—companies are there for the company, and certainly having a culture that supports people that wants to create opportunity, having a manager that is there truly to make you better and to give you opportunity, that all can happen, but it's within a company and you have to do the work in order to try and get into that environment. Like, I worked hard to have managers who would support my growth, would give me the bandwidth and leash early on to not be perfect at what I'm doing, and that always helped me. But you get to go pick them in a company like that, or in the industry in general, you get—just like when a manager is hiring you, you also get to understand, hey, is this a person I want to work for?But I want to come back to the main point that I wanted to make. When I changed jobs, I did it because I wanted to learn something new and I thought that would have value for me in the medium-term and long-term, versus how do I go max cash in what I'm already good at?Corey: Yes.Brian: And that's the root of what we were disagreeing with on Twitter. I have seen many people who are good at something, and then another company says, “Hey, I want you to do that same thing in a worse environment, and we'll pay you more.”Corey: Excellence is always situational. Someone who is showered in accolades at one company gets fired at a different company. And it's not because they suddenly started sucking; it's because the tools and resources that they needed to succeed were present in one environment and not the other. And that varies from person to person; when someone doesn't work out of the company, I don't have a default assumption that there's something inherently wrong with them.Of course, I look at my own career and the sheer, staggeringly high number of times I got fired, and I'm starting to think, “Huh. The only consistent factor in all of these things is me. Nah, couldn't be my problem. I just worked for terrible places, for terrible people. That's got to be the way it works.” My own peace of mind. I get it. That is how it feels sometimes and it's easy to dismiss that in different ways. I don't want to let my own bias color this too heavily.Brian: So, here are the mistakes that I've seen made: “I'm really good at something; this other company will pay me to do just that.” You move to do it, you get paid more, but you have less impact, you don't work with as strong of people, and you don't have a next step to learn more. Was that a good decision? Maybe. If you need the money now, yes, but you're a little bit trading short-term money for medium-and long-term money where you're paid for what you know; that's the best thing in this industry. We're paid for what we know, which means as you're doing a job, you can build the ability to get paid more by knowing more, by learning more, by doing things that stretch you in ways that you don't already know.Corey: In 2006, I bluffed my way through a technical interview and got a job as a Unix systems administrator for a university that was paying $65,000 a year, and I had no idea what I was going to do with all of that money. It was more money than I could imagine at that point. My previous high watermark, working for an ethically challenged company in a sales role at a target comp of 55, and I was nowhere near it. So okay, let's go somewhere else and see what happens. And after I'd been there a month or two, my boss sits me down and said, “So”—it's our annual compensation adjustment time—“Congratulations. You now make $68,000.”And it's just, “Oh, my God. This is great. Why would I ever leave?” So, I stayed there a year and I was relatively happy, insofar as I'm ever happy in a job. And then a corporate company came calling and said, “Hey, would you consider working here?”“Well, I'm happy here and I'm reasonably well compensated. Why on earth would I do that?” And the answer was, “Well, we'll pay you $90,000 if you do.” It's like, “All right. I guess I'm going to go and see what the world holds.”And six weeks later, they let me go. And then I got another job that also paid $90,000 and I stayed there for two years. And I started the process of seeing what my engagement with the work world look like. And it was a story of getting let go periodically, of continuing to claw my way up and, credit where due, in my 20s I was in crippling credit card debt because I made a bunch of poor decisions, so I biased early on for more money at almost any cost. At some point that has to stop because there's always a bigger paycheck somewhere if you're willing to go and do something else.And I'm not begrudging anyone who pursues that, but at some point, it ceases to make a difference. Getting a raise from $68,000 to $90,000 was life-changing for me. Now, getting a $30,000 raise? Sure, it'd be nice; I'm not turning my nose up at it, don't get me wrong, but it's also not something that moves the needle on my lifestyle.Brian: Yeah. And there are a lot of those dimensions. There's the lifestyle dimension, there's the learning dimension, there's the guaranteed pay dimension, there's the potential paid dimension, there is the who I get to work with, just pure enjoyment dimension, and they all matter. And people should recognize that job moves should consider all of these.And you don't have to have the same framework over time as well. I've had times where I really just wanted to bear down and figure something out. And I did one job at Microsoft for basically six years. It changed in terms of scope of things that I was marketing, and which division I was in, and then which division I was in, and then which division I was in—because Microsoft loves a good reorg—but I basically did the same job for six years at one point, and it was very conscious. I was trying to get really good at how do I manage a team system at scale. And I didn't want to leave that until I had figured that out. I look back and I think that's one of the best career decisions I ever made, but it was for reasons that would have been really hard to explain to a lot of people.Corey: Let's also be very clear here that you and I are well-off white dudes in tech. Our failure mode is pretty much a board seat and a book deal. In fact, if—Brian: [laugh].Corey: —I'm not mistaken, you are on the board of something relatively recently. What was that?Brian: United Way of King County. It's a wonderful nonprofit in the Seattle area.Corey: Excellent. And I look forward to reading your book, whenever that winds up dropping. I'm sure it'll be only the very spiciest of takes. For folks who are earlier in their career and who also don't have the winds of privilege at their backs the way that you and I do, this also presents radically differently. And I've spoken to a number of folks who are not wildly over-represented about this topic, in the wake of that Twitter explosion.And what I heard was interesting in that having a manager who has your back counts for an awful lot and is something that is going to absolutely hold you to a particular company, even when it might make sense on paper for you to leave. And I think that there's something strong there. My counterargument is okay, so you turn down the offer, a month goes past and your manager gives notice because they're going to go somewhere else. What then? It's one of those things where you owe your employer a duty of confidentiality, you owe them a responsibility to do your best work, to conduct yourself in an ethical manner, but I don't believe you owe them loyalty in the sense of advancing their interests ahead of what's best for you and your career arc.And what's right for any given person is, of course, a nuanced and challenging thing. For some folks, yeah, going out somewhere else for more money doesn't really change anything and is not what they should optimize for. For other folks, it's everything. And I don't think either of those takes is necessarily wrong. I think it comes down to it depends on who you are, and what your situation is, and what's right for you.Brian: Yeah. I totally agree. For early in career, in particular, I have been a part of—I grew up in the early versions of the campus hiring program at Microsoft, and then hired 500-plus, probably, people into my teams who were from that.Corey: You also do the same thing at AWS if I'm not mistaken. You launched their first college hiring program that I recall seeing, or at least that's what scuttlebutt has it.Brian: Yes. You're well-connected, Corey. We started something called the Product Marketing Leadership Development Program when I was in AWS marketing. And then one year, we hired 20 people out of college into my organization. And it was not easy to do because it meant using, quote-unquote, “Tenured headcount” in order to do it. There wasn't some special dispensation because they were less paid or anything, and in a world where headcount is a unit of work, effectively.And then I'm at Google now, in the Google Cloud division, and we have a wonderful program that I think is really well done, called the Associate Product Marketing Manager Program, APMM. And what I'd say is for the people early in career, if you get the opportunity to have a manager who's super supportive, in a system that is built to try and grow you, it's a wonderful opportunity. And by ‘system built to grow you,' it really is, do you have the support to get taught what you need to get taught on the job? Are you getting new opportunities to learn new things and do new things at a rapid clip? Are you shipping things into the market such that you can see the response and learn from that response, versus just getting people's internal opinions, and then are people stretching roles in order to make them amenable for someone early in career?And if you're in a system that gives you that opportunity—like let's take your example earlier. A person who has a manager who's greatly supportive of them and they feel like they're learning a lot, that manager leaves, if that system is right, there's another manager, or there's an opportunity to put your hand up and say, “Hey, I think I need a new place,” and that will be supported.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking, databases, observability, management, and security. 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Visit snark.cloud/oci-free that's snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: I have a history of mostly working in small companies, to the point where I consider a big company to be one that has more than 200 employees, so, the idea of radically transitioning and changing teams has never really been much on the table as I look at my career trajectory and my career arc. I have seen that I've gotten significant 30% raises by changing jobs. I am hard-pressed to identify almost anyone who has gotten that kind of raise in a single year by remaining at a company.Brian: One hundred percent. Like, I know of people who have, but it—Corey: It happens, but it's—Brian: —is very rare.Corey: —it's very rare.Brian: It's, it's, it's almost the, the, um, the example that proves the point. I getting that totally wrong. But yes, it's very rare, but it does happen. And I think if you get that far out of whack, yes. You should… you should go reset, especially if the other attributes are fine and you don't feel like you're just going to get mercenary pay.What I always try and advise people is, in the bigger companies, you want to be a good deal. You don't want to be a great deal or a bad deal. Where a great deal is you're getting significantly underpaid, a bad deal is, “Uh oh. We hired this person to [laugh] senior,” or, “We promoted them too early,” because then the system is not there to help you, honestly, in the grand scheme of things. A good deal means, “Hey, I feel like I'm getting better work from this person for what we are giving them than what the next clear alternative would be. Let's support them and help them grow.” Because at some level, part of your compensation is getting your company to create opportunities for you to grow. And part of the reason people go to a manager is they know they'll give them that compensation.Corey: I am learning this the interesting way, as we wind up hiring and building out our, currently, nine-person company. It's challenging for us to build those opportunities while bootstrapped, but it is incumbent upon us, you're right. That is a role of management is how do you identify growth opportunities for people, ideally, while remaining at the company, but sometimes that means that helping them land somewhere else is the right path for their next growth step.Brian: Well, that brings up a word for managers. What you pay your employees—and I'm talking big company here, not people like yourself, Corey, where you have to decide whether you reinvesting money or putting in an individual.Corey: Oh, yes—Brian: But at big companies—Corey: —a lot of things that apply when you own a company are radically departed from—Brian: Totally.Corey: —what is—Brian: Totally.Corey: —common guidance.Brian: Totally. At a big company, managers, you get zero credit for how much your employees get paid, what their raise is, whether they get promoted or not in the grand scheme of things. That is the company running their system. Yes, you helped and the like, but it's—like, when people tell me, “Hey, Brian, thank you for supporting my promotion.” My answer is always, “Thank you for having earned it. It's my job to go get credit where credit is due.” And that's not a big part of my job, and I honestly believe that.Where you do get credit with people, where you do show that you're a good manager is when you have the conversations with them that are harder for other people to have, but actually make them better; when you encourage them in the right way so that they grow faster; when you treat them fairly as a human being, and mostly when you do the thing that seems like it's against your own interest.Corey: That resonates. The moments of my career as a manager that I'm proud of stuff are the ones that I would call borderline subversive: telling a candidate to take the competing offer because they're going to have a better time somewhere else is one of those. But my philosophy ties back to the idea of job-hopping, where I'm going to know these people for longer than either of us are going to remain in our current role, on some level. I am curious what your approach is, given that you are now at the, I guess, other end for folks who are just starting out. How do you go about getting people into Cloud marketing? And, on some level, wouldn't you consider that being a form of abuse?Brian: [laugh]. It depends on whether they get to work with you or not, Corey.Corey: There is that.Brian: I won't tell you which one's abuse or not. So first, getting people into cloud marketing is getting people who do not have deeply technical backgrounds in most cases, oftentimes fantastic—people who are fantastic at understanding other people and communicating really well, and it gives them an opportunity to be in tech in one of the fastest-growing, fastest-changing spaces in the world. And so to go to a psych major, a marketing major, an American studies major, a history major, who can understand complex things and then communicate really well, and say, “Hey, I have an opportunity for you to join the fastest growing space in technology,” is often compelling.But their question kind of is, “Hey, will I be able to do it?” And the answer has to be, “Hey, we have a program that helps you learn, and we have a set of managers who know how to teach, and we create opportunities for you to learn on the job, and we're invested in you for more than a short period of time.” With that case, I've been able to hire and grow and work with, in some cases, people for over 15 years now that I worked with at Microsoft. I'm still in touch with many of the people from the Product Marketing Leadership Development Program at AWS. And we have a fantastic set of APMMs at Google, and it creates a wonderful opportunity for them.Increasingly, we're also seeing that it is one of the best ways to find people from many backgrounds. We don't just show up at the big CompSci schools. We're getting some wonderful, wonderful people from all the states in the nation, from the historically black colleges and universities, from majors that tend to represent very different groups than the traditional tech audiences. And so it's been a great source of broadening our talent pool, too.Corey: There's a lot to be said for having people who've been down this path and seeing the failure modes, reaching out to make so that the next generation—for lack of a better term—has an easier time than we did. The term I've heard for the concept is ‘send the elevator back down,' which is important. I think it's—otherwise we wind up with a whole industry that looks an awful lot like it did 20 years ago, and that's not ideal for anyone. The paths that you and I walked are closed, so sitting here telling people they should do what we did has very strong, ‘Okay, Boomer' energy to it.Brian: [laugh].Corey: There are different paths, and the world and industry are changing radically.Brian: Absolutely. And my—like, the biggest thing that I'd say here is—and again, just coming back to the one thing we disagreed on—look at the bigger picture and own your career. I would never say that isn't the case, but the bigger picture means not just what you're getting paid tomorrow, but are you learning more? What new options is it creating for you? And when I speak options, I mean, will you have more jobs that you can do that excite you after you do that job? And those things matter in addition to the pay.Corey: I would agree with that. Money is not everything, but it's also not nothing.Brian: Absolutely.Corey: I will say though you spent 20 years at Microsoft. I have no doubt that you are incredibly adept at managing your career, at managing corporate politics, at advancing your career and your objectives and your goals and your aspirations within Microsoft, but how does that translate to companies that have radically different corporate cultures? We see this all the time with founders who are ex-Google or ex-Microsoft, and suddenly it turns out that the things that empower them to thrive in the large corporate environment doesn't really work when you're a five-person startup, and you don't have an entire team devoted to that one thing that needs to get done.Brian: So, after Microsoft, I went to a company called Doppler Labs for a year. It was a pretty well-funded startup that made smart earbuds—this was before AirPods had even come out—and I was really nervous about the going from big company to startup thing, and I actually found that move pretty easy. I've always been kind of a hands-on, do-it-yourself, get down in the details manager, and that's served me well. And so getting into a startup and saying, “Hey, I get to just do stuff,” was almost more fun. And so after that—we ended up folding, but it was a wonderful ride; that's a much longer conversation—when I got to Amazon and I was in AWS—and by the way, the one division I never worked at Microsoft was Azure or its predecessor server and tools—and so part of the allure of AWS was not only was it another trillion-dollar company in my backwater hometown, but it was also cloud computing, was the space that I didn't know well.And they knew that I knew the discipline of product marketing and a bunch of other things quite well, and so I got that opportunity. But I did realize about four months in, “Oh, crap. Part of the reason that I was really successful at Microsoft is I knew how everything worked.” I knew where things have been tried and failed, I knew who to go ask about how to do things, and I knew none of that at Amazon. And it is a—a lot of what allows you to move fast, make good decisions, and frankly, be politically accepted, is understanding all that context that nobody can just tell you. So, I will say there is a cost in terms of your productivity and what you're able to get done when you move from a place that you're good at to a place that you're not good at yet.Corey: Way back in episode 10 of this podcast—as we get suspiciously close to 300 as best I can tell—I had Lynn Langit get on as a guest. And she was in the Microsoft MVP program, the AWS Hero program, and the Google Expert program. All three at once—Brian: Lynn is fantastic.Corey: It really is.Brian: Lynn is fantastic.Corey: I can only assume that you listened to that podcast and decided, huh, all three, huh? I can beat that. And decided that—Brian: [laugh].Corey: —instead of being in the volunteer to do work for enormous multinational companies group, you said, “No, no, no. I'm going to be a VP in all three of those.” And here we are. Now that you are at Google, you have checked all three boxes. What is the next mountain to climb for you?Brian: I have no clue. I have no clue. And honestly—again, I don't know how much of this is privilege versus by being forward-looking. I've honestly never known where the heck I was going to go in my career. I've just said, “Hey, let's have a journey, and let's optimize for doing something you want to do that is going to create more opportunities for you to do something you want to do.”And so even when I left Microsoft, I was in a great position. I ran the Surface business, and HoloLens, and a whole bunch of other stuff that was really fun, but I also woke up one day and realized, “Oh, my gosh. I've been at Microsoft for 20 years. If I stay here for the next job, I'm earning the right to get another job at Microsoft, more so than anything else, and there's a big world out there that I want to explore a bit.” And so I did the startup; it was fun, I then thought I'd do another startup, but I didn't want to commute to San Francisco, which I had done.And then I found most of the really, really interesting startups in Seattle were cloud-related and I had this opportunity to learn about cloud from, arguably, one of the best with AWS. And then when I left AWS, I left not knowing what I was going to do, and I kind of thought, “Okay, now I'm going to do another cloud-oriented startup.” And Google came, and I realized I had this opportunity to learn from another company. But I don't know what's next. And what I'm going to do is try and do this job as best I can, get it to the point where I feel like I've done a job, and then I'll look at what excites me looking forward.Corey: And we will, of course, hold on to this so we can use it for your performance review, whenever that day comes.Brian: [laugh].Corey: I want to thank you for taking so much time to speak with me today. If people care more about what you have to say, perhaps you're hiring, et cetera, et cetera, where can they find you?Brian: Twitter, IsForAt: I-S-F-O-R-A-T. I'm certainly on Twitter. And if you want to connect professionally, I'm happy to do that on LinkedIn.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to those things in the [show notes 00:36:03]. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it. I know you have a busy week of, presumably, attempting to give terrible names to various cloud services.Brian: Thank you, Corey. Appreciate you having me.Corey: Indeed. Brian Hall, VP of Product and Industry Marketing at Google Cloud. I am Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an insulting comment in the form of a PowerPoint deck.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
Drew WilkersonCareer Coach Project Youth + Born and raised in Sam's Valley here in Southern Oregon, Drew Wilkerson shares his passion to serve our youth in Project Youth Plus's Career Build Program. For the past 7 years Drew his worked in and around the public schools and still finds time to be active in athletics as an MS Athletic Director. To help support Project Youth Plus and find out more about their various programs to help our youth, please go the the resources below or give them a call at the number below! :) Call Project Youth Plus today - (541) 476-8146 Website - https://projectyouthplus.org/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ProjectYouthPlus/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/projectyouthplus/ Show Notes The Focus of Project Youth Plus How I Got Started With Project Youth Plus Life Growing Up In Sam's Valley in Southern Oregon Guiding Youth Through Individual Road Maps for Success Thankful For Community Support for Project Youth Plus What I Like Most About Working With Project Youth Plus Continuing To Get Our Message Out To Businesses In Jackson, Josephine and Douglas Counties Transcription Intro Drew: Flexibility, I think is key in being able to keep that spark and keep that interest. Because if you're really going to be able to meet youth where they're at, there has to be some type of flexibility, I think built into that. But being able to meet a youth where they're at in life, again, it's very broad. That's something that is exciting because you have all the tools, and you're able to exercise different types of tools at different circumstances. And so by doing that, you can create interest, I think, within that youth. And that's the goal for them to have that spark. Podcast Intro: There's a place in Southern Oregon, filled with gorgeous natural beauty, friendly yet independent people and a mild, comfortable climate. That place is called Grants Pass. These are the stories of the people that live and work Josephine County. These are the movers and shakers that make this place of the best. This is Grants Pass VIP. Brian: Drew Wilkerson is the GP Career Coach for the Career Build Program with Project Youth Plus. Coming from serving in public schools for the past seven years, Drew is still active and athletics. He's very much youth-centered and goal-oriented. Drew Wilkerson welcome. Drew: Really appreciate it Brian, thank you very much. Looking forward to this. Brian: Yeah, no, I'm really happy to have you here. We met over at the Chamber of Commerce and we've been talking about getting together for a while. So this is great to have you here. Why don't you let everyone know more about who you are, and where people might know you from. Drew: Sure. Kind of like in that intro, having spent a number of years in the public schools, you get to know I think quite a few people in there and working with students and a wide variety of ways. And so by getting connected with College Dream, now with Project Youth Plus, I get to continue, I think just different ways of serving youth, and working with people that are very like-minded and trying to meet people where they're at, in all different walks of life. Trying to help them I think just take the next step towards their goals, kind of making it a reality. Not everyone fits the same type of shoe. And so it's always an adventure coming from that background. Within the schools, you know, again, you get to know quite a few people serve in youth, but then also now in the nonprofit world and where we get to expand our borders, in different ways to serve youth, but also how we do it. At the same time, two different worlds, we got the public schools and education route, we got the nonprofit world, definitely two different worlds, but different ways of serving. That's really where the heart is. Within the schools, I still serve as an athletic director at a midd...
Christy Kiltz A Josephine County native for almost 30 years, Christy Kiltz takes us on her journey from moving to the area from Colorado with her husband, to taking a chance and starting her own local web-based business and it's continued expansion. If you own a business, chances are you have a web presence. Join us as Christy shares valuable tips online and why it's essential to build relationships with your customers, no matter what field you work in. Checkout Design! by Kiltz - https://designbykiltz.com/ Video's Christy Mentions In The Podcast by Simon Sinek and Donald Miller below! Focus on your WHY - Simon Sinek, Start with WHY - https://youtu.be/u4ZoJKF_VuA Build your Brand Story - Summary of Donald Miller's StoryBrand book - https://youtu.be/FkCMhhJaSSk Show Notes From Colorado To Oregon: How We Ended Up In Josephine County Why I Started A Local Web-Based Business What We Help Businesses With Empowering Business Owners to Accomplish Their Dreams Christy's 3 Things You Need For A Successful Website COVID Impact: In-Person Teamwork & Working From Home Web Tech & The Value Of Building Relationships Understanding Solutions & Pain Points of Niche Markets Expanding Our Team in 2021 What Design! by Kiltz Offers That “The Big Web Hosting Companies” Don't Transcription Christy: Understanding customer service skills and customer skill level. Sadly, many in my profession has led me to the tagline of, anyone can code few can take care of people. And it's like a dance. A true partnership dance you've got two people out on the dance floor, one's leading the others following, and depending on the dance, who is leading and who is following switches. And so that's where we truly engage in that partnership with people. Intro: There's a place in Southern Oregon, filled with gorgeous natural beauty, friendly yet independent people and a mild, comfortable climate. That place is called Grants Pass. These are the stories of the people that live and work Josephine County. These are the movers and shakers that make this place of the best. This is Grants Pass VIP. Brian: Christy Kiltz is the website designer and owner of Design! by Kiltz. She provides the full coordination of online services to bring you the best possible solutions for your business. Working with you to develop a successful concept and focus for your website. Christy takes the goal you create with her and brings it to pass. Despite her company, she really isn't a true geek girl. She loves the outdoors, camping, hiking, and water of any kind, and can even survive a weekend without a computer. In fact, among Christy's favorite things include getting away into the beautiful mountains of Southern Oregon with her hubby or taking a drive out to the coast. Christy Kiltz, welcome to Grants Pass VIP. Christy: Thanks, Brian. Brian: Yeah, it's great having you here. We've got a little bit of history, we've worked together in the past and I just want everyone to get to know you a little bit better. Why don't you let us know about who you are, and a little bit about where people might know you from? Christy: Where people might know me from, we've actually lived here in the Grants Pass area for close to 30 years now, somewhere between 25 and 30 years. And early on I worked at the YMCA. So I was all things aquatic so lifeguard swim instructor everything else. And the kids that I taught how to swim now are probably in college or close to it. But that is where some people know me from, but I've also been a member of the Grants Pass Chamber since 2004, joined after David Tally, actually, Tally Media Group and with the SBDC invited me to join. And so the chamber has been my family ever since then. Simply being a part of the business community in many different ways, served as an ambassador on the membership committee over the years, a long time ago,
Results Coaching Model with Brian Lovegrove Brian Lovegrove has been on his journey of personal growth and professional development since the age of 17. Inspired by Tony Robbins, he has created not only a catalyst but a unique approach and process to helping others, like you, achieve their goals. He believes in providing & building upon the knowledge most coaches provide by practicing these lessons and building a HABIT! Using his "5 Keys of Success" in his coaching, he is a firm believer that if these keys are used, failure is all but eliminated. In this episode, we learn about all the tactics Brian uses and has honed over the years of being a coach and we did into a few of these methods during our conversation. As always, thanks so much for listening! Joe Brian Lovegrove Leadership Developer and Results Coach Website: https://brianlovegrovecoaching.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brianslovegrove LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianlovegrove/ Live Masterclass: https://www.becomeunstoppable.info 5 Keys to Success Podcast: https://5-keys-of-success.simplecast.com/ Unleash Your Fear eBook: https://www.unleashyourfear.com/freebook Email: lovegrove@lovegroveltd.com Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.lybsyn.com Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joecostello Transcript Joe: Hi Brian, welcome to the podcast. I'm looking forward to having you on so many things I have to ask you, because you hit a core thing here with training, personal development courses, all of these things that I read about. And it's going to be interesting to find out your answers to these burning questions I asked. Brian: All right, Joe, I'm looking forward to it. Let's get rocking and rolling here. Joe: Awesome. OK, so you have to bear with me, because I literally do this with every single person on my podcast, is that I think it's important for my audience, who I believe is mostly entrepreneurs, whether they're currently doing their thing or they want to do their thing or they're struggling, doing their thing or whatever it might be. I think it's important for them to know the back story of the person that is on, because it's important to understand the development of where you came from and how you got to where you are today. And I think a lot of those things that you talk about actually people listening, going, oh, yeah, I've been there. I did that. I remember that. So I always leave this open to saying you can go back as far as you want, because if something in elementary school created who you are today, I want the audience to know about it so you can start wherever you want. Brian: Well, people ask me how I got introduced to personal development in the first place, and I actually go back to junior high. My dad was a commercial real estate broker and I grew up in Montana. And any time we would leave town, we would go on a long trip. And so he would pull out these tapes from work. And this was, of course, back before the iPods. The noise canceling headphones in that great, wonderful device that many of us grew up with, the Sony Walkman, Joe: Near Brian: Whatever Joe: And dear to my Brian: He Joe: Heart. Brian: Put into that. Yes. Yes. And so I got stuck listening to whatever was in the tape deck. And so I got introduced to guys like Earl Nightingale, Jim Roan and my favorite Zig Ziglar. And listening to those guys, Dennis Wailea, on and on and on and on, they taught me what it was to be an entrepreneur. And I remember Ziggs saying, treat every job as if you were the owner of the business and those HAQQ series that I listened to through junior high and high school shaped me in my choices in college. I actually got a degree in professional sales because of a I was originally going for a management degree my first year. My sister was two years ahead of me and she told me after my freshman year and says, you know what, Brian, you might want to consider changing majors because the people that I know that are graduating with management degrees are struggling to find jobs. And I went back and that that prompted me to ask a really good deep question at all. I don't know, 18. I asked myself, what career, what major, what level of information do I need to get while you're at college that would regardless of what happens to the industry, because I knew, you know, it's going to be out here in the marketplace for over 50 years. What degree do I need to go get that will? Regardless of what's going to happen, the ups and downs of the industry, whether we end up in another recession, we end up in another depression, that I would always have an opportunity to have a job if I wanted one. Brian: And that always brought me back to the sales aspect that Zig always mentioned, because, again, he did a lot of his sales around the Depression area and that that aspect of life where it's like how do you survive? How do you keep going in those areas? And it's really the salespeople that make the world go round. And so that's what led me to a sales degree. The other decision that I made when I was 17 was I got introduced to a guy named Tony Robbins and I bought his first tape series. Imagine a freshman in college spending probably a month of his earnings on a tape series. And I bought Tony's unlimited power. I still have the tapes are used today, actually gone and bought a second set because I wore out one of those tapes so that because I listened to it so much and I followed Tony ever since, I actually helped promote and put on his seminars for one of his franchises. And along the way, I've always been doing personal development, personal growth, and, you know, a lot I loved it. I just ate it up. But one of the big challenges that I ran into, I turned 40. Brian: It was like, why am I not far enough along? I've been doing this for 20 years. Why am I just here? Because at the time I was struggling to pay the bills. I was struggling to get by. My wife was working. We had two small kids. And I thought by the time I turned 40, I would have been much farther along by now. And so in this process, I realized it wasn't until much later that learning is not enough to make lasting change. I was actively learning. I was seeking the puzzle pieces, the pieces of information that was missing in my life. And I figured once I learned that then life would be easy and I'd be making all this money. But that never happened because I never did. The one thing that I learned all the way back in the beginning from XG is you have to do it until you get good enough at it, till it becomes your new normal. And only then, once you've applied and implement those strategies in your life, will they actually work for you. And you've got to do it long enough to get good enough at it and then continue to stick with it to where you can actually allow the compounding effect to, you know, you slowly creep and then you kind of turn that corner and it goes straight up. And it took me 50 years to hit that. Joe: So I'm going to go back real quick because I want to know what triggered you to buy that Tony Robbins course. You know, I know you were listening to this stuff in the car with your father on the Walkman or whatever else you were doing it. I mean, a kid at 17 doesn't do that. So what triggered it? Brian: Well, I had read the book, his book had come out and I had read the book and I really loved he had such a different style and he was talking about different things and he was talking about the things in the mind and he was talking about he and the different aspects there. And a lot of that was like, oh, my gosh, this stuff makes so much sense. And I was applying some of those strategies and I was seeing specific results. And I was like, and that's really what made me buy in. In fact, that's probably one of the few programs that I really started implementing strategy on. One of the big strategies you talked about was marketing Meeri, and it was one that I specifically used as I got into my initial first jobs and sales career. But I used on a consistent basis to help me actually get as far as long as I did. Joe: Ok, I'm still going to ask the question, because I'm not sure if you answered it yet. Why would a 17 year old buy the book like 17 year olds don't don't get into this stuff. So and I think it's important to figure out what triggered it for you. Brian: Well, again, I think it has to do with that was the next step, I the company that was putting those out was Nightingale Conant Joe: Yeah. Brian: And my dad would get those and I probably was home. I don't remember where I was when I got it. I might have gone home for Thanksgiving or Christmas. And I grabbed the magazine I love looking at because again, I've been doing this for a number of years now. And I was like, what? What's the new stuff they got? You know, Wayne Dyer was there and you know, you know who who are who's the new people? And there was this new one from this guy named Tony Robbins. And I don't know, I guess it just resonated with me. And I think it was seventy five bucks. And it was like and to be honest with you, I really can't say what prompted me to go. I want that. Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: But I think it was more of the sales pitch in the description of what it promised me. Joe: Got it. Brian: More than anything, that's what I would say it was based upon the results that were promised, based upon the description of the tape series. Joe: Ok, so you've been around that sort of thing for a long time, right? And if correct me if I'm wrong at any point, because I want to make sure this is super clear to the listeners, is that from what I get of what we're going to go still back, I still have other stuff to do, but I want to kind of set the stage of your expertise or what you believe is, is how you can help people. As you said, you can buy all the courses and attend all the conferences and do all of this stuff. You've said it here. You set it on your website. The enthusiasm kind of goes away when life gets in the way. Right. It's basically that simple. You come back from the high of of being at a conference or are listening to something and then life literally just gets in the way and you don't get the things done that you promised yourself that you would. So my understanding is that you are basically this coach that is going to keep you on track. Whether life gets in the way or not, you're basically going to be this person that is going to bring people along through all of this and keep them accountable to what they promise themselves that they would do and make sure that they do all of the things that are needed without shelving anything because life got in the way. Is that fair? Brian: Right, it is because, again, you know, Tony is great if you've ever been to one of his big events, you P.W. he he can talk nine thousand people into walking across twelve hundred degree recalls in a day. Joe: Yeah. Brian: By the end of day one, he's got you walking across Coles. But again, how do you can't maintain that energy and that excitement and the momentum of that event for weeks, months, years to get to where you want to go? And Tony has admitted that this is an area that he struggles with, is how do I get people to keep going? Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: Which is one of the reasons why he has his coaching program that you can go and pay tens of thousands of dollars to get a coach for a year, and it's one of the reasons why he actually created the pyramids, Madonna's training group, to train people like me to be coaches that help people implement his strategies. And that's really what it comes down to, is how do you take the strategies that, you know, you need to be doing and implement them? One of the biggest challenges in society today is we don't teach people discipline for the most part. There's a few places that that happens. But outside of that, it's not encouraged. In fact, it's almost especially in today's society, you're not responsible, you know, being responsible for yourself, being accountable. That goes out the window. And yet that's how you are going to be successful. That's how you're going to get to where you want to go. Unfortunately, society is teaching people to be cheap and to live in mediocrity. That is not how you're going to get to where you want to go, because I'm assuming that most people here are entrepreneurs. Joe: Mm Brian: They're Joe: Hmm. Brian: Entrepreneurs for a reason because they are sick and tired of working for somebody else's dreams. And so they want to pursue their own dreams or they think they can do it better. And so they're out there trying to do it on their own. But there's a myth that goes with that is the fact that they have to do it on their own, they have to try to figure it out all by themselves. And some of my best clients are the people that have gone to school to learn how to do what they want to do, a chiropractor or a massage therapist, the tradesperson, they know how to either pound nails Turner Ranch, adjust somebody's back, but they don't necessarily know how to do this thing called run a business. And so there's certain aspects that come into play because my my ideal market is that small business owner, entrepreneur and professional who's out there wanting to make a difference in their world, in their communities and their lives to make a bigger impact. But they're struggling to do that because they're trying to deal with all of the distractions and all the stuff that's coming at us. And it's like, how do I get a hold of that? How do I how do I focus on those things that truly matter that are going to move the needle for me and my business? And that's really where I come alongside them. Brian: And I say that specifically because I can't take the journey for you, but I'm happy to take the journey with you. And see, that's where the big challenge is, is a lot of people feel like they go to the seminar, which is, OK, here's how you go climb a mountain. Here's the equipment you're going to need and what happens to the trainer. They get all loaded up. They load them up and they say, go have fun. And they go walking down the path. And the river that they were told was a small creek is now this raging river, the bridge that they were supposed to be able to go across was washed out. And it's not like, what the heck am I supposed to do now? They weren't prepared for what they're going to experience or they didn't get enough information. That's one of the things that I always felt in the training classes and seminars I went to. I always felt like there was a piece of information missing. And there's only so much that somebody can teach you. You actually have to go experience it for yourself in order to develop those nuances that are really going to make a difference for you. Joe: Yeah, and I think that there are very, very, very few people in the world that can and you hit it on the head, the discipline that they will actually take, what they've learned, whether it's in a chorus, it's at a seminar or whatever, and actually implement it and be accountable to themselves. I think that's a really, really small pool of people. And so Brian: It is. Joe: Because the Olympics just happened, if we even made an analogy of like you went to class to become a gymnast and you said in a week long seminar to learn all of the different moves and tricks and flips and things, and then you just don't go and show up and start doing that. You have a coach that's watching you Brian: Right. Joe: And and helping you understand all of those things and the mechanics of it. So to me, that's what you're that's really where you help, is that you are there to, like I said earlier, to to to to push them, keep them on track, assist them with when they Brian: The. Joe: Hit roadblocks. You're by their side throughout the whole process. Right. Brian: Right, and I think so many times we have this misunderstanding because we've been taught that learning is going and sitting in class. And that's not necessarily true, but unfortunately, the self development industry has taken this model of let's bring them in, sit them down, overwhelm them with information, make them feel like they're drinking from a firehose so they feel like we've given them a tremendous amount of value and then send them on their way. And so the more people we can pack into that room, the better we make more money that way. Yeah, we actually end up doing a disservice to the customer, to the client, because at the end there is no support. And so how do you make sure somebody has what they need in order to actually achieve the results they want? And that is challenging along the way. And we've created several ways for people to do that because, again, money gets in the way. I mean, if you have enough money, you can find somebody that's going to come alongside and help you get to where you want to go. Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: But we actually started one hundred bucks a month. We've got programs where you can get that at least some help along the way to get you to where you want to go. And we grow from there. But it comes down to this process of how do we get you to take the actions you know you need to take? How do we get you to move forward consistently? And it's just like the example you used is great. The one that I love to use is the example of going to get into shape. You don't go to the gym for three days straight and be done. That doesn't cut Joe: It's. Brian: It. You know, usually you go once for a few hours and you're like, oh my God, you wake Joe: Yeah. Brian: Up the next day and you can't move. And so it's like, why would you expect you to be able to do that in the other areas of your life? Joe: Yeah, I go to the gym five days a week and I still am like, why don't I look better? So you're really in a great position to do this, because how many years did you spend in that whole seminar course kind of world? And I know you're still involved in some of it, but you helped run Brian: Well, Joe: Some Brian: I Joe: Of these. Brian: Yeah, I help promote Joe: Yep. Brian: To put them on the grand scheme of things, I didn't do that a lot. I was probably with them for maybe about a year before the franchise partnership broke up and therefore the franchise collapsed. But it was a great opportunity and I learned a lot going through that process. Back in starting in 2003, I joined Toastmasters and worked myself up over the number of years to become a semi-professional speaker when I wrote my first book and got kind of started in that. But I never really got traction and got that off the ground in this process. One of the things that happened was I shifted from Toastmasters into a leadership role in nonprofit organizations, specifically to the Boy Scouts. But one of the things I saw was because, again, I was focusing on the teaching aspect because I love watching that light bulb go off. But what I didn't realize was because I didn't see it in my life at the moment, at the time yet was that, again, teaching them was good. But coaching them is better because, again, it's about growth and it's part of my all the exercises and things I've done. I mean, I have done it easily. Quarter of a million dollars on personal development. I have bookcases and bookcases of books and tape series that are, you know, this is the pretty self I have, you know, boxes on wooden shelves and storage units full of books and stuff that I've consumed. And it's actually one of my coaching partners mentioned to me and from one of the coaching programs I was in, he says she said, Brian, you have a vault of ideas and strategies to help somebody to move forward. Brian: And so when they need it, you can provide it for them. And so really, it's about getting people to move. It's not about trying to teach you something new. It's about how can I get you to move forward and understanding how to motivate somebody to move. And he talks about the pleasure and pain principles. We move away from pain a lot easier than we do towards pleasure. But many times we only use pleasure as the incentive for us to do something. And a lot of times I'm working with some basic activities with somebody. One of the things that you can see it here in the video, if you're watching it, is my incredible results, 928 Challenge Journal, which is basically spending about 20 minutes each evening documenting what happened today, well, as planning tomorrow. And the first challenge that people come up with is doing it every day. So far, nobody has done ninety one days straight. There's a few that have come close. But on average, it takes people a good month to get into the habit of consistently writing in their journal. And so, again, it's about understanding what it takes to get people to move in the direction they have said they want to go and using those two buttons and pushing them at the right point to get things to to happen. And again, once we start getting that ball rolling and we start developing momentum, that's when it gets fun. Joe: So we are in the age of so many, like self education, know so many programs and classes and courses and all of this stuff on the Internet, right. You can find it everywhere. So and you might even admit to this yourself, because based on what you just said about having a shelf full of tapes and all of this stuff, what would you say to the there are people out there that are professional seminar attendees right there, their professional course. So, Brian: We call them seminar junkies. Joe: Ok, so Brian: Yeah, Joe: We Brian: I've been there. Joe: Ok, so this is good because you're coming from the understanding that Brian: Oh, yeah. Joe: One more seminar, a one more class or one more course is not going to make the difference. It's that you have to start implementing what you've already learned and actually admit to yourself that you haven't done the work or this is the work you need to do and actually come up with a plan. Right. It's just like we hear it a million times. It's just so hard for people to understand, myself included. I'm not I'm not preaching from a soapbox here that, you know, you have to have a roadmap. Right. Because if you wanted to get hop in your car today and drive somewhere, you need to know where you're going. Right. You would get lost. Brian: Yes. Joe: It's no different Brian: Yes. Joe: With our life. Right. So what would you say to those people that are listening to that do continue to just think that that next breakthrough is around the corner by buying yet another course are going to some sort of seminar or conference? Brian: Put down the Kool-Aid because you have drunk the Kool-Aid, Joe: Right. Brian: What they're actually doing is they're pursuing the feeling, the positive feelings they get when they go to the seminar. They're enjoying that high and over time that wears off and they want to change the way they feel. They get frustrated and they go, oh, I want to feel better. Their subconscious then says, OK, well, how do we make ourselves feel? How we do that? Let's go to another seminar. I talk about this in the master class. That is, we get stuck on this learning loop and we go and we learn some information. We get all excited and we go try it and we fail. And usually when we fail once or twice, we quit. It gets hard. It gets uncomfortable. And we don't like to stay there. We don't like we don't we want to don't want to go through that process of learning how to do it and do it long enough to get good enough at it that we actually get to the other side of. OK, I got this. You know, it's like learning to ride a bike. You're going to fall and the only way to get better is to have somebody let go in and you fall down. You got to go through that process. You've got to learn to you have to make the mistakes. You have to, quote, fail, because, again, it depends on how you define the word failure, because at the end of the day, we get to choose what things mean. My definition of failure is different than most people's. My definition of failure is you only fail when you quit or give up. Joe: Hmm, agreed. Brian: Or you don't even try. Joe: Yeah, so it's almost better that if someone had that itch, they should stop for a moment and say, OK, let's do this, let's just try something completely different that we've never done before. Let's actually hire a coach and spend the same amount of money that we would have spent on a course. But we have a coach with us by our side for however many months or a year or whatever, however long that is. That same amount of money could be spread out to have someone keep you accountable and help you to come up with a plan and stay on track and implement all the ideas. Right. Brian: Absolutely. Joe: It would be worth a try for anybody who's one of these. You could Digicom junkies to seminar junkies. Brian: Yeah, the seminar junkies, Joe: Yeah, Brian: Yes. Joe: Right. So it would be a change? Brian: What's Joe: Of course Brian: The Joe: It would Brian: Right Joe: Be. Brian: If what's your outcome? What do you want? Why are you going to that seminar? And there were several times where people said, well, what are you what do you expect from this? What do you want to learn from this? And people are sitting there throwing out answers. And I would be sitting in the background going, I really don't know. I don't I don't have an answer for that. Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: And that was kind of the clue is like, wait a minute, why am I here? Because I want to learn. That's not good enough. I want you to know I started getting specifics is I want to learn how to do such and such and such, and I want to be able to, you know, be successful at doing that. And, you know, whether that was real estate investing or personal development becoming a coach, a lot of those things was, OK, how do you do it? Because, again, we're learning about doing and we learn through doing much more powerfully. There's a difference between head understanding and gut level understanding. And so, first off, a coach, if you haven't had a coach before. I'll share a good story with you, because this is how I got introduced to coaching was I actually bought the up sell of a seminar program that actually included six monthly coaching sessions with one of the coaches that's kind of designed to help you do it. And my experience was I actually got more done in those six months than I had in the previous five years. I did more stuff. I made more progress. And as I went back and analyzed the even deeper, I did more the week before that phone call that I had the previous three weeks combined because I knew I was going to have to get on the phone with him. And again, we're leveraging fear and that pain to our advantage. That's one of the reasons why I wrote my last book on Leisure Fear. One of the strategies that I teach is how to make your friend and how you make sure your friend, as you turn fear around, it's pulling you forward instead of holding you back. Brian: And one of the ways that we do that, as we make it more painful to stay where you are than where you want to go and having to get on the phone call with me or on the Zoom call with me. And we sit in there and says, OK, Joe, you said last week you were going to accomplish these three things. How how far did you get on number one, how far did you get on number two? How far did you get on number three? Now, I don't beat you up if you don't get them done. What I'm doing is I'm wanting to get under neath it and understand the root cause of what's holding you back, because when I when we're able to do that, you see hole that was fear of criticism. That's what prevented me from making those sales calls. I needed to make up for the fear of rejection or whatever it was. And we talk about that. And then we because again, we get to choose what things mean. And so what does it mean to make a cold call? Most people hate cold calls. What if you could turn things around to where you loved cold calls? Because, again, you get to choose what things mean. You can love cold calls. And so, again, it's basically going in there and playing in the mind and shifting away the what the beliefs are, because that's what it comes down to it. That's what our life is all about, is how we feel and what we believe. And when we understand that we do everything in life to change the way we feel. It's really interesting on where things go from there. Joe: Yeah, and I think either I think I read something from your website, I believe, but something you said, I think that's where it was, but it was something about the moment we actually tell the world what it is that we want to do. We're accountable for it. Right then we everyone that that was in earshot of that or reads it somewhere on our website that we're now responsible to do it. And that's why so many people don't actually put that out there, because then they're like, oh, crap, I actually have to do that now. I said it. Brian: Right, Joe: I told Brian: Yeah. Joe: Everyone I was going to do this. Brian: But you're right, it comes down to we are afraid to put ourselves out there Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: Because we're afraid of being criticized now, we do have different types of people in our lives. We have people that I refer to as Krabs, and they're usually in your left hand. For those people who haven't heard the story, I'm sure you have. Is it if you put a crab in a five gallon bucket without a lid on it, it'll crawl out right Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: Easily. But if you put two crabs into that five gallon bucket without a lid, they won't crawl out. The more actually, the more crabs that are in there, the less likelihood that the crab is going to get away, because as that crab, they're programming mental instinct programming that we have within us is that to stay part of the group to follow the herd. Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: And if somebody is trying to climb out, they're going away. And so the rest of the group will pull them back down. And if he continues to do that time and time again, they will actually kill him. Joe: Oh, I didn't know that part of the story. Brian: Yes, well, the same thing is true with other people in our lives. We have people that are on the same level that we are or below us and we're wanting to grow. Now, that doesn't mean that they have negative intentions. They're actually doing it for a positive reason because, one, they don't want you to leave them, but they also don't want to see you get hurt. This is where our family comes in. Parents say, oh, you just sit still, Johnny, because you're not ready for that yet, or they don't want you to go pursue this thing that they perceive as scary, risky, and you're likely to get hurt. And so they're going to try to talk you out of going in, pursuing your great dream. But then there's other people that, again, they're just going to knock you down, they're going to pull you down. And if you've ever listened to Lester Brown, he talks about that and his family, he'd show up for Thanksgiving. And his brother goes, Hey, Les, how's that seminar speaking gig going? And it was almost I'm getting there. I'm getting there. I'm getting there. But we also have people that want to support us and help us. And so it's who are you going to listen to and who are you going to spend time with? And so but it's also important to be in that group of people. Brian: Your support people are in your right hand, your crabs are in your left hand. It's important to know who the person you're across the table with and who you're talking with on the phone. Is this person a crab or is this a supporter and then interact with them appropriately? Because if you're talking with a crab, you stay in the shallow end. You don't talk about your dreams. You talk about the weather, you talk about sports, you talk about whatever that is dull and boring at the time and not really enlightening to us, but allows us to maintain the relationship because there's times in our life when, yes, we can eliminate some of those crabs because other times they're related to us and we can't get rid of them. And so what do you do? So in part of it is, one, you reduce the amount of time, and then two, you understand who you're having the conversation with and understand they're coming to you with a positive intent. They're trying to keep you safe. They're trying to they want you to be happy and they want you to stay well and they don't want you to get hurt. But the same thing is true with our subconscious, which is why our biggest enemy is right up here Joe: Yep. Brian: Is the robot that runs the show 80 to 90 percent of the time. And that's where I spend a lot of time, is helping people reprogram the robot, their subconscious, because unfortunately, it was a program with a lot of crappy code and trying to reprogram it is not as easy as copy, delete and then copy and paste. It's not that easy. It's like the biggest, ugliest ball of spaghetti you've ever seen and trying to figure out where that thing goes. And it's a mess. It's just a mess in there. And but we do have the ability to go in there and change it. And the more we actively pursue that and focus on that and pursue growth, the faster we can get to where we want to go. Joe: So we're going to talk about the services you offer, but you touched upon something that in a previous episode that I had put out, I got a lot of comments about it. And so I want to talk about it as it relates to you personally. And then we can talk about how you use it with your clients. But you spoke about journaling. And the more and more I hear, either I have guest on or I hear people talk about it, the more and more I feel like it's almost got the same benefits as when people talk about meditating, how you can quiet the mind. It was all this fufu stuff many years ago and now it's becoming more the norm. Right? It's something that you need that quiet time. So tell me more about what you think journaling does for people and the importance of journaling Brian: Ok, well, Joe: And Brian: Actually. Joe: Whether or not you actually do it nightly or daily or I'd be Brian: Yes, Joe: Interested to know. Brian: Yes, the the if you can see it there, it says, a life worth living as a life worth recording. And so, Tony, he's inspired me to consistently journal. I have journals from my first in fact, in my latest move, I was going through a lot of them. And I came across the journal that I had right after college. And I was actually really interested to go back and see the progress of my first sales job that I bombed out. I lasted like three months. My experience was the story I was telling myself was different than the story that I was reading. And so, one, it's a great way to document your journey in life. But the way that I teach people to journal No. One is it leverages the power of evaluated experience because you stop and think about it. You probably have heard that experience is the best teacher. Yes and no, because unless we learn the lessons from that experience, then it was pointless. If we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again, we keep doing the same thing and expect different results. We're not learning. We're not growing. And so journaling is a great way for you to document your journey, but also to stop and evaluate what happened today. What did I get done? Because many times we get to the end of the week, we get to the end of the month. Man, I feel like I didn't get anything done. And you can go back to the daily journal process and go, oh, yeah, well, I did that and I did that and I did that and I did that. Brian: But it also allows you to say, OK, what am I actually getting done? And is what I'm getting done, moving me in the direction I want to go? Because, again, we've talked about the journey that we're on. We have a goal we want to achieve. And in order to get there, we like you said, we have to have a plan. Many people don't put together the plan. In fact, many go study programs. And I listen to rarely was there any planning process involved. And so I actually stepped somebody through this. Exactly. And the incredible results on what they challenge is Ugo's. We set our big yearly goal and we break that down into what are we going to accomplish in the next ninety one days and then we break that down. This is OK. What's going to be month one? What's going to be month two? What's going to be month three? And then we break that down. OK, what's going to be week one of month one. What's going to be in week two. Week three, week four. Because again, the only way to get to complete the ninety one day journey is to each day make forward progress. And how do you make sure you're making forward progress if you never look at the map and compare your results, what you're getting to see if you're moving in the right direction. Brian: It's like a airplane taking off from New York to L.A. without a GPS system, without a method for them to course. Correct. You know, there's a reason why there's a compass in the airplane. There's a reason why there's a GPS in there that's consistently every moment checking in and saying, am I on track? Am I on track and making those little minor adjustments along the way? Because if you actually look at a slight wiggle from L.A. to New York, because there's turbulence up there, there's wind currents up there, lots of different things depending on which way you're flying. Are you flying with the jet stream or against the jet stream? All of these things are impacting that flight. The same thing is true in our life. How do we make sure we are on target? And journalese is one of the ways to do that. But we also encourage people. The way that the journal is set up is to do that evaluation experience where you document what you got done, you documents your lessons along the way, and you also document the changes that you want to make, the adjustments that are going to make tomorrow a better day. How can I be better tomorrow? And then you plan tomorrow. One of the biggest challenges we have is making sure we get the right stuff done. How do you make sure you make time to get those important but not urgent activities into your schedule? Because if you do not intentionally plan them and schedule them into your calendar, rarely, very rarely are they going to actually happen, which means you're never going to really make the progress you want to make, because stop and think about it, your goals require a lot of time and energy doing those things that are important but not urgent, which is another reason why having the accountability is a big factor in that. Brian: It's like, OK, it's it's not urgent, but oh, my coach is going to be asking about it. What do we just do? We created the needed urgency. Give you a perfect example. I had one of my clients. She wanted to raise her rates and so she'd been talking about it for months. And so we were working on the programming in her head so that she felt like she was worthy of that price increase, putting it off and putting it off. And this is OK, put and says, OK, what's the plan? And so we specifically detailed walk through the plan. OK, I need to put a sign up on the door and I need to send out a notification of my. People and I got an email and, you know, here's an opportunity for people to come in and sign up for a plan where they can lock in the current pricing. And I says, OK, when I come see you next week, I want to see the sign on the door. When you think you put the sign on the door right after that call, Joe: Ten minutes Brian: 15 Joe: Before Brian: Minutes Joe: You showed Brian: Before Joe: Up. Brian: I 15 minutes before I walked in the door. Exactly. And it wouldn't have happened if I had not pushed her to make that commitment. As a mom, what are we going to do? Are we just going to keep going down this road? Because that's one of things that we do, is we look at it, says, OK, what happens if you don't change? If you keep doing the same thing you're doing today over and over again, you're going to get the same results. Are you happy with that? Are you satisfied with it? If you're not, then what are you going to do differently tomorrow? That's going to change. The trajectory that you're going internally is a big piece of that is to help make sure that you are documenting your journey and you're evaluating the experiences that you're getting and making sure that they're taking you in the direction you want to go and if it's not making those adjustments along the way. Joe: Is the majority of the time it happens is at night, just before you go to bed sort of thing. Brian: One of the things that we designed the system to be very flexible. There's actually a place for people to write in their schedule and there's no numbers on it because I've got clients. It's wake up at five o'clock in the morning and then there's guys like me who don't start their day until seven, but I'm usually up till midnight. So, again, it just comes down to fitting it into your system. And that's actually one of the things we do within the group coaching calls is we're saying, how do I take this system that Brian has created and apply it to my life? How does this fit into my life? And we teach people how to do that. And I've got one client who does restoration work. So he's very much like a firefighter. The phone rings and it's like the alarm bell going off. He's got to go fix somebody's problem. So how does he schedule his day? And so we came up with a system on how to use the system because what happens if the alarm doesn't go off? What are you going to do? So we had a plan, a system and a Plan B system Joe: Mm Brian: For Joe: Hmm. Brian: It. We recommend the Evening Times for a couple of reasons. Number one, when you're planning tomorrow, you don't have to remember it. Actually, you get a better night's sleep. Joe: I get it off your brain. Brian: Right, and so your brain, is it trying to remember all the things you've got to do tomorrow? We also encourage now I have some people completed at their end of their workday. So at four thirty, when they go home at 5:00, I've got one woman who does it at three thirty before she go pick up her kid at school at 4:00 and she's basically document what did I get done? And she's also there's still some things potentially that she's going to do because we incorporate not just your business, but your life in the journal. And so it's like, OK, what am I going to be doing for all 16 hours? And I'm awake and relax and let go because so many times we struggle with constantly running. And there's a reason why there's a pad of paper and a pen on my bedside is because there's a lot of times I wake up in this ideas and I got to sit there and I get to write it down because I will not remember when I wake up in the morning. And so it just comes down. We try to get the system to fit the person, not the person to fit the system Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: Like so many of them do. But at the end of the day, it comes down to what works for you. We recommend in the evening because of the benefits there. There are some people that do it first thing in the morning. If that's the case, as long as you're doing the system, great. Joe: I just hear about it all the time, and I said I was going to start it after the last episode, that someone who was heavily into it, I even publicly said, all right, I got to start doing it and I still haven't done it. Brian: Well, let's have a conversation about that, Joe, because, again, at the end of the day, it's what is it going to take to get you to move? Joe: Yeah. Brian: And that's actually something that because, again, I've got numerous stories that I can tell you about people that because one of the one of the most common mistakes that people make when they're doing the journal is the fact that they only do it Monday through Friday. They don't do it Saturday, Sunday, because, again, like the woman who does it at the end of the workday, my question to them is, OK, that's good. But what are you going to do, come on Saturday, Sunday when you're not going to the office? What are you going to do then? And so we create a plan on how and then we got to you got to figure out how to make it work. And so I actually challenged several of the people to do it, says, OK, if you don't in. The other thing is, is not getting the journal done. The night before it was OK. If you don't do the journal the night before, you have to spend two minutes on a cold shower in the morning. I don't know about you, but yes, they talk about cold showers being this great, wonderful thing. But I don't want that in the morning. No, thank you. And so, again, we move away from paying much better than the the perceived pleasure. OK, and so it's creating the pain. So it was like, OK, you don't do the journal, not before you're going to take a cold shower or I mean, really what I would do is I give them a choice. I says you can either a take the cold shower or B, you have to text me that says I didn't do my journal last night. Which one do you think people chose? And I said, OK, those are your two choices. You have to choose the greater pain. Which one do you think they chose as the greater pain? Joe: I would think having the texture would be more of the pain. Brian: Yes, Joe: Yeah. Brian: Because that is admitting Joe: Yeah, Brian: That they failed, Joe: Yeah. Brian: Which just goes to show you the level of programming we have around failure. And so, again, it's using fear and pain to move you in the direction you want to go. Joe: All right, a lot to unpack there. So we only have a little bit of time left and I want to honor your time. So let's do this first. Let's talk about I have for services written down that you offer. And you might have added one. You might have taken one away. But I have your one on one coaching. I have the ninety one day challenge. I have the mastermind and then I have your weekly accountability coaching. And so can you just briefly give us an explanation of those. And if I missed one at it and if you're not doing one of them, take it away. Brian: Ok, well, as a coach, I need I don't know where you are, so I don't know which service to offer you or which one is the right fit for you, Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: You or your listener. And so I really start with what I refer to as a discovery session where we sit down and talk about where you are and where you want to go. And then based upon that conversation, we determine how to best help you. Now, where do people usually start? But most people start with the incredible results, starting with their challenge, because it is the one skill that helps people take the action they know they need to be taking that will help them reach their goals. And they see tremendous immediate results, positive results and benefits from participating in the program. And it's one that it's only one hundred and ninety seven dollars if somebody wanted to participate in it. But you got to come through me and do that discovery session in order to determine whether or not that's the good right fit for you. The other thing that is like rocket boosters on the on any one day challenge is the weekly accountability coaching calls and the incredible results. And what a challenge. We do a group coaching call where we are sitting down and we are we're talking how to help use the system, how to get the system to work and fit into your life, and how to help you consistently take action on it. But we also help you with your plan on accomplishing your ninety one day goal. So if your goal is to get 50 new clients, this is OK. What are you doing this week that's going to make you more clients? And we're talking about those different activities in those different ideas and strategies. Brian: So the problem is, is there's anywhere from five to 15 people on that call, depending on how many people are actually in the group at one time. And so it comes down to how do you get enough of my time to where we can truly focus on that programming piece that we've talked about, which is such a big, ugly mess that gets in the way all the time. That is where that one on one time comes in to, where we actually spend 30 minutes specifically talking. We it's a very specifically designed program, says, OK, here's what I'm going to do. Here's what I got done. Here's what I learned. And here's the changes I'm going to make so we can review that in eight to ten minutes pretty quickly. And then we spend the next twenty minutes digging into what got in the way. What's the challenge and struggle you're dealing with right now? That's either the bitch that you're in, the roadblock you're facing, or what's holding you back from moving forward. And that right there is tremendously powerful and makes the ninety one day challenge much more successful. And people who are participating in both their results that they get in and I know they challenge is heads and shoulders above the people that are just in the program by itself. Joe: Yep, and I have to ask this, because I'm sure if I was listening to this, it would be driving me nuts the entire time. It's like, why ninety one days? It's not 60, 30, 90, 120. Brian: It's seven times 13 is 91, seven days for 13 weeks. Joe: Steamworks got it. Brian: So because, again, one quarter is three months, which is four point three weeks, and so it's to get a full 13 weeks is ninety one days. Joe: Perfect. So we covered that and the Brian: Ok, Joe: Weekly accountability and then Brian: Right. Joe: The one on one coaching is. Brian: The one on one coaching I refer to I refer to as my general coaching, and that's where somebody is really wanting to grow and make changes. And a lot of times people will start off there. And again, they're wanting to do a lot of growth and unpacking and deal with the programming issues that are going on. And they're wanting to make some significant changes. Those are one hour sessions and those are usually each week as well where we're digging in and we're trying to figure out again, we're making some serious shifts in there. And then a lot of times it's like, OK, we got them straightened out and we got them on a path. We've created the plan. We've got the momentum going now and it's starting to move forward. And a lot of those people will roll into the accountability coaching so that they have the regular check ins that are getting done what they want to get done, but they don't need to necessarily. OK, let's dive in deep in there and start digging around. Those are wonderful sections. I love doing them, but they take a lot of energy on both myself as well as the person because we're going deep. Know, one of the things that you probably have learned by now listen to this is I don't like to play in the shallow end. I like to dive deep and I like to go under the covers. And if people aren't, that's the other thing is if you've got to be comfortable in playing in the deep end and there's a lot of times when my role as a coach is not to tell somebody what to do, I almost never do that because who's an expert on Joe and Joe's business, Joe is right. So my role is to ask you the questions that is going to help you come up with the answers and solutions to the problems that you're faced with that external perspective and to help you come up with the solution that is within yourself and that the mastermind is more Joe: That's Brian: At the upper Joe: Ok. Brian: Level Joe: Ok. Brian: And that right now is closed. So people are not available into that. And usually what happens is we start people off in the 90s when they challenge and there's those people are rolling up into that mastermind as they complete the 91 day challenge. Joe: Scott. Brian: But we start people off with where they are and what they can afford of what they need to do. And so we have programs that start, like I said, at one hundred dollars a month, up to twenty five to five thousand dollars a month, depending upon which program you're involved with. And there are other things that I do. I have mentioned Tony Robbins, but I have not mentioned John Maxwell, most certified coach, trainer and speaker of the John Maxwell team, which means for those people who are not familiar with John Maxwell, he's a world renowned leadership expert. And that was one of the big challenges that I saw was there was a lack of quality leadership in our world today. And because my target market is that small business owner, entrepreneur and professional, they have never really had much experience with leadership training. But again, I'm not a leadership trainer. I'm a leadership developer. And so we have leadership programs using John's world class material that over a period of 90 days, we teach you the strategies and you practice them for ninety one days so that you develop those skill sets along the way. And so, again, it depends upon where you are and what you need and what tool is necessary to help you fix the problem that you're up against. Because again, I use Stephen Covey, I use Joe Mitali. I will pick from anybody I need to and I will claim that everything that I share didn't originate with me. Brian: I'm standing on the shoulders of the giants that went before me as far as you know, all the way back to the Greeks, Aristotle and and some of those, because they had it first. They they mentioned it. And again, everybody since then is really just repackaging it from there. And if somebody wants to do a DIY version of it, pick a great book. Napoleon Hill's was probably the the godfather of personal development or at least modern person development with they can grow rich. And one of my mentors actually went and read the book and studied it over and over and over again. You probably have heard the suggestion that you should go read a book a week or so, go read 50 bucks a year. Right. I challenge you. That's not the right strategy if you're wanting to grow. It's a great way to learn information. But if you're wanting to make changes in your life. Yeah, one great book and read it 50 times, study it, do the exercises at the end of the chapter, implement the strategies. Another great one is Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. That that book still to date. That's one book I try to read at least once a year. And I'm usually listening to it because I'm taking advantage of the windshield time that I have. And it seems like there's always something more in there. Brian: That book is so deep and there's so many different levels that you can get into it as you grow. There's another level. There's another level. There's another level, which is how I spend a lot of my time. Yes, I have three different coaches and I'm constantly consuming more and more material. But there are there's about ten different books that I try to spend time reading consistently because they're the road maps, they're the foundational skills. And it's going to take for me to get to where I want to go. And it's only through consistently coming back to it. You don't become a master blackbelt by learning how to do the form and doing it perfectly. One time I believe it was Berklee that said, I don't fear the man that knows ten thousand ticks. I fear the man that is practiced one kick ten thousand times in the story that got you the story and the rest of the story was the example of that was he says will show me. And and basically what it was is because that person had practice that kicks so well. It doesn't matter if even if you know it's coming, you can't block it, you can't stop it. He has mastered how to do it regardless of what you do to counteract that. The only way to not get kicked is to not get into the fight. Joe: So. We're over a little bit, we have a few more minutes. Brian: Oh, yeah, I'm good. Joe: Ok, cool. So I want to ask you about because you mentioned since we're on the subject of books and you mentioned Joe Vitale and you were you are part of a book called The Abundance Factor. Brian: Yep. Joe: Can you tell me a little bit about that and how that came about and. Brian: Well, I was on the short list as Joe was looking to write his next compilation book, and I had been following him, been a fan of him, read a number of his books. I still practice one of one of the big things that sticks for me from Joe is the story of Hopital Pono. If you have not read the book Zero Factor, I highly recommend it. It's a very fascinating book. The mantra that that book teaches is something that actually helps me go to sleep at night because my brain has a hard time shutting down. And by saying that for phrase mantra helps my it's kind of a signal to my brain to stop thinking and go from into my head and into my body. And so it's really helpful there. And so I was on the short list of authors that Joe asked to help participate in that book. It's called The Abundance Factor. I knew the group of people that were pulling together. And so my chapter is called The Unpleasant Truth, because, again, there's a lot of people out there teaching because we're talking about the mindset of abundance, which is something that a lot of people struggle with. But it's hard for people to actually do it and practice it consistently. And that's really what my chapter was about. It was about taking the actions that the book is encouraging you to take. And so that's what my chapter is in that book. April of the year that it came out, we did hit the Amazon bestseller list with that book at the time. And it's been a great book. And I use it more of a as a calling card and as an introduction to myself when I'm meeting new people. Joe: And then you mentioned earlier about a book that you wrote that I did not actually see in my notes. So can you tell me about that? Right. Was Brian: Ok, Joe: There. Brian: I've written three books. Joe: Ok. Brian: The first book is called Ready, Set Succeed, which is a self published book. Again, it was another compilation with a series of different authors. And I've got several boxes of those still today that, again, I use them as is handouts. And it's, again, about taking action because again, that's what I saw people struggle with and implementation because again, at the end of the day, it's ready, set, succeed, go. You've got to get moving. And so we were all writing the chapter based upon that. It was a self published book. The only way that you can get that is to go through me to get that I'm aware of. And I actually did have a client come to me through that book for one of the other offers. They got it. They called me up and that chapter resonated with them. And it was an opportunity for me to help them out. Then we wrote The Abundance Factor, and then after that we wrote a book called Unleash Your Fear. And that book is available right now. You can go to unleash your fear dot com and get a copy of that. Right now, at this point in time, it is about a 40 page e-book. You can get a copy were actually read it to you for in about an hour. Brian: But that's one of our projects for the rest of this year, is to work on rewriting that book and expanding it to where it's around a hundred pages and we turn it into a physical book and using that as a methodology to share that message. Because as we've gone back and we've we've shared that message, we teach in a very powerful concept in that book about the relationship that people have with fear, because right now most people have a lousy relationship with fear. But fear is just a tool that's used by our subconscious. And our subconscious causes us problems because it's designed not to make us happy. It's not designed to make us successful. It's designed to make us survive. Problem is, when we do go out there, when we want to grow, when we want to succeed and we want more, it sees that as not surviving. That's risky. There's pain out there if we pursue those things. So how do we how do we change that? How do we work on that? That's what I've understood from the people that have read the book, that a lot of people enjoyed it and you can actually still get it for free for a little bit longer. Brian: We're in the process of getting that changed. You can go to unleash your fear Dotcom and get a copy of that book there. And once we get the expanded version, we will still be using that. You are all along the way. And so in this process, we've got a lot of great tools that are available to you. And we've talked about a lot. Joe, you're actually one of the longer podcasts that I've gone on and we've talked about a lot of different things. But one thing we haven't talked about is one of the foundations that I used for my coaching, which I refer to as the Five Keys of Success. And that's actually a podcast that I do called the Five Keys of Success podcast. And you can go out there to wherever you get your podcasts and Google five Keys successor Brian Lovegrove, and you'll be able to find it. And I talk about those five keys, because at the end of the day, because, again, I've been doing personal development for decades now. And so I boiled down all of that stuff to what is the true fundamental foundational skills and tools you need. And I came up with those five keys. You want to know what those five keys Joe: I Brian: Are? Joe: Do, I have actually you were not going to get off this podcast without talking about it, so I have them here. I still have other stuff. That's why I like that. Yes. So please, I totally want to these this is like one of the things that really triggered it. When I wanted to have you on as a guest, I'm like, man, I want to know what those are. Brian: Well, the five keys of success, the first key is clarity, and I refer to it as get clear because without clarity, you're lost, you're wandering around in a fog. If you don't have a destination, you're never going to be able to get there. And if you don't know where you are, how do you know how you're going to go from where you are to where you want to go? And we talked about the plan. If you are not clear on the plan on how to achieve your goal, you're not going to get there now. But there's some also challenges with that piece because, again, a lot of people may not necessarily know how to get to that point, but do you know how to get started? Because that's the key. Do you know what the next step is? How many people get bogged down with steps? Nine hundred and eighty seven through steps. Twelve hundred and eighty four. Well, what steps do you want? I'm on step five. What step six. I don't know. Focus on step six, seven, eight, nine. OK, focus on what's in front of you and these other steps you will figure out by the time you get to that point. The second key is commitment because without commitment we cave in to the fear. We don't have the motivation, the energy and the power to keep going when things get. And the analogy that I love to use is the story about Cortez. When he landed in The New World, he burned his boats. His men woke up the next morning and they went in. He addresses many gentlemen. There is no way home that we do not create for ourselves. And so his small band took on and conquered much larger nations and groups of people in South America because they were committed to making it happen because it was either do or die. Joe: I'm a big fan of burning the boats, by the way. Brian: Absolutely, that's one of the podcasts that we did, is, OK, how do you burn the boats? Joe: Yeah. Brian: And we kind of walk through that exercise and that's that can be a whole coaching process. My story around that was I used to weigh two hundred and sixty pounds and I went on a diet and I lost thirty five pounds in the first month and a half. It was a radical diet. And one of the things that I did on the back deck in the fire pit is I burn my fat jeans and I actually have a picture of you. It's it's at night. You can all you can really see the flames. You can barely make out the jeans as part of the picture. But I vividly remember that process. And I promised myself I would never buy that size pair of clothes ever again. Now, have I been able to keep off all the weight that I lost? No. But when my pants get tight, that option is not there. Joe: Yeah. Brian: It's like, OK, we got to do something, we got to turn this around because we are not buying a bigger sized pair of pants. And so, again, that's where that burning the boats actually comes in, which leads us to step three, which is get crankin or get busy taking action. Money talks about taking massive action. And, you know, how many times have I you know, I've tried everything. Really? How many times have you tried? What have you tried? A hundred things.
Part 2, of our five-part interview with Ari Galper of Unlock The Sales Game. Topics covered in this episode Building Trust to Create an Open, Comfortable Sales EnvironmentWhy Most Sales Are Lost at the Beginning of the Process, Not at the EndWhy Sales is so Much More Than Just a “Numbers Game”1 The Power of Trust-Based LanguagingNever “Chase Ghosts” AgainHow to Remove the Pressure from a Sales Call https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toDxvWynhmg Full Convo ➡️ https://brianjpombo.com/bjpchats/ Transcription Brian: Wow. So you talked about running into that brick wall of, you know, just seeing reality for what it was. How did you get from that point, to figuring all this out, how did you come across that? Ari: Actually that was my trial and error right there. I had enough. I was like, I'm done with this, I'm not gonna treat myself like this ever again. I felt asthought I was mentally abused. I felt like disgusted. I quit my job and I said to myself, enough is enough. If this has happened to me right now, it's probably happened to 1,000s of people all over the world, millions of people who don't even recognize they're being treated this way. And I literally sat down and came up with my approach that basically became a bomb in the industry and revolutionize everything, and really helped people see the truth. That's why I created my, Unlocking Game System, which we could talk about today and share with you insights and ideas and help people who are also experiencing this every single day losing tons of money, because they don't know any other way of doing it. Brian: So tell us more about, Unlocking The Game. Ari: Sure, there's sort of like three core principles behind the system. And I want to clean out the mental harddrive that your listeners probably have right now, right? What they believe selling is, so I can pour in some new ideas, because it is a mindset shift. And the first core sales method is why I'm sure you heard this one before that sales is a numbers game. That's a pretty common myth. Where the more contacts you make, the more sales you're supposed to make. That's the concept, right? Because the more people you meet, the more phone calls you made, the more demos you have, will miraculously somehow it'll trigger out more results. Well, we discover in this day and age now in this economy, it's not about how many contacts you make anymore. It's about how deep you go on each conversation, how good you are trust building, not how good you are, how many contacts you make, or how many meetings you have, or how many demos you have is the opposite of how people view the process. Number two, is kind of a big one that the sale is lost at the end of the process. I'm sure you've had deals pending before. Where it all looked good, all positive and at the end it just like, fell through, right? Brian: Yeah. Ari: So we discovered in our research that the sale is not lost anymore at the end of the process, it's now lost at the beginning of the process, even at hello. I'll prove it to you right now come and find a way, if someone calls your office tomorrow morning, you pick up the phone and you hear, hi, my name is, I'm with, we are, what goes through your mind in about three seconds? Brian: It's a salesperson. Ari: It's over at hello, isn't it? Your guard goes up, you pull back, and now you're in the game. So I'll make the case today that most of your listeners or viewers are most likely losing their sale, not at the end of the process, they're most likely losing it at the beginning. Now that they're always doing outbound calls, but I won't explain today why they're losing their opportunities in the beginning and not the end, which is so, so contrarian. I mean, every sales guru in the world teaches people to focus on getting the what? Brian: The End. Ari: The end. Turns out, it was lost at the beginning, they got it all wrong.
Our five-part interview with Ari Galper of Unlock The Sales Game begins. Topics covered in this episode From a Done Deal, to a Day I'll Never ForgetUnlock The Game: A Whole New Approach to Sales Full Convo ➡️ https://brianjpombo.com/bjpchats/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHl-rU7vVbc Transcription Brian: Ari Galper is the world's number one authority on trust-based selling and has been featured on CEO Magazine, Forbes, Inc Magazine, Sky News and the Australian Financial Review. As trust becomes the most important currency in the new economy, the act of selling is a dehumanizing process with endless chasing, has been completely reinvented and anchored in the timeless values of integrity, and trust, through trust based selling. In his best selling book, Unlocked The Sales Game, Ari describes his revolutionary sales approach based on getting to the truth, and why having a mindset of focusing on deep trust, instead of the sale is ironically, 10 times more profitable. I'm happy to introduce Ari Galper, the world's number one authority on trust based selling. How's it going Ari? Ari: Very good, Brian. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Brian: Yeah, Welcome to Brian J. Pombo Live. Let's just start out, just tell us a little bit more about you and where you come from. Ari: Sure. So I'm from the US, originally from California. I live in Sydney, Australia right now been here for 20 years actually. Meet my wife on a dating site 20 years ago. She's from Sydney, met her in Los Angeles, actually met on a dating site back this is pre swiping days. It's just photo and text and email. And then we started dating and came back to Sydney to visit her family got engaged there and then married and we've been here for 20 years now ever since. Brian: Oh, fabulous. How did you get into trust-based selling? What's your background there? Ari: Prior to all that, I used to be a sales manager at a software company, we launched the first online website data collection tools, like website behavior. It's called Google Analytics now, where you track the stats on website. Back then we were the first one to come out with something like that, fast growing business internet was kind of taken off. I had 18 people underneath me, sales reps and the large opportunities came across my desk, I was kind of the first one to get those. There's one leak came across my desk and I call the contact back, you'd recognize them, it was a big company, lots of websites. I call them, nice guy and he agreed to a demo and a conference call to see our product. This was such a big opportunity, Brian, that if I close the sale, it would double the revenue of the company in one sale. That's how big it was. So really excited. Everyone's excited. So they finally came Friday afternoon, four o'clock, never forget it. I was in a conference room with my CEO and the door was closed behind me. We had one of those long conference tables in front of us in the conference room. And on the table was a speakerphone, the old school ones, you know, the corporate one. It looked like a spaceship. Brian: I remember them yup. Ari: Star Trek ones. I hit the dial-tone, dialed the number my contact picks up is like hey, Ari, hey, how's it going? Good. And he says to me, Ari, let us tell you who else was on the line today. I was like, oh, great. Next thing I hear is, my name is John, I'm CEO. I like wow, CEO of a whole company, that's incredible. My name is Mike, I'm head of IT. Oh, this is good. My name is Julia, I'm head of Global Marketing. This is even better. I mean, everybody on this call was basically a decision maker, you know, this is the goal but helping as often as possible. So always good there. And I begin to introduce myself kind of describe what we do. Let me give him a live web demo over the web of their website, we collect it ahead of time and show him stats of what it look...
Shelley Whitehouse of The Smart Chicken Coop It all started with 3 chickens on a porch, that turned into a side interest in backyard chicken keeping, that grew into a successful online business. Shelley Whitehouse shares her story about her company, The Smart Chicken Coop as we cover various topics listed below. Be sure to checkout The Smart Chicken Coops quality products at the link below! The Smart Chicken Coop - https://thesmartchickencoop.com Topics Covered It all Started With 3 Chickens On A Porch Craigslist & The Smart Chicken Coop's First Customers Credibility & Trust, Help Convert to Sales Facebook & Google Advertising Success COVID-19 Effect on Business Life, Caring for Animals & The Value of Homegrown Food Increase In Demand: The Start of DIY Chicken Coop Kits Importance of Business Acumen & Self Discipline Challenge of Developing a Marketing Plan for Nationwide Success The Joy of Providing Value to Others Bad Reviews & Quick Responses Meeting Demand, While Maintaining Our Product Level Advice for New Business Owners A Joy for Indian Runner Ducks The Value of Perseverance In Business Transcription Shelley: Just started out as a lifestyle business, do you know what I mean? Brian: Yeah, absolutely. Shelley: I didn't know that it was going to become so popular. And then of course with COVID, it became ridiculous. Brian: Yeah. Shelley: But my husband actually took three months off of work his work, because we couldn't get everything done, we were working full-time, all of us. We're working. It was crazy. It's crazy, but really fun too, because here are these families who are stuck at home with kids pulling their hair out, and they get to build chicken coops and then get the chickens. It's a fun business. Podcast Intro: If you're someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family. If you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing. You may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman. We are here to celebrate you whether you're looking to improve your maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel. From selling chicken eggs online, to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure, life off the grid. Brian: Shelley Whitehouse has quite a varied background. She spent many years performing as a professional orchestra flutist, raced mountain bikes for the heck of it, coached high school sports, raised three kids with her husband, then decided to go back to school to get an MBA. After several years working as a management consultant, one of Shelley's side interests, backyard chicken keeping, morphed into a business called, The Smart Chicken Coop, that sells fancy backyard chicken coops nationwide. Shelley, welcome to the Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast. Shelley: Thank you for having me. Brian: Absolutely. So what brought you into Backyard Chickens in the first place? Shelley: Well, this is a funny story. So as I said in the bio, I was working as a management consultant. My daughter, who was at UC Santa Cruz at the time, decided to stop out of school and move to rural Yucatan. And so she dropped three chickens on my porch en route. And I hate birds, but what I found is that they were really fun. And people started saying, well, what's the latest with the chickens? That turned into, why don't you do a blog, that turned into me buying chicks to sell in my backyard, to people saying, where'd you get that chicken coop?
Our seven-part interview with Bob Regnerus of Feedstories begins. Topics covered in this episode What led Bob to become a digital marketing and paid advertising expertThe THREE POWERFUL THINGS Bob's done in his career to help him thrive in business, and attract clientsHow Victor Cheng encouraged Bob to write his first book, Big Ticket EcommerceWhat are the main advantages of writing a book?Finding Your SUPERPOWER Full Convo ➡️ https://brianjpombo.com/bjpchats/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1RLL3CSeis Transcription Brian: Bob Regnerus of Feedstories, part one. This is a series of conversation that we had with Bob Regnerus. You're really going to enjoy it, you can watch all the other parts of it over at BJPchats.com. And you can see everything else that I'm offering my book, you can have me as a guest on your podcast if you're interested on being a pet guest on this podcast or the other ones we provide. Or if you'd like to have me as a speaker at your event, go check all of that out over at BrianJPombo.com. Now, here's the show. Brian (Intro to show): Coach Bob Regnerus is the co-founder of Feedstories, a digital marketing expert and the author of five books, including, The Fourth Edition of The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising. Bob, welcome to Brian J. Pombo Live. Bob: It is so good to be with you, Brian. Looking forward to a lively conversation today. Brian: Yeah, good deal. So I like to jump into these things without a whole lot of research in general. But the issue is, is that I already knew who you were, because I'd seen you around. I knew that you had co-authored this book. And I'd seen your name around probably for years, because I think we have ran in similar circles. Bob: Yeah, that's probably likely. Brian: Yeah, just tell me…we'll get into the details as far as where you're at right now, eventually. But tell me how did you end up where you are? Bob: Yeah, well, I guess I took a little bit of an indirect approach to being an entrepreneur. I was a programmer by trade, I went to college, you know, studied computer science, studied business, I had a dual degree. And I ended up working for a large corporation out of college doing programming on mainframe computers, that's the computers that take up a whole room. Did that worked at a couple different corporate jobs, and I met a guy at one of my gigs who was there on contract. And like, I was an employee, he was on a contract, I thought that was interesting. He kind of made his own hours. And he was making, you know, I mean, he wasn't getting benefits from the company but it felt like he was making more money than me doing kind of what he was doing. So I became friends with him and eventually, I went on my own with him and was doing some contract work. I worked for TransUnion, the big credit bureau. That was about 1998, I really got the bug for the internet. Obviously 1998 we're going back a few years, internet wasn't what it is today. Right? But I was a coder. I actually developed my first e-commerce website, I built a shopping cart for a business from scratch. By the way, there's still a client today, there's still a client. So it's pretty awesome. But we launched that thing in 98 and it was pretty funny. The business owner who I'm friends with is like, this is great, you know, we're getting orders, like the middle of the night, you know, when we're closed, it was a big deal. He's like, how do we get more people to the site? I said, oh, that's not a big deal, I know exactly how to do that. And of course I had no idea how to do that. So that's where I dove into the World of internet marketing and direct marketing. Discovered Dan Kennedy and Perry Marshall and all those things. I really became a student of marketing. And I shifted from being a technology person to a marketing person, just kind of felt really comfortable for me, it felt like the next step.
Brian's son Tyler jumps in on tonight's episode to share his love for Nintendo Lego Super Mario in our talk about the power of combining interests. Brian also shares how combining interest of gardening and chickens has worked for a recent company he interviewed named, Roost and Root. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDL74CVn5FM Transcription Brian: Combine interests for extra attention. Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live. And with me is… Tyler: Hello my name is Tyler. I'm his son, Brian J. Pombo. Brian: This is Tyler Pombo here. And he is How old are you? Tyler: I'm 7 years old, and I have a Mario I'm going to show, it's actually Lego Mario. Brian: Lego Mario, okay. What about it do you like? Tyler: Yeah, like, if you put them on green Legos. It shows like, green, and it's electronic. Brian: And so you could play games with them? Tyler: Yeah, like there's a little pipe that you put them in, and that's just like the Mario, you have a time and you have to go really fast. You only have one minute to delay. Brian: So it acts like the Super Mario games. Tyler: Yeah. Brian: So what what do you like, Do you like Legos, or do you like Mario? Tyler: Both. Brain: Okay, so both Legos and Mario. So they took Mario which which came first, Legos or Mario? Tyler: Legos. Brian: Legos came first. You're right. And then Mario came out. Tyler: So how you turn them on is, this a little button that's down here. Then there's a little app, and that's one of my favorite parts. Brian: An app for a phone? Tyler: Yeah. And then you push this one that's up above it, then it actually connects to it. Brian: It'll connect to the app? Tyler: Yeah, yeah. Brian: Was that Bluetooth or something? Tyler: Yeah. It's Bluetooth. It's awesome! Brian: So do you think do you like that better than a lot of your other Legos? Tyler: I used to build a lot of Legos that I changed to a bunch of stuff with Lego Mario. Brian: Yeah, and you but that's your favorite Lego piece is the Lego Mario ones. Tyler: Yeah. Brian: Do you think it's because they that combines two things that you really like? Tyler: Yeah, it's like super super cool. You guys can like get it. I bought this at like, Fred Meyer I think. Brian: We're not doing a commercial just for Mario. We have we have stores in this area called, Fred Meyer. That's what he's talking about. Tyler: Yeah. Brian: But, I think they got the point that you like Super Mario and you like Super Mario Legos. But the idea is, is that if you can combine…if you can combine two different interests, two different areas, two different things that people love. For example, on my podcast, the Off The Grid Biz Podcast, we had Roost and Root and that website, it actually combines the idea of raising chickens with gardening. Who someone that you know, that raises chickens and has a garden? Tyler: Mama. Brian: Mom does that. So it's common to have two things that go good together. You know, the old Reese's Peanut Butter Cup concept to two things that are good alone, but also are good together. So think about how you combine products, combine interests of your marketplace, and you'll be able to get a lot more attention. So don't forget about my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. You can get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com and you can find out more ways to be able to make a huge difference in your business in the long run. It's a quick book, it's tiny. It's real thin. You get a hard copy or you get a free one AmazonProofBook.com and we'll be back tomorrow. Thanks for being on Tyler. Tyler: Yes. So there's like, so like you can also buy expensive and expand on Lego Mario. Brain: Oh yeah it goes on and on with all the Lego Mario stuff that you can. Tyler: Also you can take off his pants. Brian: Oh, yeah, which is always a good feature.
Who is behind the voice of our podcast introduction? Who edits The VBAC Link podcast episodes? Meet Brian Albers, The VBAC Link's secret weapon! Listen to this episode to find out why Brian has earned this title time and time again. We also learn some fun secrets and ask him some of your burning questions. But in all seriousness, we are SO grateful for all Brian does for us. He is a quality, genuine guy that they just don't make these days anymore! Additional linksThe VBAC Link on Apple PodcastsHow to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for ParentsThe VBAC Link Community on FacebookThe VBAC Link ShopFull transcriptNote: All transcripts are edited to correct grammar, false starts, and filler words. Meagan: All right, you guys. Guess what? This is an episode that I know you guys have all been waiting for since we posted a picture of our secret weapon wearing, “Don't be all up in my perineum.” If you haven't seen the post, go scroll back in our Instagram. We have Brian, who is our secret weapon. Julie started calling him that, I don't know, forever ago.Julie: Because he is.Meagan: He really is. He has proven it. So we today are going to be recording an episode about Brian. Brian is the voice of our intro on our podcast. Review of the WeekMeagan: We have a review, and Julie is the best review reader. We all know this. I can't read.Julie: Oh my gosh.Meagan: She can. So Julie, go ahead and read your review. I hope you picked a big one. I think strategically, you probably pick the big ones knowing that I can't read them.Julie: Yeah. That's exactly what I do, actually. I pick the bigger ones and leave the smaller ones for you.Meagan: I always hope. I always hope.Julie: We have so many. I don't even think we are going to get through them all, so I am trying to pick more recent ones because I know that you pick older ones and so I feel like maybe we have a little bit of both worlds in our review reading. All right. This review is from Apple Podcasts and it's from carrie.vic so we can totally Facebook stalk her if necessary.Her title is, “OMG, the best VBAC resource out there” and then she says, “Thank you so much to Julie and Meagan for this podcast! I began listening to it right after my C-section in August 2018. Then, when I found out I was pregnant in June 2020, I re-listened to every episode. So. Much. Information. So much positivity and hope. I had my VBAC on 02/11”That was just this year.“and I don't think I could have done it without The VBAC Link. This podcast helped me ensure I had the most supportive birth team and provider, provided so much useful information, and all of these mamas made me truly believe in my capability to do this!“Thank you, thank you, thank you a million! Sending so much love to all you mamas out there! ❤️”I love the heart emojis. I love the reviews. I love carrie.vic from Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much and congratulations on your VBAC.Meagan: Yay. Congrats, congrats. I love when we hear the reviews and we don't have to go stalk them. So if you leave a review or if you have left us a review and then gone on to have your baby, let us know how things are going because we kind of stalk you on Facebook, not on Facebook Facebook but on our Facebook community to see because we love following up and hearing about the stories. So leave us a review and if you have already had your baby, drop us an email or tag us on Facebook and let us know.Julie: Yeah, because we really need closure on these things. Like the ones from last year that you read, I'm like, “Oh my gosh, they had their baby eight months ago. I don't know what happened.” Closure is always good.Meagan: Okay, without further ado, we are going to have Brian give us the intro.Brian: All right, here comes the music. You are tuned into The VBAC Link podcast with Julie Francom and Meagan Heaton, VBAC moms, doulas, and educators here to help you get inspired for birth after having had a C-section. Together they have created a robust VBAC preparation course, along with this uplifting podcast, for women who are preparing for their VBAC. Although these episodes are VBAC specific, they encourage expectant moms to listen and educate themselves on how to avoid a Cesarean from the get-go. The purpose of this podcast is to educate and inform. It is not meant to replace advice from any other qualified medical professional. Here are your hosts, Julie and Meagan after we hear from today's sponsor.Julie: “Here are your hosts, Julie and Meagan”Meagan: Yay. I love it.Julie: I love it. Brian is amazing. I call him “our secret weapon” because he is our very first person that we ever paid to do anything from The VBAC Link. He literally saved my life because when we first started, I was editing our podcast episodes using a free program that I downloaded, and every Tuesday night I would be in a rush trying to get-- I'd spend two hours editing, and trying to crop out “um's” everywhere, and putting the intro and the exit there, and get it in the right spot, and get it uploaded, and get everything posted in time for our Wednesday podcast runs, and then Meagan connected us with Brian.Meagan, you're going to have to tell the story because I don't even remember how you guys met. But then he literally saved two hours of my week and that's why he is our secret weapon. But not only that, he is our video guy. He records the videos for our courses and we also give him a whole bunch of random audio/video stuff to do here and there for us. So he is called “our secret weapon” because he saved our lives and we want to keep him nice, quietly tucked away in our own little package so nobody else can use him because he is ours.Meagan: Brian, you belong to us.Brian: Yep.Julie: We will lock you in a dungeon with a computer and some audio equipment just in case you ever decide you want to stop editing.Brian: And honestly Julie, what you described Julie, just cutting out the um's-- that's pretty much what I do. That's the bulk of it because there are so many, really.Julie: Yeah, because me and Meagan don't know how to not say “um.”Brian: Well, I mean, everybody says “um”.Julie: I know.Brian: It's just a natural, normal part of speaking, but when you're trying to present it as a podcast, you want to sound as pro as you can. And cutting out those “um's” is working towards that goal.Meagan: Yes.Julie: Yeah, and then not saying “um” is another step.Brian: Yeah.Meagan: Yeah.Julie: Maybe when we are grown up we will stop saying “um”.Meagan: It's seriously one of the most, it's one of the hardest things for me. What's funny though is I don't recognize myself saying “um” or “uhh” but I totally recognize anybody else saying “um”. I'm like, “Oh my gosh that person says--” like I recognize “um's” more, but in myself, I don't. I don't know why that's a problem.Julie: Until Brian sends us a message that says, “You guys are saying ‘um' a lot more than usual. Just pay attention.”Meagan: “Can you guys drop the ‘um's?”Julie: And then we are texting each other during podcast episodes and saying, “Oh my gosh I am saying ‘um' so much.” No, but I have learned that I replace that with “so”.Brian: Uh-huh, or “and”.Julie: Yeah. And “and”. Yeah, and “so”. That's awesome.Brian: And that's okay. That's okay too.Julie: Yeah. So let's get going. Um, we-- see? There I did. Oh my gosh, I just said it.Brian: Yep.Julie: You'll probably have to edit that out.Brian: I'll leave that one in.Julie: Yeah, you can leave that one in because, um-- oh my gosh. Now I am going to be so hyperaware. Oh, this is not going to go well.Meagan: Oh my gosh. Okay, so I was just reflecting back on how I got a hold of Brian and I feel like-- okay. So I had a client who, crazy enough, yeah. Anyway. So I had a client and he does video and then his wife does sound. I asked her, I sent her a text or something. I was like, “Hey, do you know about anybody or do you know anybody?” And she was like, “Yeah.” I can't remember if she sent Brian to me directly or if she sent me to someone else, but I'm pretty sure she sent--Brian: You're talking about Michaela, right?Meagan: Michaela, yeah.Brian: Yeah.Meagan: Michaela knew you, right? I thought she sent me directly to you. She was like, “Yeah. I know someone.”Brian: Yeah, because I work at the NPR station here in Salt Lake City and Michaela does as well. She is a weekender and that's how I know her. She still does work there and I still do work there so we still do know each other.Meagan: Yes, yes.Brian: And so she approached me and she asked me if I was interested in helping out some friends of hers start a podcast or do a podcast or something. I don't know if she just didn't have the details or just didn't give me the details, but I had no idea what anything was about. I just knew it was something about audio editing and a podcast and I said, “Yeah, sure.” I love doing audio and I love helping people if I can pursue what they want to pursue. If I can help out, I will help out. Especially when it comes out to audio stuff because I've been doing audio forever. And so I said, “Yeah. Throw them at me. Give them my email. Whatever happens, happens.” And that just got the ball rolling.Julie: And then you became our secret weapon.Meagan: Yeah. She sent me your email. That's right. I was like, “I was pretty sure it was direct.” And then I sent it to you. I remember emailing you and it was such a big step for Julie and I because Julie was our editor before and she did a wonderful job, but she was tired of it. And we are not professional. We are not professional. It's not easy.Julie: It was so much work. Oh, well and Brian can edit a podcast episode in 30 minutes that takes me two hours to do.Meagan: Unless we say “um” all the time and then it's two hours. But yeah. But no, it was just such, I don't know. The stars aligned so perfectly. I will forever be grateful for her and we are forever grateful for you, Brian, and we are so excited that you are with us.Brian: And that was when? That was the fall of 2018?Meagan: Two years, mhmm.Julie: Yeah. Right about that.Brian: And you hadn't done too many episodes before I came on board, right?Julie: I think we were 30 episodes in.Meagan: I was going to say, I think it was 30 or 40.Brian: Wow.Julie: Yeah.Meagan: We really hadn't done that many and they were a mess.Julie: Brian was like, “You guys really need to find a studio and I actually know one that might be available.”Meagan: Yeah. He's like, “You need to have better audio.” So it's just been so awesome and then we were like, “Oh, we are going to do this online course. Hey Brian, do you know how-to video?” “Yeah.”Brian: “Yeah.”Meagan: And you guys, he spent an entire Sunday--Julie: It was like, 10 hours.Meagan: Yeah. With us in an empty duplex sitting there as we were just talking about-- like seriously, yeah. It was amazing and yeah. I am so grateful for you.Brian: And actually, videoing is the easy part. It's all the editing and post-production that takes forever.Julie: And so you know so much about birth, and Cesareans, and VBAC--Brian: And do you want to know? The funny thing is when I started editing the podcast, I, first of all, didn't know it was a birth thing.(Meagan and Julie laughing)It was just a podcast. Seriously, I had no idea--Meagan: He didn't know.Brian: --what it was about until I heard the first audio. I had no idea what a VBAC was. I had no idea what a VBAC was. I had no idea what a doula was. I had to look that stuff up.Julie: And now you know way more than you ever thought you would know about birth.Brian: Oh, I know way more than I thought I would ever know.Julie: Probably way more than you would ever care to know.Meagan: You could be a doula, Brian.Julie: I want to read your bio really fast.Brian: Oh, go for it.Julie: You wrote out a really well-thought-out bio and I want to read it because I think it is transitioning to what we are talking about right now, but I want you guys to know a little bit more about Brian and then we can talk some more, and share some really embarrassing stories, and all that fun stuff.But Brian is a SoCal native which-- I did not know that about you. Meagan probably did. Meagan is a bigger people person than I am. But you moved to Salt Lake City in the summer of 2015. You are a lifelong musician and we have seen some of your stuff on YouTube. It's pretty amazing. You have been an audio engineer since the early 90s. You worked in radio, big-time nationally syndicated stuff as well as small-time local stuff as an engineer and on-air host since the mid-90s. He is currently an on-air host at 90.1 KUER NPR Utah, headquartered in Salt Lake City, heard throughout Utah, and video editor in marketing at Salt Lake community college. I did not know that either.You run Humorless Productions. That's his business name. Remote audio, video recording, and post-production, primarily concert recordings, primarily noisy undergroundy, aggressive, electronic music. Obviously, not recording too many concerts these days. You are an avid skier. I did know that. Avid road bicyclist-- also knew that, and hard-core introvert. Also knew that.And let me tell you, people, Brian‘s never married and has no kids. Brian is such-- this is why I call him “our secret weapon”, right? He literally edits a birth podcast. He has never had kids. He has never seen somebody or helped somebody have a baby, but he is sitting over here being the biggest trooper for us. He came to our first birthday party and took pictures with us in our little made-up photo booth. He is just always so willing to help out and is just so-- I don't know. I just think you are a good-quality, genuine guy. They just don't make people like you anymore. I don't know if that makes sense.Brian: Well, if you think about it though, if you put yourself in my position, I mean, I don't really have to know anything about birth specifically. I'm just doing the audio.Julie: That's true.Brian: You know? I just pull it up on my computer and put it in my editing program and start editing. At that point it's not about birth, it's about audio and it's about making the people sound good.Julie: Which you do a great job of.Brian: So the podcast could be about anything and I'm still going to do the same process.Meagan: Right.Julie: Yes.Meagan: But at the same time, you are so willing to go the extra mile to do so many other things. In fact, even wearing your “Don't get all up in my perineum” shirt.Julie: “Don't be all up in my perineum.”Brian: The perineum shirt.Julie: Actually, can we talk about that shirt? I'm going to have that available in our VBAC Link shop. So if you go to thevbaclink.com/shop, you can see exactly what we are talking about and buy your own. “Don't be all up in my perineum” shirt straight from our VBAC shop. So by the time this episode airs, I will have it up there and live for you. I am pretty sure we can include a picture of Brian rocking it. In fact, that might just be our main product image.Meagan: Yes. Yes. I love it. Okay so, Brian. What got you into-- I mean, you've been doing this for such a long time. What sparked your interest in this? Like as a kid, what did you do as a kid? Did you want to do stuff like this as a kid? Like in editing and audio and video and all that?Brian: No, I mean, as a kid, like as a teenager, I would ride my bike around the neighborhood or ride my bike just as much as I could, so that's always been a lifelong thing. I started playing guitar at 12 or 13 years old and that pretty much instantly became my main focus forever. I wasn't good at it instantly. I wasn't a prodigy, but I got fairly good at it in some short amount of time. I was sort of a natural musician. It was just a language that I understood.Meagan: Yeah, it just came to you.Brian: It just kept going and going from there. I was in bands back in the 80s which-- we didn't go anywhere. We didn't record anything. But I was always playing and I was always getting better. Eventually, the first thing I did out of high school was, I went to a guitar school in Hollywood. It's the premier West Coast guitar school via Musicians Institute and the Guitar Institute of Technology. I graduated in 1990 and from there, that's what got me interested in audio. In playing guitar, and playing with bands, and playing with other people and recording as well, I was interested to know how exactly. You know, you mic up a guitar and why does it sound different if you put the mic here or if you put the mic here? Or if you use this microphone or that microphone? I was interested in that sort of stuff. I just dove into it headfirst while all along being a musician, but also being interested in audio.Once I eventually went to proper college, I was a music major at first, but then I switched to audio engineering and graduated as an audio engineering major. That was in the mid-90s. That's when I started in radio. I eventually did my own music shows in LA and I was an engineer for some big radio shows in LA. It all just came together and that's how it's been since then.Meagan: That's awesome. I didn't know that about you.Julie: Yeah. You're pretty good at it. You've got a natural talent.Meagan: Yeah. Oh my gosh.Julie: Alright.Brian: Isn't that what they say about kids? Because I'm a middle kid. I have an older brother and a younger brother.Julie: Aw, that makes sense too.Brian: Isn't the middle kid supposed to be the artsy one?Meagan: You know, my middle kid is. She is very artsy. I mean she seriously, she was 18 months old and I remember we were in this group of people and there were some coloring books. She sat down and started coloring and this lady was like, “Oh my gosh” because she was color blending and coloring in the lines so perfectly. She was like, “What in the deal?” And then now, she can just look at something and she just draws it. And she's like, “Look, this is--”. The other day, she brought home-- it was Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss's birthday, or whatever, and she brings me this Cat in the Hat picture. I am like, “Oh my gosh.” She is so good that way, and then she is really good in the arts like dance, and music, and things like that. She is really good at the piano and she is six. So, yeah. I would say my middle kid is good at it.Brian: Cool.Julie: I have two middle kids and I would say my third is definitely the more artsy one. But again, they are three, four, six, and seven. My seven-year-old has really mild cerebral palsy so he has always hated handwriting. He's always hated coloring because it's hard for him because of his right hand. It's his right side that is affected. He's not severely disabled or anything. It's really, really mild cerebral palsy, but it affects his right extremities and so he is forced to be left-handed when his brain operates in a right-handed way. He's never been good at that type of thing. I wonder if that's true. I don't know. We will see. We will see as my kids get older I suppose.Meagan: So tell us something else unique that no one would know about you that we don't even know.Julie: Yeah. Behind the scenes.Brian: About me?Meagan: Yeah, because you are. Like we said, you are just like this secret weapon. You just have all of these hidden talents. What is something that you-- I don't know. What is something secret?Brian: Well, I have a good one. I don't know if I have told you before, but I lived-- so I am from Southern California. That's what I say. That is the short answer. But the long answer is I was born in San Diego and I grew up in San Diego. But I lived all of my adult life in LA and so LA feels more like my home, which sounds sort of weird than San Diego, but if you press me, if you asked me where my home city is, I will say LA. But then, I also moved to Austria twice.Julie: What?Brian: Yeah. I lived there for most of 2005 and then I moved back to LA, and then I moved back to Austria from late 2009 to late 2010, so another year there for no reason. It wasn't a work thing. It wasn't for anything, I just wanted to live there. So twice, I sold all my stuff and quit all my jobs, and moved.Meagan: Oh my gosh.Julie: Oh, to be free.Meagan: That's amazing. That's amazing.Brian: Yeah. I didn't really know the language too much. I mean, I took some classes beforehand just so I was a little bit familiar, but I went over there and that's actually where Humorless Productions started my mobile audio/video recording system. That's where I really cut my teeth because there were so many more shows over there at that time that I could record as opposed to LA, at least for the music that I was interested in recording. And so I went over there, and I brought some equipment, and I would record all sorts of shows every month. It wasn't easy, but I worked out a system. It's evolved over the years and now I have a really good system.Actually, the first time I lived in Austria was in Vienna. The second time I lived there was Linz, which is a smaller town about an hour and a half west of Vienna. But if you really asked me if there's anywhere in the world that feels more like home than anything else, I would say it's Austria.Meagan: Really?Brian: Yeah. I have five more friends even today in Austria than I do in the States.Meagan: Wow.Julie: That is super cool.Brian: Yeah.Julie: Gosh, I used to travel so much when I was single. I guess maybe it was because I was in the military. I lived in a couple of different places and then once or twice a year before I got married, I would just travel somewhere on a plane. I was just talking to Nick the other night about this and I just miss that so much. You know, you get married, and you have kids, and you're just stuck forever until your kids get old enough to travel with you. I love that.Brian: And actually when I was over there, I wasn't really intent on traveling or going around, but that just ended up where the shows were that I would record. Vienna is fairly centrally located, so I would hop on a train and go up to Prague, or Budapest, or to Venice, or to Zurich, or to Munich, or to Berlin, or wherever. So it was all sorts of fun.Meagan: That's awesome. So cool. Yep. I did not know that.Julie: Yeah. I did not know that either.Q&AMeagan: So I posted on our Instagram what questions people have for you and a couple have come in. Can I ask them to you?Julie: Yeah.Brian: Yeah.Meagan: One, what is the most interesting thing you have learned from this podcast?Brian: I've learned all sorts of stuff. What's the most interesting thing? I don't know the most interesting thing.Meagan: What's something that stands out to you that you've learned? Obviously, you learned what a VBAC is in general.Brian: Yes, in general.Julie: Maybe if somebody asked you, what is The VBAC Link? What would you say?Brian: Well, here's the thing. For anybody listening, Julie and Meagan don't necessarily want you to have a VBAC. They want you to have the birth that you want. If you want a Cesarean, that's super great. More power to you. The thing is, you're going to learn stuff. Even if you do a Cesarean, you will learn stuff for your pregnancy that will benefit you if you listen to this podcast. If you are a first-time mother, you will benefit. You will learn stuff from this podcast. It doesn't matter if you have never had a Cesarean, doesn't matter if you have never had a vaginal birth. There is just so much good information that you will learn in this podcast.Meagan: I would agree. So another question is, do you share what you have learned with any expectant parents in your life?Julie: Wait, wait, wait. Hold on a minute. Hold on a minute. Thanks for that Brian. That was really nice of you to say. I really like that.Brian: Yeah.Meagan: That really was.Julie: Thank you.Meagan: So to me, Brian, you just answered it a little bit, right? Because that's one of the most interesting things you have maybe learned, right? We're pro VBAC, obviously. That's why we are here and that's why we created the course, and the podcast, and the blogs, and all of that jazz, but you nailed it. It's not that we want you to have your VBAC. It's that we want you to have the birth experience that you want, whether that be a VBAC or not. So I totally love that so much and that seems like the answer to me too. Maybe it's not the most interesting, but it is something that you have definitely taken away and realized that through editing our podcast, that's what we are here for. That is exactly what we are here for is to help these people get the birth that they desire no matter what that may look like to them.Brian: And one other thing, it might sound like not the best way to say this, but a lot of these women who come on the podcast have learned lessons the hard way. They want to share their experiences of learning things the hard way so that other women don't have to learn the hard way themselves. You know? You never ever want to say, “Well, I told you so I told you so,” but I think that's one of the best things about this show is that women don't have to go through all the trauma and all the pain that these other women have gone through, not unnecessarily. You know how birth goes. You never can plan it out 100%.Julie: You know how birth goes now.Brian: Yeah, more than I used to.Meagan: Yeah, and I love that. Yeah. I don't think it was saying it like that or anything. It's true. We have all learned things in hard ways a lot of the time and that for sure was me with my second provider. I didn't switch and I learned the hard way to follow my gut. I didn't follow it the first time. I had to follow it the second time. I am glad that I did so I had the outcome and the experience that I had. So, yeah. I love that.Do you share what you have learned through this podcast with expectant parents in your life? Do you have many expectant parents in your life?Brian: Yeah, I would in a heartbeat. I have only had one friend who had a kid last year sometime in 2020 and I definitely recommended it to her when she was pregnant. I said, “Hey if you want to learn some stuff, listen to this podcast.” I don't know what her plans were as far as her birth plans, but yeah. I said, “There is all sorts of stuff that you will learn listening to this podcast.”Meagan: That's awesome.Brian: And she was a first-time mom.Meagan: Yeah. I know, I think that's something that is so interesting. A lot of the times it's like, “Oh, I have had a VBAC so I don't need to listen to that,” but really like you said, the first-time parents can almost learn just as much, if not more, than the people who have had Cesareans. Right?Brian: I mean, how many episodes do you have on the pelvic floor? That is something that every first-time mother can use.Julie: Yeah. At least four I think.Meagan: Exactly. Mhmm. Yeah. And chiropractic care and working through your fear.Brian: Yep.Julie: And big babies.Meagan: Oh yeah and big babies. Things like that and learning what is evidence-based. You know, we really focus on a lot of evidence-based. So yeah. I love that. I love that you referred us. Thank you for referring us. Do you know how her birth turned out?Brian: I don't know.Meagan: Did she talk to you about that? Most people, probably not.Brian: She hasn't talked to me about it. I've seen pictures of the baby on Facebook and everything looks like it's rolling just perfectly.Meagan: Going really well. That's awesome.Brian: Yep.Meagan: So you said you have two siblings. You are the middle child. Did you say, two brothers?Brian: Yes.Meagan: Are they married?Brian: Both of them are. Older brother has no kids. Younger brother has two kids.Meagan: Oh awesome. Do you know how his wife's experiences went?Brian: I don't know. I haven't asked her.Meagan: Right. It's not really something you probably would. I was just so curious if now--Brian: I mean, I don't think she'd hesitate to tell me if I asked because she's an adult. I'm an adult. Yeah. But I just haven't asked.Meagan: Yeah. Okay, what other questions do you have, Julie? Or what else do you want to tell us, Brian?Julie: I mean, I guess unless you want to embarrass us or roast us, I am so disappointed that there is not going to be any roasting. Throw us under the bus. What kind of dirt do you got on us? Tell the whole world.Brian: I don't have anything embarrassing about you. I have something embarrassing about me.Julie: Okay sure.Meagan: That's the thing is, I want to know more about you. I want this episode to be about you. So tell everyone about you.Brian: Well, here's one thing. First of all, I said in my bio there that I am a hard-core introvert and that's 100% true. This story sort of reflects that a little bit. It was when I first started the podcast. I think I had met Julie and I had met Meagan maybe once. I forget. Maybe not at all at this point, but one of you called me. I forget who it was. One of you called me on some afternoon and just wanted to say, “Hi. I just wanted to chat on the phone for a little bit.”Julie: That was definitely Meagan. I don't do things like that.Meagan: Probably me.Brian: I felt so bad because when you called me, I was at the main library and I couldn't really take a call. I couldn't really talk but I was totally whispering. I felt bad because I wanted to talk. I wanted to say “hi” but I was just not in a position where I could do any of that because there were people all around, and I was in the middle of something, and you can't make a whole lot of noise in the library. And so the call ended up being 30 seconds. It was like, “Yeah, hi. Thanks. Okay. That's cool. Okay, bye.” That was more impersonal than I usually am. You know, in the first place, I really am not the most personable person. I am not friendly at first.Meagan: Really? I think you were. You were friendly.Brian: But I felt bad about that call. But now we all hang out and we are all cool.Meagan: Yes. Now it's like, “Brian!”Julie: COVID has put a serious cramp in our style. We don't get to see you anymore.Meagan: I know.Brian: Yeah.Julie: One day. One day, maybe.Meagan: I know. COVID. Darn COVID. How've you been during COVID Brian? What have you been up to during it?Brian: It's been pretty great for me. I call it “working from home”, but at the same time I have been an essential worker at both of my jobs, and so I have really not changed my schedule at all too much. But it's been great for me as an introvert because everybody else in the office doesn't show up. They are all working from home.Julie: So you get to be all alone and enjoy being an introvert.Brian: So at both of my jobs, I pretty much have the whole building to myself. I can work at my own pace and I can play music as loud as I want. So it's been okay.Meagan: That's good. Have you taken on any side projects or anything other than everything that we send you?Julie: Everything that we send you?Brian: Everything you throw at me? No, not really. I mean, I have all my regular stuff. I have about a dozen blogs and a dozen side projects. I have always a thousand music projects at home which don't really have a deadline, so I have a mountain of stuff I can always work on. Sometimes I get to it. Sometimes I don't. Right now it is ski season, so I am skiing every Saturday and every Sunday for months on end. I am working both my jobs quite a lot these days so I don't have much time to do much of anything.Meagan: Where do you like to ski, Brian?Brian: Well, living here in Salt Lake City is pretty much the center of the universe. We have all sorts of good skiing here. I have one of those multi-resort passes so I have gone to Big Sky Montana this year. I've gone to Steamboat Springs this year. I actually have weekends coming up for both of those coming up shortly. I don't think I will hit Jackson Hole this year. I don't think I will hit Sun Valley this year. I don't think I will hit Aspen this year, but I have skied all over the West Coast.Meagan: What's your favorite resort here in Utah? What resort would you suggest of someone to come to Utah and try out?Julie: Megan is our skier. She probably wants to go catch you on the slopes one day.Meagan: Yeah.Brian: It's probably not the one that most people would come up with as the number one resort here in Salt Lake City at least, but I go to Snow Basin.Meagan: Snow Basin is awesome.Julie: I like Snow Basin.Meagan: That's the first place I go.Brian: At least for me. I was going to say, Snow Basin is better than any of the four here close to town. We have Snowbird, Alta, Brighton, Solitude. But Snow Basin is the one I prefer. Just got the best terrain for me. I am an advanced skier. I've been skiing my whole life.↔Julie: You got a lot of that in SoCal huh? Just kidding. I'm sure the slopes were amazing in Austria.Brian: Yeah. Yeah. I went skiing at St, Anton in the alps for a week. I skied Kitzbühel.Julie: Aw, what a dream.Brian: I skied the racecourse. The Hahnenkamm racecourse at Kitzbühel a week before the race. It was the day before they actually shut down the course for the race, which was totally cool. So I skied the Hahnenkamm in Austria.Julie: That's pretty cool.Meagan: That's super cool. I just started skiing this year.Brian: Really?Julie: Did you? For some reason, I thought you've been skiing for a while. I used to snowboard back in the day when I was cool and now I'm just a boring mom. I still have my snowboarding boots. I used to go to Brighton because it was the cheapest one. You could buy a half-day pass for only three of the lifts and it was only $40 instead of having to pay $90 for a full resort pass and so me and my friend would go up almost every weekend. We would go boarding and then we would go to the Porcupine Grill at the face of the canyon afterward and have nachos and hot chocolate which you wouldn't think go together but after you go snowboarding, they definitely do go together.Meagan: Oh wow. That's in my neighborhood. Yeah. No, I actually begged to snowboard as a kid. I begged my mom every year. “Mom, I want to snowboard. I want to snowboard” and she was like, “Nope, nope, nope. Too dangerous. Too dangerous” and refused. And so this year for Christmas, my husband surprised us with also a multi-pass and said, “We are--” because you guys probably know I hate winter. I hate it. I hate it. I hate being cold. I like being at the pool feeling the sun and going outside on hikes, and sports, and obviously, as of last year I really took up cycling, and so I just like to be on my bike. So yeah. “We are going to make your winter better.” I will just tell you right now, if you haven't ever skied before and you have snow In your area and you are listening, go skiing. It has changed my winter life completely. So I love that you ski, Brian. I always remember we would always try to get the podcast recorded at the end of December, or really November, so we weren't driving in the winter and we would try to get enough through February because we were like, “We don't want to drive to the studio in winter.”Julie: The studio is an hour away from my house. In some of the snowstorms, it took me two hours to get home, and then there was that one time Meagan made me run out of gas on the freeway.Meagan: Yes.Julie: That was at midnight. It was awful.Meagan: Yeah. We were recording with Brian. This is how much of a champ Brian is. He would literally stay with us at the studio until 11:30 PM. It's insane what this man does for us. So we just are overly grateful for you. But I always remember he was telling me-- I swear there was two years or something that you were like, “Yeah. I'm going to Jackson this week.” And you would go and ski in Jackson. It's one of my dreams to go and ski because we have a cabin there and now that I ski, I want to go skiing there because I have heard it's amazing. I've also heard it's pretty steep though. Is it steep?Brian: Great one. Yeah. They have something for everybody.Meagan: Good, because I am still not as advanced or confident. My husband says I am a really really good skier. I just lack confidence.Julie: We need to get your confidence for skiing just like we want people to have their confidence for birth.Meagan: I know. Okay, one last thing. What advice would you give to parents listening to the podcast? What do you feel is one of the most important takeaways from listening to all of the stories?Brian: The biggest takeaway, and it's the most obvious thing in the world. Birth is not easy. It is a monumental challenge. You can only be as prepared as you can. You could write down every single thing that you think is going to be a part of your birth plan and both Julie and Meagan will tell you there is not a single birth plan in the existence of the history of the universe that didn't go 100% according to that birth plan. There's always going to be some curveball in there that you were not prepared for. It's impossible to prepare. You can't prepare for absolutely everything. You can make a birth plan. You can make a backup plan. You can make a backup backup plan. The best thing you can do is just learn, research as much as you can, listen to the podcast, I don't know what else to tell you. You can't be prepared for everything but you can just try.Julie: And trust your intuition.Brian: Yeah. And the other thing is that-- I'm sure you've said this Meagan or Julie in the past on one of your episodes and I know it's easy for me to say, “Well, keep this in mind.” But keep in mind that you are the mother. You are in charge. All the nurses, doctors, the providers-- they can tell you, “Okay. We need to do this,” and if that doesn't line up with your birth plan, you say, “No, wait a second. I am doing it this way.”Julie: Boom.Brian: “I'm doing it this way.” You say it twice. You say it loud if you need to. “I'm doing it this way.” And if they say, “Okay. We'll work with this.” It might get to a point where they say, “You know what? This is medically unsafe or medically unwise.” At that point, you say, “Okay. I will listen to what you have to say.” Otherwise, you are saying, “I'm doing it this way. I'm doing it my way.”Meagan: Yeah. And it's okay to say, “Why is this medically unwise?” It's okay to question that.Brian: Yeah. You are in charge. Not them.Julie: Love it.Meagan: Okay. You're awesome, Brian. We love you. We love you so much.Julie: Yep. Don't ever go anywhere. We are going to keep you forever as our secret weapon. Our not-so-secret weapon anymore but I am still going to call you our secret weapon.Brian: Awesome. Okay.Meagan: If you ever decide to go back to Austria, are you still going to stay with us, or are you going to be like, “Peace out Meagan and Julie?”Brian: Well I mean, we haven't actually ever been in the same building for a year now.Julie: Yeah, so I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter where he lives.Brian: And we're still making a podcast, so whether I'm in Salt Lake City or in Vienna, we can still work it out.Julie: Boom.Meagan: Perfect. All right, okay. Well, if you guys want to know more about Brian after this episode, message us and we will get your answers. And Brian, seriously, you are just a miracle in our lives. So, we love you. We appreciate you. Thanks for joining us today and telling us more that we didn't know about you. And for the ski trips.Brian: Totally awesome.Julie: Wonderful.ClosingWould you like to be a guest on the podcast? 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I had the honor to interview Brian Bogert who for me, is a real life superhero in a sense. He has dealt with his share of adversity and he continues to brush himself off while continuing to bust through barriers to create his best self. I admire all that he has accomplished in his life and he's here to help other accomplish the same and more. He goal to impact over a billion people is lofty yet if there is anyone who can do, I'm putting my money on Brian. This was a special episode as Brian was so gracious and share so much and sometimes the conversation gave me a lump in my throat as we went deep. I sure hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did creating it with Brian. Thanks for listening! Much love, Joe Brian Bogert: Human Behavior and Performance Coach, Keynote Speaker, YouTuber, Podcaster and Course Creator Founder - Brian Bogert Companies Website: https://brianbogert.com/ No Limits: https://brianbogert.com/no-limits/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bogertbrian/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bogertbrian YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmhaMgY8q-tMMCj0rpGg7iw LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-brian-bogert-companies/ Email: info@brianbogert.com Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.lybsyn.com Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joecostello Transcript Joe: Ok, today, I want to welcome my guests, Mr. Brian Boger. Brian, welcome. Brian: What's up, Joe, I love I love that shirt you're rockin no limits, soldier, right there. I Joe: Hey, Brian: Love it. Joe: There you go. You know what? So since we're talking about the shirt, we've brought it up. Explain to me the purpose behind this shirt. I know that you give all the money away to Brian: One hundred Joe: Charity. Brian: Percent of the proceeds, huh? Yeah, so I'll first describe kind of what no limits is just high level and then we'll talk about kind of where this is. No limits is is part of our branding. And it's this belief that I genuinely feel like we all can live with no limits. It's not that we're unlimited and we can do anything we want. It's that we can live significantly beyond the limits we place on ourselves and certainly be on the way the world has placed limits on us. And so that infinity sign, there's a lot of intentionality around it, which is really about awareness and intentionality and how those weave together to help us find who we are so we can live with no limits with our life in alignment. And so as we've been building this brand, there's always been this altruistic philanthropic side of me. Everything I do and desire for me to be financially successful is also for my ability to distribute that wealth back out into the community. So when we had an opportunity that people started to really attach to the brand and what they were doing were like, you know what, let's make some apparel. And we've got, I think, five different t shirt designs, both in men and women. We actually also have a dog design, too. I'll explain that in a second. Brian: But the reason we did it is one hundred percent just to allow people to attach to it. You see, there's not Brian Bogot companies and stuff written all over it. Right? It's really the infinity in no limits and embedding people in that. And one hundred percent of the proceeds are going to nonprofits that we're going to rotate on a quarterly basis. And so, you know, it's just another cool way. You know, I'm not gonna make a bunch of money off t shirts. That wasn't something that needed to move the needle. But, you know, people can attach to the brand and feel like they're doing something better. Their investments also helping more lives. And a big part of who I am, I'm on a mission to impact a billion lives by twenty, forty five. This is just another way to perpetuate that. The dog shirts are that we're an animal family and my wife is like obsessed with them. And she's like, we can't have apparel without matching dog apparel, which just saw me die laughing because I still think it's so ridiculous. But I love my wife to death and every time my animals wear clothing, it just makes me laugh. But it's been cool because, yeah, those are those who go to support our local Humane Society and ASPCA as well. So some of the proceeds. Joe: That's great. Yeah, and it's a beautiful shirt. I'm always nervous about when you can't you can't feel it first, but when I took it out, I was like, I don't know. I've been in the gym a lot lately. I might be a little a little too big for him. It's like fit perfect. It makes me actually look better than I should look. So I Brian: Well, Joe: Appreciate Brian: You know, Joe: It. Brian: I'm super anal about t shirts as well, so I'm actually happy that he said that because I before we ever posted them, before we started selling them, we actually tested a bunch of shirts. And I wanted to make sure that they fit and they felt like I like shirts to fit. Not that that means everybody else needs to like what I like. But I've had so many other t shirts and different apparel that they just don't fit right in. You never wear it. And I'm like, if I if I'm going to buy something for my own brand or have something for somebody else, I want something that people feel comfortable in. Joe: Yeah, Brian: So Joe: Yeah, Brian: I'm Joe: So Brian: Happy that you feel that way. Joe: Yeah, and besides wearing it out like normal, like this with her jeans and whatever, I definitely am going to get some more because I think it's cool and it'll be a gym shirt for me. And then I think people will come to me and go, that's cool, what is that? And then send more people your way. So that's my goal. Brian: I'm so grateful, yeah, for the gym one, you're going to get one of those embrace pain to avoid suffering shirts. That's Joe: There you go. That's Brian: That's Joe: Right, Brian: That's that's the motto in the gym that's Joe: That's Brian: Going to help push you, man. Joe: Right. All right, deal. So I always I know you've told your story a zillion times, I'm sure. And I want you to tell as much or as little as you want to bring us up to today. So however, you can kind of let the audience Brian: All Joe: Know. Yeah. Brian: Hold it a million times, so I feel like I know the points I want to hit, so I'll just I'll just run with it. I'm going to ask you and anybody who's listening, unless they're driving to just close your eyes for just one second. And I want you to imagine going to a store, having a successful shopping trip, heading back out to your car. And it's a beautiful day. And you think you're just going on with the rest of your life like it was just any other normal shopping trip. And then you get to your car and you turn your head and you see a truck barreling 40 miles an hour right at you with no time to react. Go and open your eyes. That's where this portion of my story begins. My mom, my brother and I went to our local Wal-Mart to get a one inch paint brush. And anybody who's known me followed me or even in the few minutes we've been talking can probably tell. I've always had a lot of energy. It's the first one of the car and not a surprise to my mom because I want to get home and put that paint brush to use. You know, this is back in the days, though, before they had key fobs. So I had to literally wait for my mom and brother to close the gap of those four or five feet, catch up, stick the key in the door and unlock it to get on the other way. Brian: And as it happened, the truck pulls up in front of the store and a driver, a middle passenger, get out. And the passenger all the way to the right felt the truck moving backwards. So he did what any one of us would do, Joe, and he screwed up and put his foot on the brake instead of the gas combination of shock and forced Zoom up onto the steering wheel, up onto the dashboard. And before you know it, he's catapulting across the parking lot 40 miles an hour right at us with no time to react. Now, we were in that spot, so we went up into the median, went up to the car in the median, ultimately knocked me to the ground, ran over me diagonally, tore my spleen, left the tire tracks, scar on my stomach and continued on to completely sever my left arm from my body. So there I am laying on the parking lot on one hundred and fifty three day in Phoenix, Arizona, my mom and brother just watched the whole thing happen and they look up and they see my arm 10 feet away. Fortunately for me, so did my guardian angel. She saw the whole thing take place, she was a nurse that walked out of the store right when this happened. Brian: She saw the literal life and limb scenario in front of her and she rushed immediately into action. She focused on life. First, she came over and stopped the bleeding and she saved my life. And then she instructed some innocent bystanders to run inside, grab a cooler filled with ice and get my detached limb on ice within minutes. Had she not done one or both of those things, I either wouldn't be here with you today or I'd be here with you today with the cleaned up stop. That's just the facts, right? So I will expedite a whole lot of the rest of that particular story. We can dig deeper if you want to. But as you can imagine, there was years of recovery that came from this. Twenty four surgeries and a whole lot of lessons and observations. What I've definitely learned is that I have an extremely unique story. I'm sure that your listeners weren't expecting it to go there today. But what I've also realized is that we actually all have unique stories. And what's important is that we pause and become aware of the lessons we can extract from those stories and then become intentional. How do we apply to our lives? And we all have the ability to do that. We also all have the ability to tap into the collective wisdom of other people's stories, to shorten our own curve, to learn something to share with you two primary ones. Brian: And then we'll just see where the conversation goes. The first is I learned not to get stuck by what has happened to me, but instead get moved by what I can do with it, and the second I didn't realize until far later. I was a kid. I was seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 years old when I was going through the meat of all of this. Yes, I was the one doing the the therapy. Yes, I was the one having the surgeries done to me. But I was also being guided through the process. So I was a little bit in a fog. My parents, however, were not they were intimately aware of the unceasing medical treatments, years of therapy and the idea of seeing their son grow up without the use of his left arm was a source of great potential suffering for them. So they willed themselves day in and day out to do what was necessary. It was tough to embrace the pains required to ultimately strengthen and heal me. So whether it was intentional or not, what they did was they ingrained in me a philosophy and a way of living which I embody and everything I do now, which was to embrace pain, to avoid suffering. And I believe when that's done right, that's also where we gain freedom. Brian: So it's these concepts that I use to not only become this unique injury, but how my business partners and I scaled our last business to 15 million with the span of a decade. And now how is a human behavior performance coach and entrepreneur? I flip that on its head. You will have individuals and organizations just like you, just like the people listening, become more aware, more intentional, and who they already are, their most authentic selves. You see, I believe that's when magic starts to happen and the door starts to crack to perspective, motivation and direction. And that's when people have the opportunity to have joy, freedom and fulfillment and to back into their lives. And those are the reasons I'm spending the next twenty five years of my life committed to trying to impact a billion lives on this planet. Because if we can reduce the level of suffering that people experience, which there's a lot, and we give them the chance to experience joy, freedom and resentment, we give them the permission to be exactly who they are and know the world will embrace them and love them for exactly who they are. And we can bring vulnerability and authenticity into everything we do, which are the glue that binds human connection. Then we can come together and leave this world a lot more. Beautiful place for my kids, my grandkids. Joe: Well, let me start here first. Do you still are you still in contact with that nurse? Brian: You know, I am actually on a mission to find her right now. I've never spoken with her. And so part of the reason I also talk about that role in that process on so many platforms is I want there to be a lot of exposure and hopefully the world is going to help me track her down because I just want to say thank you. Joe: Sure, that time that I've heard the story, it was like, I need to ask him that question, I'm just wondering if they're in connection with each other. Brian: We're not I'm actively looking for her right now. Joe: Got it during the time you were going to school. How did you handle I would assume you were treated differently, right, Brian: Of Joe: By Brian: Course. Joe: Your by your friends and teachers and they always whatever the case might be. How did you handle that? Brian: Yes, so I think I handled it from a place to survive and protect myself, although I didn't realize that's what I was doing until far later. I didn't I didn't like being the center of attention and I didn't like. Being defined. By boundaries that were placed upon other people's view of what they'd be capable of in my scenario, and so I got this really adamant approach to I'm not going to be defined by those boundaries and I'm going to break beyond boundaries for my entire life, because why not? If I want to do something, the limitation is inside. Right. I need it. And there may be a physical limitation in some ways, but like I can always overcome the physical limitation. If I have a will and desire, that's great enough. But what happened right to protect myself is I created this intellectual narrative, which was I'm good, I'm strong, I'm capable. I don't need anybody's help. And it served me really well for a long time during that period of time, I was able to really hone my emotional intelligence because I got so good at wanting to divert attention from me that I got very strong in my ability to read people, read environments, read situations so that I could almost ensure that that attention wasn't on me. And so it honed those skill sets. And it also honed my mental toughness, which, again, I'm a huge believer is a big part of the equation to be kind of successful. That intellectual narrative ended up biting me later in life. And when I was 20 years old, I broke my arm in a snowboarding injury. Brian: Compound fracture almost lost it again. And that was the moment that I realized the power of our narratives because the world bought into mine. I had I had sung that preached that narrative so strong. I never even said those words right. That's just the message that I was sending with my energy and how I showed up and how I interacted. And now all of a sudden, I'm in my most vulnerable period ever as an adult, not having the same infrastructure and support system that I had at home that I probably took for granted up until that point, how much support I had. Now, sitting in this vulnerable position, I didn't have the courage to ask for help. So I had a lot of friends, a lot of family. Nobody showed up and they didn't show because they didn't love me or didn't care about me. And they showed up because they just believe Brian's goody strong is capable. He doesn't need anybody else. And so that's kind of the during that whole school adolescent period. Right. It was really about me proving that I could overcome the physical limitations, that I could protect myself, that I could get myself there. But what I really downplayed the importance of was the importance of human connection. So that whole next year of my life, I shifted to vulnerability and authenticity and how do I hone the relationships that I was developing so strongly through emotional intelligence to be able to focus on a true connection. Joe: So it sounds like your parents were super special. Did they go out of their way and whatever normal way for them to handle it, to not limit you from doing anything like when somebody knocked on your door and said, hey, can Brian come out and play and we're going to play football? Did they say, Brian, go have fun? Like, is Brian: Yeah. Joe: That the approach they took? Brian: You know, nobody's ever asked me that question, you just gave me chills when you asked that. I think it's a blend, honestly. They did. They never wanted to be the reason that I didn't do something. But as you would expect, all parents have a protection mechanism that kicks in. So immediately after the accident, I was I was in slings and during surgeries for a few years. And so that first year after the accident, no, I wasn't going out and playing at the level that I would have right between seven and eight. But it wasn't long after that that it was it opened up. We started having good friends in the neighborhood. We played football in the street. We played basketball on the street. We rode bikes nonstop. And so they were never going to tell me that I couldn't do those things. Now, what they didn't want me to do, they didn't want me to join a football team where we were playing tackle because for obvious reasons, I get hit really hard on that arm. Even though the doctor said the bone wasn't strong, we don't know. Right. So so they would limit it in terms of like, exactly the application. But at the same time, they got so used to me doing what I was doing that whenever the phone rang and it was somebody a number that my mom didn't know back then, she was expecting insert branded something again because I needed I think they appreciated the fact that that's who I was when I was born. Brian: I mean, I was always the guy that was pushing the limits even before this. This gave me perspective in humility that I wouldn't have had otherwise. And so they at least were aware enough to recognize, like Brian's got a higher risk threshold and probably has an even higher one after the accident than he would have had anyway. And they they knew that they needed to give me those outlets to be able to spread my wings and be free. So they always encouraged. Right. Like, if I wanted to go mountain bike and do jumps, they'd be like, OK, you're going to get hurt. And then if I got hurt, we'd figure it out. Right? I mean, within reason, they gave me the freedom. I think they made the right decision to not let me play tackle football. Who knows what could have happened, but did I play on other sports teams? Absolutely. So, yeah, I think my parents really did encourage and they still do to this day, despite the fact that they know you know, I think my mom has just gotten used to constantly being on edge, like expecting that Brian is going to do something crazy and get hurt. That's how we find our limits in this world, is we've got to push them. Joe: Well, tell her to not follow your Instagram account so she doesn't have to see you squatting. Four hundred pounds. I saw that. I saw the photo of you sitting there. I'm like, oh, my gosh, I can't watch this. This is killing me. Brian: Well, I mean, and that's one of those things I had to learn, right? I mean, my biggest limitation for some of those things is my hand strength. And so I have to get creative and I figure out how to do things. And when I first started deadlifting, I mean, I knew I couldn't deadlift with a normal bar because of the imbalance in my body already, but I could deadlift with a bar and protect myself for the most part. Well, that worked really well until the one time that my strap broke Joe: Oh. Brian: While I was lifting. And this was like early on. So I had to, like, learn these things. Well, my instinct wasn't to just let go of the bar on the other side. And I think so what you saw the other day, I wasn't 400 pounds. I think it was two hundred and Joe: Yeah, Brian: Forty. Joe: I know, I just I couldn't remember, Brian: But Joe: But. Brian: But I but I have I have reps significantly above 300 pounds. I don't say that to impress. I rest to the point I was doing that in this one scenario when the strap broke and I didn't let go on my right hand because it wasn't instinct, because I wasn't expecting the strap to break. And this was a learning experience because it tweaked me really bad. And I mean, I didn't deadlift for a few months after that. I had to recover. But once I started getting back into it, it changed my form. It changed my focus, it changed my attention. And now I'm like intimately aware of, like every movement on the strap. And I'm like ready at any moment to just drop so that I don't tweak my back. But my core strength is a big part of my ability to not be in debilitating pain every single day. Those deadlifts keeping my upper thoracic, keeping my shoulders, keeping my back because I don't have a lot on the left side of my back, keeping them strong is essential for me to not be literally in debilitating pain every day. Brian: And so those are the those are the pains I have to embrace. I've got to embrace the pain of figuring out how do I lift in a way that pushes my body, gets the hip hinge in there, gets the movement, my back and my core strength and all that stuff engaged in a way that's going to allow me to maintain a livable amount of pain in my back because the imbalance versus debilitating suffering. So it's funny that you mention that. But yeah, I think my mom is just used to it. My wife is too. I mean, my wife is incredible. She literally is like I know that if you set your mind to something, you're just going to go do it. And there's a high degree. At some point you going to get hurt. She's like, but what am I going to, like, box you in and continue? Like, you're just going to go do it anyway. I was like, yeah, see, like, I love that, right? It's like just let people let people spread their wings. Joe: That's right. Well, that's great before we get off of this subject and move on. I know that you and Blake do mountain biking, Brian: Yeah, we do, Joe: Right? Brian: Yeah. Joe: And that's like a big thing he loves to do with you and you with him. And so that's got to be at least I mean, I've done it and that's a lot on the arms. Brian: Yes, so what's funny is I have no other perspective because I didn't learn how to mountain bike until after my injury, I didn't I didn't learn how to mountain bike when my when my son did at five and six and seven. So, yeah. It isn't in balance. Yeah, it is difficult. And I did it for almost. Let's see, I did it for probably 20 years before I actually started adapting my bike. And so there's no tricep, so Tricep and Laerte are the two muscles that you absorb, all of it, all of the impact with when you're mountain biking outside of the suspension. So I don't have a lot of tricep. So there's an automatic imbalance in my body, but I've learned how to balance it because I didn't know any other way and I was motivated and wanted to do it. Mountain biking is one of the few places that I'm absolutely free. And the reason I'm absolutely free there is I don't have the ability to think about anything else. Almost any other workout I do, almost anything I do like there's time to think. Mountain biking, you've done it right. You know, like you've got to be on your game. Brian: One hundred percent focused on what's ahead of you. And so because of that, I've learned how to how to modify my body, my weight distribution, the way that I actually handle the handlebars. But two years ago about I started researching modifications for people with upper extremity injuries. And I landed with this company in the UK that they're actually right now building a product for me that I think is going to take my mountain biking to the next level, which is cool. But what I did is I got a steering stabilizer almost like the ones they have on their bikes. There's a company in the US called Hoby and they make these steering stabilizers for for mountain bikes. So I ended up getting that which what it essentially does is it's a spring unit which snaps the bars back to being straight. I thought it was going to help me more going downhill than uphill. What's crazy is it's actually helped my climbing more than anything because I can pick a line and put all the power I need to in the pedals and not worry about the imbalance in the handles, because it'll it'll keep my lane pure Joe: Yeah. Brian: And with slight, rigid and then downhill. It just gives me more confidence as well, because if I were to hit a bump and it goes on the left side, your weight goes forward, the handlebars collapse. Right. And just like twist the bars, this steering stabilizer stabilizer allows me to balance it with the muscle structure having the right arm and how I can balance my body on the left and then hope, hope he breaks is also another brand that I actually found out they just released this last year, a brake unit that has two master cylinders in one unit so you can have your front and your rear brake both on the same side. I've always never used the front brake in mountain biking Joe: Sure, Brian: Because my right Joe: All that Brian: Side Joe: Pressure. Brian: Is always Joe: Yes. Brian: What you want to be able to use primarily anyway, right? Whereas road biking, which I do a lot of the front brake is more important. Mountain biking, the rear one's more important. So I was always able to get around the corners, but I never had the confidence that I could actually stop and modulate my brakes effectively. So I would take things a little more cautiously now that I have these brakes on both sides and I can truly modulate, like just with, like little twitches in my fingers and the steering stabilizer and it's changed my mountain biking game. I can go out there and rip at a level that I've never been able to with confidence. And then there's like I said, these are these two other products that I'm really excited about. But, you know, one of the things I never knew any different, I wanted to do it and I figured it out. And I think that, again, that's one of those things that I could have just told myself, like, nope, you can't do it. You don't have tricep, you don't have a lot. But I genuinely believe if you want something badly enough and you take the time to think, plan and put things into trial and error, you start to realize you can do a lot more than what the world conditions us to believe we're capable of. Mountain biking is just another example for me on many things that I've been able to break those boundaries and expectations. I see I go mountain biking. People are like, how do you do it? I'm like, how do you do it? I mean, you could you could explain to me with a fully abled body how you do it, but I wouldn't understand because that's not my experience. Joe: Yeah, that's crazy. So, Blake, is your son Addisons, your beautiful redheaded little daughter? With what happened to you, do you believe that certain people on this earth are have the power to get through some of these things where I just think about what you've gone through? I think about even my own brother, who, when he was young, why they were there at my parents house, they were splitting wood with one of those hydraulic splitters. That goes really slow. Right. But the Brian: Oh, Joe: Log Brian: Yeah. Joe: Slipped and he had like these two fingers crushed Brian: Yeah, Joe: And Brian: Yeah. Joe: Then, you know, reconstructed but not usable in a sense. Then he lost his son at 21 years old in a car accident. And I think about this and I go, God, I. I am not I don't have the capacity to handle something like that. And I guess when it happens, it's different. Right? You figure it out. But I almost feel like certain people I don't know if they just they're born to be able to handle these things. And if this is more for the audience Brian: Yeah. Joe: That might hear this and go, oh, God, there's all of these things that come into people's lives that they're they're given to deal with whatever that might be. And is it just the chosen ones that can handle it? That's why they've it just doesn't make any sense to me. So that's. Brian: Yeah, so. I really appreciate the direction your questions are going. By the way, I just have to compliment you on that. You're asking a depth of questions that don't often get contemplated. And I think that there's a lot of truth behind even what you said. You know, it's interesting if you even think about what you just said when you were talking about your brother, you say, I look at him and I'm not sure that I could have handled it. And the reason I pay attention to that is because that is what I truly believe in, how the world has viewed me, they have viewed my limits through their own lens of what they believe they're capable of. I don't think that people truly know what they're capable of until they're tested. And that can be done either intentionally or externally, right? Sometimes we get tested not by our choice. Clearly getting run over by a truck was not by my choice, but it was a test. And I could show my strength to myself into the world by how I stood back up and what I've now done with it. Why I say I have a unique story is it doesn't matter the trauma that I experienced because it's unique solely to me. The trauma that your brother experienced, the trauma that other people experience with divorce or loss of a loved one or financial despair or like you name it, we all have our own unique challenges that we face. And I don't care who you are, if you're still on this planet and you're still standing. You are a survivor. None of us get through this world unscathed. Brian: None of us. Perspective allows us to really pay attention to what other people are going through, but what perspective is really doing is allowing us the opportunity to get in someone else's world to gain perspective, to apply to our own. So it's not necessarily about what each one of us are inherently able to handle. It's that I think we're all dealt a unique set of cards and it's how we play those cards that matter. So the thing about pain, and I'm just going to speak to that, because my experience was pain, your brother's experience was pain. He had physical pain, probably emotional and spiritual pain with the loss of two fingers and a deep emotional, mental, spiritual, and probably manifested as physical pain with the loss of his son. Pain, that's what it is. Now, pain can't be measured independent of the person experiencing it. But the one thing we know is that it's a universal human experience, we all experience pain. And so what's important is not to question can I or could I have handled that? But just to say I've handled everything that's ever been thrown my way and I'm still standing here today. So what that tells me is you're probably capable of handling a lot more than you thought you were capable of at a prior period in your life. And if something were to happen that's devastating, right in that moment, you have to choose, is this going to define me and keep me stuck or am I going to use this as fuel to who I'm capable of becoming because of what I've gone through? That's why I said earlier I learned not to get stuck by what's happened to me, but I get moved by what I can do with it. Brian: I realize I have a gift not just in my own natural abilities and gifts and intuition and emotional intelligence and all the things. But this has given me perspective that I couldn't I couldn't have gained any other way. I can put myself in other people's shoes and know what it feels like to not be seen, to know what it feels like, to feel like nobody understands me, to know what it feels like, to have people question everything I'm capable of for my entire life, even if it has nothing to do with my physical ability, even if it's one hundred percent mental, one hundred percent job and application, they view me. As not capable of doing I know what that feels like and I've had to battle that my whole life, I don't know a single person on this planet who has never felt that way. We all feel that we all experience and it's real to each one of us uniquely so I know it's probably a lot longer of an answer than you were hoping for, but the depth of the question, I think, required that approach because it's not about what you believe you could handle based on other people's circumstances. It's about what you already have handled and what you're very capable of handling if you change the way you think and feel about what you're capable of, which, again, is typically limiting in our own belief system. Joe: So because we're doing this recording and you and I have not talked about what we could talk about or what we couldn't talk about, I want to ask this and obviously I can always edit it out. And you Brian: Free Joe: Know Brian: Game, buddy, go ahead, go ahead. Joe: What? So when does someone say, like, did you ever have these dark moments? And this is not the part of the question that I'm going to ask. This is just in front of it. And you ever have a moment that you said, why me? Like, did you ever Brian: Absolutely. Joe: Ok? Brian: Absolutely, and I have those moments still today when I get when I get hit with certain things. The reason I was able to shift out of that so quickly, I remember being seven years old and that was the first thing I remember when I woke up, one feeling like it was a dream. And then I was like in this hazy state of like what this altered reality felt like, it didn't feel real. And then it was probably a day or two before I really came to and was like awake, awake, not just like in that dazed awake. At least this is from memory, I don't know the exact timeline. This is just how I feel it. And I literally remember. That question. Weiming. What is the rest of my life going to look like, like this sucks. I felt sorry for myself. I was given the opportunity to snap out of that quickly because the uniqueness of my story drew a lot of attention to it and there was a lot of families in the ICU with us who were coming up to us saying, we're so sorry for what happened to you. This is so horrible. We can't believe how hard this must be for you as a family. Let us know whatever we can do to help. Just getting wrapped with love and support from strangers to strangers saved my life. Right. That's crazy to think about. A stranger went into action and saved my life. Had she not chosen to do that, I wouldn't be here. Brian: So I don't take that lightly, but what's happening in the ICU with these families is we start to realize that these families that are giving us just unfiltered support. Are also questioning whether or not their kid is going to survive another 30 days from the terminal illness that they're in the ICU with. Only immediate threat to my life and not at that moment knowing whether or not I'd be able to use my arm. I knew I'd be alive and over the course of the next ten years, being with those kids and all of us who wanted to rally around this cause to help more people, to bring perspective, motivation, direction to an organization that helped us so holistically in a healing process, either physically, emotionally, spiritually, whatever. Right. I lost multiple of them to their terminal illnesses over the course of the next ten years. And so although I don't think about them every day, when I'm asked questions like that, it really centers me on grounds me because I'm here happy, healthy and productive, living a life that many would dream of. And those kids didn't have the opportunity to do so. And so I have to just know and honor that it was me for a lot of reasons, I might not know all those reasons in this lifetime, I believe I know a lot of them at this point, but I still ask that question. I mean, last week was an unbelievably challenging week for me. Joe: I saw the story and, yeah, that's part of where, Brian: Yeah, Joe: You know, this Brian: I mean, Joe: Is Brian: Last Joe: Going. Brian: Week Joe: Yeah. Brian: Was an unbelievably challenging week for me, for a variety of reasons. One was around this fabricated reality, around a date that in some ways is very significant, in other ways is not significant. But coincidentally or coincidentally, I got kicked in the stomach multiple times last week. And yet it didn't really totally faze me in a way that brought me down to the deepest, darkest moments, because every time I face those things, every time I start to ask the question, why me? It starts to reveal itself faster and faster the more I go through the pain. And and and so I now have this element of trust in surrender where the literally last week I was like, why do I always have this stuff happening? Why am I the one that has to deal with this? Literally? I mean, I said to my wife last week and then in the same breath, I'm like, I know why. And so for those that did ask that question still. I would just encourage you to recognize that there absolutely is a resum. Nothing happens by accident. You could call this my accident, but this was for a purpose, it wasn't on purpose, but it was for a purpose. And I realize that now more holistically than I have in my entire life, but it's the same thing for everybody else. I mean, I guarantee that your brother has learned from his experiences and having to adapt and do things with the loss of two fingers. He's had to learn and adapt. What does it mean to be a parent? And there's so many are out there who live on their lives without their child. Still a part of it. Parents aren't meant to outlive their kids. Joe: Correct. What's Brian: Right, Joe: The what Brian: And. Joe: The worst car I could think of? Brian: And by the way, there was this pending doom around this date last week that was connected to that for me, as well as from a parent's lens now. And the data is reference to a couple times I didn't I didn't say specifically on the show, but this last Saturday, March 6th, was the day that my son, who's my little clone, my little mini me, my my only boy and my oldest. Was the exact same age to the day that I was on the day of my injury. Twenty nine years separated. And. There was a lot to that most of what happened in the 10 days leading up to it had nothing to do with my son. But they were absolutely clarifying moments that needed to take place in that window. And Saturday was kind of a new start for me and a whole variety of ways, which was just unbelievably cleansing and freeing and purifying. And so even the questions last week, why me? Why does this always happen to me? Why do I have to be the one to do this? We're very clear. I know, and I think all of us do we just fight and we resist because it's not in alignment with what the world tells us. It's not in alignment with what the narrative is externally. Right. But it's not about being the victim. It's about recognizing that if we have ownership and accountability with everything we do, we recognize that there's always a reason, there's always a cause, and there's always a way through it if we desire it enough. That's when we start to become free. Joe: Ok, so here's the the part where I want to talk about Blake and Addison really quickly, I don't want to stay because, you know, I know you're super productive, positive guy. And I don't want this episode to be like the Debbie Downer episode. But you went through a lot in your life up to this Brian: Yeah, Joe: Point. Right. Brian: Yeah, Joe: And Brian: A lot. Joe: Then, Blake, I remember you talking about this, so I'm only bringing this up because I think you've talked about Brian: Yeah, Joe: It and. Brian: I've shared publicly on stuff, I'm sure I know where you're going, Joe: Yeah, Brian: But go ahead. Joe: So so you said it is is on the spectrum, right, and so you there's an extra amount of attention that has to happen Brian: Of course, Joe: There. Right. Brian: Of course. Joe: So then you deal with that another moment where you said, why me? Like, I haven't I haven't. I gone through enough. Why me? Right. And then now you have yet a third time now with with Adderson with her here. Right. And I could be another time we go. What is it going to stop. Like why me. Right. I'm sure there's people out there that do not handle this anywhere near as well as you do. And I'm hoping your words of wisdom, if they run across this episode, that it will help them understand how you I mean, you can look at their beautiful faces and go, oh, it doesn't matter. You know, they're amazing. It just it's a it's a small little blip on the radar. But it's still some people can't even handle the bullet. So Brian: They Joe: That's, Brian: Can't. Joe: You Brian: They Joe: Know. Brian: Can't. And by the way, there's a lot more depth and truth to that statement than than you probably even realized, I mean, to the point that when we found out about our daughter's hearing loss. The audiologist actually said to us she does have loss and she could benefit from hearing devices. And I paused and I said. She could benefit, like are you saying she needs hearing aids, like is her hearing profound enough that it's not like she would benefit? She she needs it to restore it to what we would expect are going to be? And she said, yeah. I said, why didn't you just say that? And she said, because most parents don't want to hear it. And she said that even when they do want to hear it, she said, because of the reports that we get when we plug in hearing aids, even if they go through the process of getting hearing aids, even if they go through the process of doing these things, she said. Most kids, the hearing aids live in a drawer. Because of some reason, right, that either the parents don't think it's important they're embarrassed by their kid or whatever, like there's a whole slew of things. You're exactly right. And in both those moments, by the way, when we found out about our son's diagnosis on the autism spectrum and we found out about our daughter. Brian: It was it was challenging, right? It was absolutely challenging for both my wife and I and we both we both grieved in different ways. And why I choose the word grieve is any time we have a vision for our lives. And that reality that we've created gets stolen from us, we experience loss. We literally go through the grieving process, the multiple steps of grieving, sometimes it's anger that manifest first, sometimes it's just like absolute depression. But but recognize it for what it is like having something happen to your kid and realizing that they might have an altered future from what you always desired and hoped for them. You have to process that, but then once you process that and you start to realize like this doesn't define the kid, just like a mine accident didn't define me right. What this really does is it's a gift because what getting both of their diagnosis is as early as we did, what allows us to do is wrap them with services, wrap them with all the support they need to close the gap between whatever their diagnosis limits them from doing to what a typical kid might be capable of doing. It shortens that gap early in those foundational early development years so that it won't really ever hurt them. Brian: Plus, the more that we talk about it not as an ailment, but just a part of who they are, right. It's no longer a label. It becomes a term of empowerment because they recognize that like they have superpowers as a result of what their diagnoses are. So the answer is yes. There's there was absolute grieving for both my wife and I, for both children. We're well beyond that at this point. But it hung with us for a while. And and there are still moments where the difficulty and complexity of our household that most people will never understand and ours is light compared to what some other people's situations are. Right. So we keep that in perspective, too. Is it harder than most parents and most households might have to be? We believe so, but it's not about like we have got it more difficult than what they have. It's just this is the cards were dealt, so we're going to play them as best we can for both of our kids. We know how lucky they are to have us. My wife is brilliant. My wife is brilliant and what she has done to allow our kids to feel authentically who they are in safe, despite all of these things, despite the fact that they know they're different in certain ways and honoring and cherishing, encouraging them to just make do the things that make their hearts happy and stand up for what is right and know that they're worthy of receiving love like exponentially. Brian: And all these things, like my wife and I were partners, but our kids are lucky to have us at the counter to that is we also feel extremely privileged to have our kids because they have challenged me to go to depths of myself, my soul, my emotions that allow me to be more effective in the world. That had I not recognized those scenarios for what they were, which is we can handle them and let's figure out the plan forward. It probably would have made me feel stuck longer than it did. And so for those parents that are listening out there that might have kids like this or even if there's not a diagnosis, but you just have a challenging time or there's an injury or there's something like, again, nothing happens by accident. And so the only way through it is through it, and if you if you desire something on the other side, then you've got to go through and that's really what it comes down to. Joe: Really powerful and I appreciate you sharing leading up to this interview, I wanted to talk about those things and I was just like, I know he's talked about it, but I I didn't know how to actually go after it and Brian: You did it beautifully, my friend, it was Joe: Think Brian: Great. Joe: I'm grateful that you shared. And so, OK, so now you and I know this is a big jump, but I just want to I know we Brian: Yeah, Joe: Have limited Brian: No, let's go. We got it, yeah. Joe: We have limited time and I don't and I want to get to where you are today. So then you get into the insurance business. Correct. So you're in that for you grew a company. I think it was from like. Brian: Quarter million to 15 million over the span of a decade. Joe: You just picked that that was just a career that you pick at one point and. Brian: Yeah, you know what's funny, I saw depicted it sort of picked me up, I was my junior year in college, was deciding that I needed to go get an internship. And so I started looking at a whole bunch different places. And I actually ended up getting into insurance because my one of my childhood friends and my childhood girlfriend, in fact, that we grew up together. And a lot of ways I always had her parents were like second parents to me for a lot of years. And I always had a great lot of respect. But I always viewed her dad as this very successful man. But I knew nothing about what he did. And I reached out to him as a mentor, frankly, and just said, hey, I'm going out. I'm doing these interviews and I have these things. And I talked to my own parents and they're successful. They've done these things as well. But I wanted extra perspectives. And he ultimately was like, I'm going to pass on your resume to so-and-so. And if you don't get a call in three days, call me. I was like, OK, not a clue what it was. It was the only one that was in insurance. Right. Very, very amazing opportunity. And it just took off from there. And nobody grows up wanting to be an insurance, right? I mean, and if they do and if you're listening to this, I apologize if you always had a desire to be an insurance. I know there's some people who love it. I never loved it. It was a great vehicle for me. And it was a great testing ground for me to grow and develop who I was as a professional, who I was as a man. I kind of grew up in it, but yeah, no, I didn't seek out insurance. I kind of fell into it and it just it fit. Joe: Right. So while you were there with your inner voice saying there's more out there for me, I want to do more, whatever it might be. I mean, how did you make the jump then when you left Brian: Yeah. Joe: There to now what you're doing, which is the coaching and the speaking and and the podcast. And I mean, I, I look at your website and I get tired just looking at all the all the different menus that I could take a look at stuff. And then I went into the podcast when I was like, wait, is he doing actually three podcasts? Like, how is he doing all this? So how did you decide how did you decide you were going to leave insurance and then pursue the Brian Bogot we know today? Brian: Yes, so I'm going to start with the first question you asked, which was, did I always know? I knew for a long time I've always had this gut feeling that like there was something meaningful that I was meant to do. No idea what that meant. OK. And then I conditioned that out of myself, and when I first got out of college, it was like bright eyed and bushy tailed, I was going to go take over the world and make a ton of money. Right. I'm going I'm literally going to be running the company. I'm going to climb the corporate ladder. I mean, it was all external. And, you know, this is one of the things I talk about now is I chased the what like so many of us did. Right? I chased what house, what car, what amount of money, what amount of success, what image do I want to portray? What, what, what, what, what. And I lost the who along the way. And I woke up one day after having accomplished all the words that I ever desired, way earlier than I thought I would have, in a way bigger level than I ever thought I would. And I realized, like, what have I been doing all this for? The more money I made, the less I cared about money, the more I got into a successful career, the more I was like, why am I doing to myself? And then I'm running in circles with people making six, seven, eight figures who all were having high of success and they were all miserable to. Brian: And so those were the turning turning point moments over the probably the last seven to eight years, maybe six, seven years, if I'm being real honest, because when I first started coaching, it was because I had my son and I always said that I'm going to do everything for the benefit of my family always. And I did. But then six months went by when my son like that and I realized I missed all of it except the first week because I was burning the candle at both ends, I was still living the life that I was to create this abundant amount of external success and validation that I needed to prove to myself I could do it and I never recalibrated my life. So part of providing everything for my family is with finances and security and opportunity and safety and all those things. But but but it's also love and leadership and presence and connection. And I don't want to be that guy that did everything for his family, then woke up twenty five years later and never had a relationship with any of them. Brian: They decided that I didn't serve a role for them outside of money. It's not all about money. It never was all about money. And so it was the first in my life. I didn't have the people in my life, the mentors, the experience or the intellect myself to figure out how to fix it. So I hired my first coach. And he said to me, a month of working together, because you're going to be doing this, like, what are you talking about? He said you need to be coaching and speaking. So you've been on stages since you were seven because you've got a unique ability or a unique story and you have an ability that you're not afraid in front of groups. And he's like, you're all about building people and building businesses. Like you're always helping. You're always finding ways to level people up. You're always helping them connect dots. And I was like, yeah, whatever. I was like, I'm paying you a lot of money. Not that's how great I have to figure out this stuff. And I completely threw it out the window. And then it just kept trickling. It kept trickling in every single month for about nine months. Brian: And then this crazy experience happened, which again, nothing happens by accident. But the universe gave me the sign that I needed, which was he told me what I needed to hear, not what I wanted to hear. And that's when I started to desire a little bit more and started to feel like maybe I wasn't in alignment. But I had to ask the question if I'm going to jump in being in coaching, is this complementary or conflicting to everything else I had because I was so significantly invested mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually and monetarily. Right. In this other business that we built, that was the fruits of its labor were just starting to pay off. And it's like, let's let's make sure that we forge ahead on what we're doing here. So I started coaching and speaking and I did it alongside for about five years and then summer of twenty nineteen comes around. And again, I told you, I'm running in circles with people that are miserable. And I realized my relationship with my clients started shifting to more coaching relationships. We were placing multi million, hundreds of millions, tens of millions of dollars of insurance for people. And my conversations had nothing to do with insurance with the people that I was actually interacting Joe: Right. Brian: With at the C Suite. Joe: Yeah. Brian: Right. I was coaching them on how to be better people, how to be better leaders, how to change the culture of their business, think through and problem solve on things that really had nothing to do with insurance. But the insurance was how we were in the door. And so the more that started to migrate, we have this connection moment summer twenty nineteen with my wife and I. We go away for a weekend and it was one of those that like mentally, spiritually, physically and emotionally, like brother, like our souls were bonded like we were one and we're driving back to pick up our kids and she looks, everybody goes, how would you feel if you did have to go to the office on Monday morning? And I was like, that's a pretty loaded question. Joe: No. Brian: Why don't you tell me more? Well, I had some other I had some other health stuff that impacted me pretty significantly a few years back. I'm good now. It's all all squared away. But she said, I think you let some of this stuff allow fear to enter into your world in a way I've never seen you operate. She said, I feel like you've convinced yourself that we need the money, the status, the prestige, the security, the all of the above, what's been built. She said, I'm here to tell you we don't I don't care if we live in a cardboard box. What we need is one hundred percent of you. And she said, I don't know if you see it or not, but I see you dying a little bit inside every single day. You live in insurance. And and so she said, I think you're barely scraping the surface of your potential, nor do I think you have any impact on the world that you want. And then she said, you know, there's nobody on this planet I'd rather take a bet on than you. We took a big bet on you once and it paid off. Why don't we double down on that bet and see what you can do? And so, you know, this was one of those moments where I was flooded with fear, flooded with a whole bunch of emotions. And I had to spend three months really unpacking it with complete awareness, complete intentionality, understanding where my blocks were and ultimately came to the decision that I needed to embrace the pain of walking away from the easy button, from the sure thing, to avoid the suffering of not ever knowing what I could become or what I'd be capable of doing from an impact perspective. Brian: So you fast forward to today and you know, I spent 10 months unpacking that business left at the time, the best year ever in that industry, the year I left and was simultaneously building the foundation for where we could go. And, you know, I'm not sure if I said it or not yet on this show. I think I did. Yeah, but but that's that's now where I'm so clear and convicted on this billion lives. I genuinely believe, like we've got an opportunity to to change the world and make people feel at a level that they've never felt and feel free. And so I know what that miserable, dark place looks like. I've spent a lot of my life in moments like that. No one deserves to feel that way, but a lot of people do. And right now, I feel more free, more fulfilled, happier and more like myself than I have in my entire life. Everybody deserves to feel how I'm feeling right now. And so when I started to get the curiosity, I didn't even lean into it. My wife pushed me. And she, along with my other coach, told me what I needed to hear, not what I wanted to hear, and it's not lost on me, the courage it took in my wife to take that leap of faith with me and give me the push knowing it could upset her entire lifestyle. And so that's what I had to honor because my kids are watching, I don't want my kids to see me do what I want my kids to see me do what's right. Joe: Incredible. I love it, so your podcast, what are there, is there are there three, is that Brian: You Joe: Right Brian: Know what, I actually Joe: Or. Brian: Don't even have my own yet, Joe: Ok. Brian: I I'm in the process of developing a few. What you've probably seen as I have Bogarts Bullets, which is a regular consistent thing, but and it's going to be repurposed into a podcast. But right now it's just on YouTube and it goes on all my social channels. We have a marriage hack's string that we've started that my wife and I, we've now done we've only done one episode, but we repurpose it into three. And then my content team and strategist's decided that there are a whole lot of thought leaders, influencers, speakers in the world that create intellectual content similar to what I have for years, Bogarts, bullets putting things out, podcasts, other pieces of content to get distributed. And then there's bloggers that are much more niche, but there's nobody that's doing both. And so he's like. If you talk about how you live, you talk about these philosophies, you talk about these guiding principles, these lessons, these things that you do. Why don't we pull the curtain back and show people behind the scenes that that's actually how you operate. And so those are the three things that you've probably found is bogus bullets, the marriage tax and then the No Limits blog. And all three of those, although they're not currently set up as podcasts, one of them will be repurposed that way. And then I'm actually in the process right now. I'll be a co-host on at least two podcasts. We're going to be launching here soon, likely three if this other concept takes off. The podcasting world has kind of changed my world in a lot of ways, in a way I never saw coming. And I've been on over one hundred and fifty other people shows in the last seven, eight months, and it's allowed me to have opportunities to meet people like you. Right. And the connection with Ken Joslyn and Steve Sams. Right. Which both were people that I was on their platforms, on their shows. Like it's allowed me to align myself with incredible individuals on this planet so that we can truly have collective impact. So those are the three shows that currently exist. But they're not podcast currently. Joe: Got it. OK, so you have things coming up, I know that you're doing the Ken Joslin's Brian: Yep, Joe: Boot camp, right? Brian: Yep, yep, I'm doing his boot camp in April, I've done two of his I've got some other speaking events coming up. And then we've also got a few things launching that I'm really excited about. So we're still doing all of our work with no limits university, which is really like the concepts and the philosophies to help people understand who they are, leading them on intrinsic journey. But we also have another entity in a movement that's called Who before what that's launching as we speak, which is really an attempt to help us change the language and narrative in society about putting more emphasis on what we do versus who we are. And it's not that one or both don't matter. It's that they both matter. But one needs to lead, which is who. And so we're going to change the narrative because it's this whole idea that you go to a networking event. And the first question everybody asks is, what do you do? And even if you asked who you are, like, tell me who you are. Ninety eight percent of people answer with what they do, not who they are. Joe: So Brian: Part of the Joe: True. Brian: Pain and suffering that exists on this planet, as so many people don't know who they are. And so a lot of the core of the work with everything we do with our coaching and the No Limits university and those things are all about that. But we're actually creating a specific movement to bring into conscious awareness this idea of who needs to be before what. Joe: I love that is the university and the who before. What are they separate from your actual coaching piece Brian: They're Joe: That you Brian: All Joe: Do Brian: There, it's all kind of integrated, Joe: Ok? Brian: So, yeah, my my I would say my one to one coaching is the only thing that's kind of outside of that umbrella. It all fits on the same coaching philosophies. But just with the people I work with one to one, it's it's just inherently different than the other structure that we have. But it's the same philosophies, what you'll know about me and a lot of what we do with the no limits you and everything is this idea that we truly have the ability, if we are aware enough and influential enough to build a life of alignment that can become self-regulating. So for me, I'm very clear on who I am. I'm very clear on where I'm headed. I'm very clear on the impact I want to have, as well as the hierarchy of importance in my life. Family being first. Right. After that, because I'm so clear, everything I do is in alignment with where I'm headed. So when you ask the question, are they all, yeah, they're integrated because they're all holistically apart and in alignment of where we're going to impact a billion lives. How those are translated look a little bit different. But they are all towards the same intent, which is to impact a billion lives. Joe: So it's the YouTube channel, it's eventually some podcasts on their way. It's but no limits university. There's the Who before what portion of that? There's the coaching, which is one on one with you. Correct. Speaking engagements. When when? I mean, obviously, you still do it virtually, but you're actually going to be live at that bootcamp coming Brian: Yep, Joe: Up in Brian: Yep. Joe: April. So as that opens up again, I mean, when I watched you on the Growth Now summit, which I attended, your portion of, it was brilliant. I Brian: Oh, Joe: You Brian: Thank Joe: Know, I Brian: You. Joe: Just said, I mean, you're an amazing speaker. Brian: Thank you. Joe: You're just not talking to us. But you bring people in to the story. Brian: Thank Joe: And Brian: You. Joe: I just Brian: Thank Joe: Sat Brian: You. Joe: There and I was like, oh, this is unbelievable. Like, I would have paid thousands of dollars to Brian: Thank Joe: Watch. Brian: You. Joe: So it Brian: Thank Joe: Was amazing. Brian: You. Joe: Did I miss somewhere on your website? Because it's just so much on there. I can't figure out. Brian: No, Joe: But Brian: You Joe: Is Brian: Didn't miss you didn't Joe: It. Brian: Miss anything. There's going to be new sections actually built on the website, Zoom. Let's put it this way. You listed a lo
Brian Phillips is Co-founder and CEO of The Basement, an integrated (technology + creativity + measurement) B2C and B2B marketing agency with its roots in production. Brian dabbled in art and worked in architecture before he took the artistic principles of rendering positive and negative space to marketing. He explains, “The positive space, the consumer journey, is one we can see and everything works.” He believes marketers can get a lot of understanding out of identifying and analyzing negative space – the things that don't work – and that these, too, can help define the client journey. He believes “Negative space helps define and form the positive space.” His interests today remain diverse. For the past year, he has avidly read scientific books, pursuing ideas related to how genetics might impact buying and selling. The agency manages all media and destinations (the social channels and websites where consumers engage), extracting and analyzing as much data as possible and using multivariate testing. As an example, the agency may “cross-reference data out of Amazon” with data from its analytics platform on the ecommerce side.” The Basement markets its clients through an often complex, multi-touch, multi-channel approach. Larger companies may have as many as 150 datapoints across their consumer journey from “high level impressions down to ecommerce platform conversions.” Brian has found that insights gained by analyzing data about consumers in the lower funnel can provide information on how the consumer got there and what the consumer will do next. The agency measures its success through outcomes, which, Brain explains, ensures accountability. Brian says his agency's focus has always been on growth, but growth “has to be calculated.” When asked about his agency's culture, he says simply, “Stay fascinated,” and then expands on the thought, adding, “Stay curious, stay ambitious, stay competitive, stay genuine, and stay fascinated.” Brian can be reached on his agency's website at: thebsmnt.com. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I am your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Brian Phillips, Co-founder and CEO of The Basement based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast. BRIAN: Thank you. Thanks for having me. ROB: Excellent to have you here, Brian. Why don't you start off by telling us about The Basement and where the firm excels? BRIAN: The Basement is an integrated agency, and there's probably some backstory there of how we got to be an integrated agency with roots in a production company. It's sad but true, but one of our greatest strengths is being able to deliver on what we say we can do. I've sat at many tables with brands that are unsatisfied with whoever their partners are, and sometimes it's as simple as just being able to deliver. I think as a production company, at the beginning that was what we prided ourselves on, and over time we've evolved to include that same delivery mentality against the consumer journey and a fully integrated offering of technology and creativity and measurements with the consumer journey in mind. We've had a lot of success with brands. We're not afraid to talk about outcomes. Actually, we prefer talking about outcomes, and we prefer the accountability that comes with that. We've been very fortunate to align with some great brands, and they acknowledge and accept our approach. It's turned out to be very impactful for both their business and mine. ROB: Are those brands typically more consumer-facing, or is there some B2B in there as well? BRIAN: Mostly consumer-facing, but we do have some B2B. Certainly there are major differences there. But we really approach our work systematically and through a proprietary framework that we've developed. Technologies roll in, audiences roll into it, but at the end of the day we're still performing the same services against that framework for B2B and B2C. ROB: Interesting. Tell me a little bit more about that framework. I think you have some brands that are of a pretty big size, and their go-to-market with customers is probably very multi-touch in a way that would often be hard to measure and hard to be accountable for, but that very much seems to be what you've leaned into. BRIAN: Yeah, there's no question. It seems like the majority of our clients are that way with the multi-touch and the omnichannel approach. I think it's important when we start talking with a brand that we're all aligned on accountability, and where we're going to hold ourselves accountable and where the brands are going to be accountable. Throughout that initial phase where we're working on strategy, we have to come to consensus on how we're going to measure success. Measuring that success along the consumer journey is something that we work together on and then we measure against. So that becomes, in my opinion, a lot easier to have dialogue and to have fruitful conversations and collaborations if you're aligning at the beginning. And that approach has been the core of what we do and how we build our integrated offerings. ROB: What sorts of things are you measuring for brands? BRIAN: Oh, man. [laughs] One of our larger brands that we work with that is a consumer brand, we're measuring 150 datapoints across their consumer journey, and that's everything from high level impressions down to conversions through their ecommerce platform and everything in between. At that point we're managing all media, all what we call destinations – places where consumers engage, whether that be social channels, whether that be their enterprise websites. We're going to build that infrastructure inside of that journey so that we can extract as much data as possible. Then we want to analyze it. We want to understand if there's any insights we can gain in the lower funnel that can impact how the consumer's getting there and what the consumer's doing next. And we've got case studies where we've seen and applied insights that were upper funnel, that were on the advertising layer, where we were able to test what type of product mix through display ads – we would run multivariate testing and we noticed that these certain product mixes with color combinations and words were effective. That then translates all the way down to the way we communicate on our website and what products we show on the website, how we're driving conversions through the performance funnel online. That cross-analysis is very important to us. We use and leverage a lot of technology, don't get me wrong; technology is extremely important to our business. But at the end of the day, we want to make sure that our core teams that work with the brand are analyzing that data, and we're looking for those insights and we're trying to figure things out on behalf of the brand. Machine learning is helpful. Obviously, it's a trend and it's going to be here. It already has changed the business and it's going to continue to change the business. But at the end of the day, I think you still need to have humans involved in that analysis, and that's something that we do very diligently with our clients. ROB: It's fascinating because a lot of marketers think about knowing how to track marketing when they can track the individual user all the way around the internet, when they can get a hard link through to conversion, that sort of thing. Certainly, you will have that in cases on the ecommerce side. But it almost sounds like on the broader consumer/general market side – maybe they bought something on Home Depot's website or Costco's website or Amazon or someplace where you can't sink into the data – it sounds like maybe you're still pulling on the stages of the customer journey at a macro level to see what's pushing down the funnel. Is that how you're thinking about it? You know what the stages are, you know what people are doing; even if you can't link each person, you can still see the echoes of what you've done up-funnel. BRIAN: Exactly. That's exactly right. Amazon's a great example where we can get data out of Amazon and we can get data out of our analytics platform on the ecommerce, and we have to cross-reference those. We have to understand why this happened versus something else happened. My background is kind of an interesting background, but it certainly comes from the creative side. I often talk to my team and in general about the importance of the consumer journey and looking at it very similar to figure drawing. The way that I learned figure drawing is you have positive and negative space, and the positive space, the consumer journey, is one we can see and everything works. But with figure drawing, you need to leverage and use the negative space as templates to help you define and form your positive space. I relate that to marketing and the consumer journey in a way that says sometimes things don't work, but understanding why they don't work and having the measurements in place to understand and help define – that helps us define what's going to work and what didn't work. So we really want to look at the positive and the negative space. I think there's an idea or a wish for marketers and agencies to say, “We just want to find all the positive and that's it. That's what we want to base everything on.” We try to look more holistic than that, because we think we can get a lot of definition and a lot of insights out of the things that don't work. ROB: It's fascinating to hear such a – there's sort of a disciplined line of thinking around the creativity that probably frees you up to be creative in other ways. It's interesting how it echoes right into marketing. It almost sounds like we're talking about planetary physics or something while we're at it. BRIAN: Now you're really going to get me going. [laughs] ROB: Oh, how so? BRIAN: I study science. I don't read many business books; I never did. I mean, I've read marketing and business books, but I've found that the focus on our business and the focus on science, everything from natural order to epigenetics, is something that I've been really focused on over the past year and a half and applying that level of thinking. To your point, you mentioned the word discipline, and I think that's certainly a strength of the agency and it's something that my business partner and I have always strived for. If I were to analyze my career, I think a systematic, more scientific approach to creative is something that I've always done. The parallels of science and creativity are just so fascinating to me. ROB: I think you can't just drop epigenetics into the conversation without actually helping those of us who think we know what that is, but maybe we don't. [laughs] Can you give a definition of what that is and maybe how it ties into, if it does tie into, your work and marketing? BRIAN: Any of the scientists in your audience may say, “He's completely off,” so I'll use the caveat that this is how I've interpreted it. The genes that we have as humans are what I would consider more binary. They do simple on and off. They can't define the entire character of a person. They may define the way you look, they may define other parts of your genetic makeup, but epigenetics is a newer science that is the study of the chemicals that are how the genes are expressed. What's so fascinating to me and what really got me interested in the concept is that these chemicals, these imprints of chemicals can become part of your genetic makeup that you can pass down to your children. There may be a certain way that you move or the way that you stand that wouldn't necessarily be part of a gene. A gene doesn't have that in it, but epigenetics have put that imprint on you because of the way that things have happened through your environment. That is what I find so fascinating about it – that study of behavior and getting all the way down to that science to say these behaviors can actually be explored through genes. Tying that to marketing – I think this is way, way future-focused, but when that data becomes more readily available and people start mapping it, which they are now, how does that bring the science of genetics into the targeting of how people are buying and selling products? That is the stuff that I find fascinating and I read about. ROB: Is this something in the neighborhood of a gene drive or something like that? Is that what we're talking about here? Or am I completely out of the neighborhood? BRIAN: What did you call that? ROB: A gene drive, where they can take certain things and introduce them – like they can introduce sterilization into the mosquito population not by shooting a mosquito into a crisper or anything like that. It's called a gene drive. Basically, they can introduce this trait into the population in this external way. BRIAN: I'm not spending a lot of my time and energy on what they're going to do with that innovation. [laughs] I do think that the future of medicine is going to be more tailored based on the structural variations within people's genes. So I do think that's going to change medicine as a potential outcome. But right now, my fascination and interest has just been the data and what happens when that source, that mapping has been done, what you do with it. It's like Tesla having all the data of people driving their cars. ROB: I see. So, you're able to measure things you've never been able to measure before to get insight you've never been able to draw before, just by how deep you're able to look into the picture. BRIAN: Right. That's what we keep doing as society. We keep finding new ways to extract data, and that is a parallel to the way we look at our framework and the way that we work with our clients. How can we extract meaningful data from the journey? It's just going to get smarter and more robust, and the systems are going to be in place and the first party data is going to be there. It's an interesting time, for sure. ROB: You've alluded a couple of times to your own background and your own origin story. What is the origin story of The Basement? What made you decide to start the firm, and what have been some key inflection points along the way? BRIAN: How far do you want me to go back? I think there's some relevance to the first brush of creativity. For the record, I'm about 6'6” and I come from an athletic family, and I was a basketball player. There was a point in my life where I thought I was going to go play basketball. Certainly not professionally, but in college. And I was always an artist. When I was in high school – this was in the early to mid-'90s – I met a graffiti artist from Chicago. That culture didn't really exist in Indianapolis in a meaningful way. That culture really didn't exist in the common culture of society. Hip-hop culture was in its infancy, really, at that time. I became fascinated by that art form. I think one of the key powers or superpowers, if you will – and for the record, I think superpowers change over time. At that time in my life, one of the things that defined me was defiance, and I think that carried through my career, from graffiti art to wanting to be an animator when I saw the movie Toy Story. That became my goal. My dream was to be a character animator. That's what my career set off into: how can I make animated films or shorts or whatever? I didn't really have a definition. I ended up in architecture, and I spent a number of years in architecture. It was at this period when the internet was becoming relevant. It was getting introduced to businesses. This was pre-broadband. Everyone was on dial-up. We were just at that point in society where the internet and how people engaged online was being defined. Then I became really interested in creating these very rich, high-end experiences that eventually became online, for lack of a better term, engagements. That's how my career started. I was doing that in architecture, and at one point my business partner and I met, and I was frustrated with my career and the ceiling that I saw for myself and the work I wanted to do. I wanted to work at Pixar. I left. I just quit my job. I convinced my business partner to start a business. He was certainly more of a marketing business mind than me at the time. I was very much an artist and a producer. The combination of the two of us has worked out really well. And we left. He left McDonald's Corporation, where he was a very successful regional marketing director, and I was this young, probably cocky kid who was doing 3D animation and interactive 3D online and virtual worlds, and we took off. We ended up becoming one of the first digital agencies in Indiana, and from there we started The Basement because we saw a void with traditional agencies that didn't have an understanding of digital. We saw that as an opportunity and a void in the market and serviced agencies for the first 5 or 6 years of our business as a high-end interactive studio, doing animated TV spots, doing Flash games. We made a number of video games, we made a number of TV spots, we did a number of very high-end, rich websites for consumer brands and national product launches, until we saw an opportunity. We were really good at building the destinations and the engagement points with consumers, and we would always ask the agencies and the people we were working with, “How are we getting people here? What's the narrative? What's that consumer narrative and how do we extend it?” That's where we started to take on more direct clients. We had clients that were at agencies that went to the brand side and wanted to hire us directly. It really started to snowball, and then we built a media business, and now we have a full national internal media business and analytics business, and obviously creative is still there, still a studio. We still produce a lot of work in-house. There's a ton of content that gets produced along with consumer journey. Being able to build that content against a very robust media strategy that's looking at data, looking for data, that's the kind of integration that we've built. In a very, very short, run-on sentence, that's how we got to where we are. ROB: Brian, you mentioned something that I think is very common, which is that a creative firm starts up to work on a particular practice area that other agencies aren't focused on, and you'll either take a referral or you'll get white-labeled under them on the engagement – and then there's this jumping off point that has to come around to grow more. That's that graduation from taking other people's subprojects and leftovers and engaging the clients directly. How did you change the mindset and make that jump in the business? Because a lot of people get stuck there. BRIAN: I really give a lot of that credit to my business partner. We also have one of our vice presidents who took the client services part of the business. We all worked really hard together, and my business partner's background in the agency was account service. He knew that business. He knew it very well. He's very disciplined, and he understands how to build systems, and again, echoing the points that we made, we think systematically. So we built systems that will hold ourselves accountable, and we made sure that we were honest with each other and collaborated. We're transparent. I think that transparency was a very important key for us with our clients throughout. If we can do something, we'll tell you we can do it. If we can't do it at that time, we're going to be honest with you and we'll tell you when we can do it. That formula worked really well for us. I've always been an advocate for hiring people that are better than you, and that is what we did. At that time we had to build a culture, and we built a culture around growth not only for our clients, but for ourselves and for the individuals that are within the company. We fostered the culture, and that culture helped organically make us better. That is I think equal weight in the success of that adoption and being able to change and being able to recognize how something needs to improve. That's, again, been a big part of who we are. We have a tagline, which really is the definition of our culture, and that's “Stay fascinated.” Our culture is defined by stay curious, stay ambitious, stay competitive, stay genuine, and stay fascinated. That idea of staying fascinated is see something bigger than yourself, see something that we can become collectively. When you see something and you strive for something and you strive for growth, things need to change and things get better. That's how we define our culture, and that's how we were able to improve. Because I'll tell you right now, our account service business was not great when we started. It was good. We've made it great. ROB: It sounds like by being honest with yourself and with your clients – both of which takes discipline, which we said before – you were able to avoid getting yourself in the deep end in some areas and say no to the things that were too big while also growing into bigger and bigger capabilities along the way. BRIAN: Yeah. We expanded our services along the way. Again, very, very proud today. We've had tremendous growth over the life of the agency, and we still plan to grow. We are going to continue to grow. Thinking of it from a biological standpoint, organisms grow to the point where they peak and they start to decay. We feel that we're not even close to decaying. Growth has always been a part of our strategy, but it has to be calculated. We've said no to things that we knew we weren't going to be able to deliver against, and that I think is very important and has defined us by saying no to things versus saying yes to everything. That was a really good business lesson that we've learned along the way. And preservation of culture, because you can say yes to things and short term you can grow revenue, you can make more money – but at the peril of what? That was something we've always been very protective of: the culture, the people, the dynamics within the team. Because as we recruit and we want to hire the most talented people, then you have to protect them and you have to make sure that they are in a position to do what they're great at. The point I made about superpowers evolving – as I got further in my career and further into the growth of business, that became part of my role and what I strive to be good at. ROB: It's quite a journey, Brian. Thank you for sharing. I feel like there's a lot more we could pull on; I want to be respectful of everybody's time. Brian, when people want to get in touch with you and with The Basement, how should they connect with you? BRIAN: Certainly the website for The Basement, and that is thebsmnt.com. That's the easiest way to get a hold of us. We love challenges, and we love brands that want to swing above their weight class. We're actively looking for new partnerships. I really appreciate you taking a moment to have me on and talk about this business that we've built out of Indianapolis, which is not typically known for advertising. ROB: If people don't know, there's a lot there. ExactTarget didn't get as long in the sun as people might've wanted it to, but that was a big deal out of Indy, right? BRIAN: Oh my goodness, yes. ExactTarget has been a fantastic story, and Salesforce is there. Yeah, things are changing. There's no doubt. Things have definitely changed and momentum is with our city right now. ROB: Got that Atlanta to Indy connection with Pardot and Salesforce and all that. We appreciated ExactTarget as well. It was good for our ecosystem. BRIAN: Good. ROB: Thanks so much, Brian. Good to have you on. Be well. BRIAN: Likewise. Thank you again. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Brian is a husband, father and hugger from the Midwest. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST ZAK: Brian is from the Midwest. He works in insurance. His daughter is grown now, but when she was a little kid. BRIAN: I noticed a funny thing. She was a pretty easy kid to raise but if she was ever upset or crying or cranky, hungry, tired...if you sat down on her level and just pulled her in for a little bit and if you'd feel her take a deep breath and she would just let go. And I thought, that's funny...Not yelling at her, not telling her to do anything. Just grab her and hold her a minute. When I would come home from work and I'd be exhausted somedays, getting home late and she'd run to the front-door and she'd hug me and I said that's a fake hug. That's a movie hug. Give me one of your real hugs and she would squeeze me as hard as she could and I would say, I can't breathe! And her response always was, try. BRIAN: But then I recently was reading about hugs and when you hug 20-seconds or more there's actually a hormone, oxytocin. It makes you let go. It lets rest. It lets you relax. And during this pandemic, I was always a person that was gone and traveled and I've been home a lot and I have a little of this feeling. And I saw my wife getting a little bit more anxiety too and we would occasionally, just, I'd pass her in the kitchen in between calls and I'd realize, hey, that's big hug opportunity. And I'd just reach out and grab her and at first she'd be surprised but she'd hug and then she'd try to walk away and I'd say, no, it's gotta be 20-seconds. That's when you really get the full effect. ZAK: Yeah. Do you have a name for these long hugs? BRIAN: I call them a drive-by hug. Because I almost pass her and then I turn around and say, whoa, I missed a chance for a hug there. ZAK: That's so sweet. Do you count to 20? BRIAN: I actually don't count but I do it by breaths. Cause I try to take deep breaths when I do it too. ZAK: Do you think it works on yourself if you do a self-hug? I'm thinking about folks who don't live with other people. BRIAN: You know, I think it does. ZAK: Can we try a 20-second self-hug? BRIAN: Yeah, let's do it. ZAK: I'll follow your breaths here. ZAK: Listener feel free to breathe and hug along with us at home. Extended Breaths..... ZAK: I feel better. What's not to like about that? I want to thank Brian for sharing this concept of the 20-second drive-by hug with me. I've been practicing at home. You've been listening to The Best Advice Show and I want to hear your advice. How are you getting by? Lemme know on the hotline at 844-935-BEST. That's 844-935-BEST. And here's an idea. I know we can hug anyone outside of our pod right now, but maybe sending them this episode would be a nice consolation. Thanks. Talk to you soon.
My guest today is Brian Watkins, former VP of eCommerce for Bulletproof 360, the diet and supplements company. This is Part 2 of the interview where we explore how he grew the Bulletproof business.This is the free edition of Marketing BS. Premium subscribers got access to part 1 of Brian's interview yesterday and twice the content every week.You can also listen to these interviews in your podcast player of choice: Apple, Sticher, TuneIn, Overcast , Spotify. Private Feed (for premium episodes).This interview is sponsored by GoToWebinar:Save up to 23% on GoToWebinar Annual Plans!GoToWebinar eliminates the headache and hassle from webinar hosting. No matter your goal or skill level, you'll quickly see why so many choose GoToWebinar for easy virtual event management, performance data, videos, polls, and email invites and reminders. Try GoToWebinar for free today!TranscriptEdward: This is part two of my interview with Brian Watkins. Today, we're going to dive into his experience as head of ecommerce at Bulletproof 360.Brian, can you start by explaining what Bulletproof does?Brian: Bulletproof is a health and wellness brand started by Dave Asprey about six or seven years ago now with the goal of radically improving your own life. What Bulletproof does is basically develop a line of supplements, protein powders, MCT oils, and just a variety of healthy intakes primarily driven around the ketogenic diet. But it resolves, at the end of the day, around the Bulletproof diet, which Dave Asprey created with the idea that by bringing in healthy food into your system you can have better energy, gut health, and mental performance.Edward: What are the main products that Bulletproof sells that drive the majority of its revenue?Brian: There are six main product lines. There's MCT oil, which is modified coconut oil, which is a high fat, low carb, zero carb enhancer for food and diet. There's a supplement business so vitamins and other items that you can take for mental clarity, energy, and immunity. There's protein bars, protein powders, ready-to-drink coffee, and packaged coffee. Those are the six main product lines that are offered to incorporate different parts of the Bulletproof diet throughout your day.Edward: That's a pretty wide variety. It's practically a packaged-goods firm. Are some of those more important than others, or they're all fairly evenly divided?Brian: Back in the day, when it first started, Bulletproof is highly focused on the biohacker. There's a lot around what MCT oil was, and Bulletproof truly developed that category in time. But then also the supplement of a collagen protein regime and then also supplements created with the biohacker community was focused on and looked for.As the company has grown, we've grown beyond what a biohacker is to help maximizers—people that just care or are naturally invested in their health. A lot of this runs back to my days of considered purchases within jewelry because if you're going to be consuming something that you want to know about, there's a little bit more research and a little bit more pause. It made sense as we shifted from biohacking to broader consumer goods, how could we bring education in the consumers along in that process?Edward: Initially, your customers were primarily people who knew your founder, who read his books and were bought into his philosophy rather than his products?Brian: Dave started by blogging (more than anything else) about his own personal journey with food, and energy, and health. He ended up using content in building this foundation and then starting to provide very simple rudimentary products they wanted just falling because they were asking for. Dave, can you get us this? Can you show us this? Can you provide this for us? That then developed into what we know today. As you go down, it ships because what you had day one was a highly knowledgeable person making these purchases. Fast forward today, Bulletproofs at Whole Foods, and Walmart, and Target and it changes the overall value proposition of how you communicate the brand, the brand values, and also what it can do for you in terms of performance onto a single package as you're walking down the shelf.Edward: How do you do that, beyond the fact that he has built a reputation for himself and has a blog and has a book? How do you broaden the awareness and consideration for Bulletproof beyond that core audience?Brian: There's a couple of things. This is what brought me to the company is the product's work. One, people are making these purchases and then coming back like, wow, I can feel a difference. You start with just a very basic repeat-and-referral. You're developing these core pockets of influencers that are starting to communicate out. From that, you can build a foundation.When I think about Bulletproof, especially on the digital acquisition side, we started from the bottom of the funnel and moved up. We were very focused on repeat-and-referral businesses building our email communication and our content. What we did unique about the content is we didn't just spend time talking about the Bulletproof diet, ketogenic diets, or about these products. We went back and said, what are the things we're trying to solve? Are you having a problem with sleep? Are you having a problem with your energy? Are you having midafternoon crashes?What we would do is create content that was more solution-oriented. What that allowed us to do is move up the funnel and get highly qualified prospecting traffic to our brand where they weren't aware of the brand, but they were aware of their issue. We were able to provide a solution both in content and also product recommendations that would help expand that group over time.Edward: I often think of many products as being either Tylenol or vitamins. Either they're solving a specific problem, or they're making your life better in a way that you weren't even aware that you needed. It sounds like Bulletproof started, hey, we make your life better in a way you didn't know you needed and then shifted to be, no, we can solve these specific problems. Were you doing search marketing for people searching for how do I improve my sleep?Brian: We did some of that—this goes back to analytics [...]. We would take all the search marketing information, all the keyword information. You'd also be using the Google search webmaster information to understand keyword volume. If you think about a three-dimensional Rubik, you could understand where's the keyword traffic coming from, what issues are out there.We can then overlay that with the Bulletproof product line, which product lines are doing immunity versus health versus energy versus sleep. Then you could understand the phase of that consumer either based on their search queries—have they already been to the website or whatnot—within this very dimension. Then you have a consumer journey you can communicate to. Is this a prospecting visit, is this a repeat purchase, or is it the subscriber that might be thinking about unsubscribing? You can tailor these journeys to each of these consumers, and we used it across three channels at all times. You had the digital side for sure. Out there, either Facebook look-alikes or Facebook prospecting and Google-branded terms and non-branded terms, depending on what the ROI was. But then we also integrated that very tightly into look-alikes and [...] within Facebook, and then we also did physical mail as well—direct mail. With that, we were touching people across multiple communication channels with their need-solution in mind. That's what helped to elevate the awareness of the brand.Edward: How did you target with direct mail? Was it broad-based, or did you have the equivalent of look-alikes on your direct mail?Brian: We started by focusing on just our existing consumer. Step one was saying look, we know—from our email database—how many of our physical mail addresses have been purchasing or moved to inactive. We started by doing very basic inactive work, which is, hey, we haven't seen you in three months. We've sent you a ton of emails. You haven't opened them, so we're going to send you a physical email. We'll give you a small offer to see if we can get you to re-engage on our website.Edward: How did you know those people hadn't switched to buying at Whole Foods?Brian: We don't, technically. We don't have a single source to a thread online and offline consumer consumption. But what we found is that it's an issue around convenience. If people would typically have shifted to one medium or the other, if they like that, it doesn't matter what we're trying to communicate with them. It's not going to happen. How we thought about our value proposition fell into four lines across all of our channels. The first one was the price. We made sure that Bulletproof maintained the same price. If you're going to buy something at Whole Foods, Walmart, or online, you'd find within 5% or 10% depending on the pricing strategies of certain retailers, but the price would be the same. It definitely was online. The second thing was product selection. Whole Foods was only going to offer two or three items within a protein powder versus online, where we offer the entire assortment. You had a different set of selection. Convenience, nothing could beat that up. You're already at Whole Foods checking out and you're buying that. We can't win on that.Ecommerce convenience is around shopping at home, delivery from home. If you have Amazon, you could have fasted delivery. Then you're left with the brand experience. It's a long way of saying that we knew consumers for passing back and forth between channels. They weren't necessarily passing back and forth because of price. Even by incentivizing some of the 10% coupon or 20% coupon, we typically found they stayed in the channel that they wanted to be in versus having people optimize between channels overtime.Edward: When you found someone who had dropped out of your online purchase channel and you sent a direct mail to them, the assumption was they dropped out of the online channel. They hadn't switched to Whole Foods, they just dropped out completely. I assume you ran a test and control. You held back some people, sent direct mail to others, and saw whether the reactivation made sense in the long run.Brian: Exactly right. What we found is it absolutely did. It had almost a 2X improvement with our test sample size, and we do this for 3-, 6-, 9-, 12-month lapse customers so we could track and see their interaction over time. The other thing you can do is you can go back through and see—if you're using Amazon or whatnot—you can also start to mirror in your shipping addresses across multiple platforms as well. Those other ways to consider overtime, narrow that list of who is inactive versus who is just maybe moved on to a secondary channel.Edward: Talk to me about the Amazon channel. How did you work with Amazon?Brian: You got to love them in Seattle, and there's no doubt they're highly successful. But it's hard to be a brand on Amazon—I say that cautiously. At Bulletproof, we ran a 3P relationship. That means that we were managing our own data on our own pricing within the Amazon ecosystem, and that was important to us because it goes back to this, we wanted to have consistent pricing. We didn't want people to figure out or feel like there is differentiated pricing between our channels. We've grown to be one of the largest 3P sellers within Amazon. We use FBA, fulfilled by Amazon. We ship our product to Amazon, Amazon executes, and ships our product out to the consumer. But what's hard is that when you're in that Amazon ecosystem, you get two types of buyers. One is, you have people who are very brand loyal. It's just more convenient. To be on Amazon, you're going to get it in two days, you can add it to a broader order. Some of their subscription tools are just cleaner. You have brand loyalists that are already on Amazon that have a great LTV, and then you have this group there just discovering.What's hard about that is how do you stay top of mind in your Amazon search results. Because unless you have a brand recall, there are so many places within a page for Amazon to compete against you, either from their own brands or their 1P brands, which are brands that they're buying the merchandise for and selling on behalf of the other brand, or just other product placements and advertising. You're constantly trying to work that piece of it.And then you have to respect part 3 of that is there's a lot of data that shows if you look at where Amazon searches occur—and I don't have this data but Amazon does—but if you were to geolocate people as they are on an Amazon app, what you'll find is there's a lot of people shopping in an aisle at Target, pulling up an Amazon search result. Not because they plan to buy on Amazon or check the price, but because they're looking at the reviews. They're looking for a clean way to know what is the best product to look on the shelf of Target. They're not going to target.com. They go to Amazon because that's a large market. You also have to plan that to create credibility in some of your offline channels as well.Edward: You need the reviews on Amazon in order to drive conversion rates in other places. Is that just an assumption or do you have any data to make sure that's actually happening?Brian: There's a decent amount of research that shows that that is occurring. We never did. I'd have to think through it a little bit more, but I don't think we ever did a tremendous amount. We never plotted our review rates on Amazon to our conversion rates across channels or our adoption rates across channels. In general, if we found that we had a lower product rating in general on Amazon, that was a weaker product across our entire assortment. Is that just because it was a weaker product, to begin with, or was it an Amazon umbrella effect? We don't know. But when you talk to a lot of people working within Amazon advertising within the VC community for CPG goods, they do talk about this additional conversion effect, where Amazon advertising now is lifting overall conversion across a lot of channels outside of just Amazon.Edward: Amazon is definitely a distribution channel for you, people who are looking for Amazon and the review factor. Would you find that it was effective at all for discovery?Brian: It is if you're willing to make that investment. The question there goes into the efficiency of that listing and how are you going to get promoted. The key thing within Amazon is to be on the first page. If we're not doing branded keyword searches, but you're just typing in protein powder. The first question is, are you on that front page? Because if you're on that front page, you need to pay to make sure you're on that front page. If you're on that front page, the question is, are you getting the right traffic, the right keywords, and the organic lift you want to have? That's the key thing to brand awareness or prospecting marketing. When you go out and bid on the keywords of protein powder, it is so highly efficient out there that it goes back to the days of Google where it's probably break-even at best. Then you have to have that following and understanding which says, a first-time protein buyer on Amazon, what's the likelihood they will rebuy your brand on the second purchase? What you'll find is there are certain categories because what we've got at Bulletproof is you research that there are certain categories in certain product lines to have a high propensity of repeat and branded options. Those are the areas where we would spend exponential dollars in or incremental dollars in to promote those products. These just aren't going to be Amazon products that we can do profitably, so we leave that as a distribution solution to our loyal brand followers, but we're not going to use that for prospecting within that ecosystem.Edward: Did you use any of Amazon's display network stuff or only on their merchandising, only on their core search results?Brian: We did display as well. When you think about Amazon display, we viewed it as there are three different ways to apply it. Once again, I'll go back to the marketing funnel in reverse order which is, you could do display advertising around the realm of loyalty.Which one of the benefits of selling supplements is I know that there are 30 capsules in that bottle, which means in about 30 days you need to repeat order. What we do is we run loyalty display campaigns to go re-find those consumers if they had not already placed an order to date.Edward: You are using retargeting, not so much like look-alike audiences.Brian: On a delayed basis, retargeting. That would be one channel. The second channel would be straight retargeting right after they first did their search. That's remarketing. They've probably already seen our results once, chase them down for the next three days, don't know if they've made a purchase or not, make sure that they know about Bulletproof, and then the final one is that prospecting look-alike.What's the benefit of what Amazon does there in their display network is they have a tremendous amount of sub-genres and look-alikes, and so you can use that to mirror it over time. The hard part about Amazon display—and they definitely heard it a lot from us—is that they like to report out on view-based conversions.One of the difficulties with the display is trying to understand the role of view-based, which might make sense at the prospecting level. But it sure doesn't make sense when you get down to this reactivation loyalty level because you only want to spend that if you know it's driving an incremental unique conversion. It has to get down to that click-through because I already know they're converting. I need to know if that display ad drove that conversion or we got them from some other means, and that makes the data very difficult in those situations.Edward: I'd imagine that if you're retargeting, so many of those people are going to come back and buy from you anyway. If you're going to give them credit to anyone who sees the view, effectively, you're just stealing all this attribution you would have had anyway.Brian: There'd be a lot of meetings where they'd come and be like, oh my gosh, you should triple your display budget. It's going incredibly well. I can't take any of that money to the bank because those conversions were happening at a consumer level, but we couldn't attribute back to that channel. That's such a critical piece to this when you get down to the lowest part of the funnel is understanding what role that final conversion piece is. We wanted to use Amazon display more and more for loyalty and for cart abandonment, but we couldn't effectively always deploy it in a way and therefore, it's left in middle effectiveness in terms of a channel.Edward: Let's talk about your physical distribution and retail. How do you drive more sales there? Is it the same thing, hey, get on end carts and do lots of demos?Brian: Yeah. That's one more like, yeah, you should talk to our retail and brand group. Edward: Fair enough because you were only doing ecommerce.Brian: I was only doing ecommerce. I'll tell you two things. One is that it goes back to the days of Ritani, they play off of each other. There's something to be said that when you move your product into Whole Foods, Sprouts, Walmart, or Target and people see it, that's going to help grow the overall awareness of the brand. There's no doubt. The flip side is when we're doing the right things online and we're getting our information out there and we're showing it to people, that's going to help the in-store as well. What we would do a lot of times in store—which goes back to being an ecommerce person, where you can track that transaction, you can track that conversion so much easier—is you find things like we would do in-store demos. It's just really hard to understand. By the time you put a demo team in there—are they a product expert and people are trying it—and then you look at that store lift both that day and then 30, 60, or 90 days later, I'm not convinced that in-store demos truly drive a real change. I think the retailers love it because it's a value add to their consumers walking the aisles pre-COVID, but I'm not sure the economic proposition is there.Edward: Is it the equivalent of a view-through conversion?Brian: Yeah, in my mind it is. It absolutely is. Maybe that's why I don't end up helping out on the in-store marketing is because it's harder for me to quantify that next dollar. I feel confident when I say, hey, I'm going to put a dollar into this channel. I have a 90% degree of certainty I'm going to return X% back, be it two-time, three-time, or four-time [...].When I do an in-store demo or when I do high-level brand impressions and campaigns, I'm told, in 3-6 months, what we hope to see is a lift of X%, and that's important at some point. I always joke around like I appreciate the people of Budweiser when they run the six Super Bowl ads because I think they're hilarious. But as a marketer, I would have such a hard time trying to justify that sixth spin because I couldn't quantitatively put it back into where that sale occurs based on that investment.Edward: Brian, this has been fantastic today. Before we go, tell me about your quake book and how it changed the way you think about the world.Brian: I'll give you two because they are the very far extremes of book reading. One, I'm a huge Dr. Seuss fan. Maybe I created the lowest bar ever for Marketing BS. But Oh, the Places You'll Go! is an outstanding book to create perspective around one's journey. especially if you've ever done a day-one startup or gone through really hard career items. That book summarizes what it feels like and the highs and the lows. The other one that comes around with management is—Gallup produced a book several years ago called 12. It's around the 12 questions of employee engagement. That was a game-changer for me because when you influence people, you have three ways to influence them. You have role power. Being a previous CEO or head of the department, you walk around with this red neon light that says, I can fire you. It turns out people are going to laugh at your jokes and they're going to do what you say you do. That's role power.You can also have expertise power where you can walk in, and because you've done this for so long or you know the patterns better, the people are going to follow you because you've done it and you have this understanding that they don't have.But the real power is around relationship power. The book of 12 talks about highly engaged teams and how do you create engage-core forces over time. It all goes back to a high EQ and emotional understanding of teams. When I finally realized that and understood how to develop teams like that, it's just been a complete game-changer to how I look at my career and how I managed teams going forward.Edward: Brian, thank you so much for being here. This has been fantastic.Brian: Thank you so much. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com
My guest today is Brian Breslin. Brian is a tech entrepreneur, educator, and community builder based in Miami. He's the director of The Launch Pad, the entrepreneurship center at the University of Miami, and founder of Refresh Miami, a non-profit organization dedicated to growing South Florida's tech and startup ecosystem. In this conversation, we focus on community-building, especially during this time when geographic boundaries are becoming blurred. Listen to the show Download episode 50 Show notes Brian Breslin @BrianBreslin on Twitter Refresh Miami Google Groups LISTSERV Meetup Mailchimp Constant Contact Miami Herald Magic Leap REEF Technology Airtable Zapier Tony Hsieh Wealthfront Venmo Metcalfe's law Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commissions for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Episode 50: Brian Breslin Jorge: So, Brian, welcome to the show. Brian: Thanks for having me. Jorge: Well, it's great to have you here. For folks who might not know who you are, could you please introduce yourself? About Brian Brian: Sure. My name is Brian Breslin, I'm a Miami-native tech-entrepreneur and community builder and educator. I've been working on the internet since 1995 — since I was a teenager — and I've been building different products and companies and helping other people with their stuff for the last 20-plus years. Jorge: I've been aware of your work, I think from fairly early on, and I've seen you create what seems to me like a pretty thriving community in Miami. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Brian: Sure. About almost 15 years ago, coming up in the spring, I started an organization called Refresh Miami. Refresh Miami is one of my sort of proudest achievements at this point in my career. It's the largest tech and startup community nonprofit in the Southeast United States. It's got a little over 11,000 members, who come together to share ideas and to network and to learn about the entrepreneurial ecosystem and how to start a startup, how to bring their ideas to life, how to grow their businesses and their professional careers and all that. And, pre-pandemic, the format was a monthly meetup where we'd have speakers and guests talk about different topics related to building their businesses and things like that. And we had around two to three hundred people every month from the greater Miami metropolitan area coming to sort of break bread and have a drink and meet someone new. The origins of Refresh Miami Jorge: When you started it, it just started from scratch? Brian: I was inspired by Refresh Dallas and Refresh Phoenix, which both had popped up a few months earlier. I had heard about them actually through the web accessibility community, which was more prominent back then in 2005, 2006. And there were sort of ad hoc , no central organization. But the idea was, how do we advance the local tech communities? And a lot of it was just people searching for their own tribes, you know, and trying to find like-minded individuals. And that was what inspired me. I was a solo entrepreneur in Miami having returned from University just a year and a half earlier, and I was looking for people who I could talk to about tech, and learn from, and collaborate with. That community didn't exist in Miami at the time. There had been some during the first dot com boom, but then that all fizzled out in the early 2000s. And this was a lull in the market and a lull in the community where there wasn't anywhere for people who wanted to learn about emerging technologies and where they could meet other people. And so this was as much me wanting to make friends as it was me hoping to coalesce a tribe. Jorge: So, it sounds like there were precedents, but there wasn't a community already in place in Miami. What did you do to get things kicked off there? Brian: I think all I did in the beginning was I had set up a basic website and I put a little newsletter signup form where people could sign up for our Google group, which was like a LISTSERV-type tool that existed back in the early- to-mid 2000s. I posted a message saying, “who wants to go grab coffee and talk about tech?” And we had like twenty five people respond, randomly find me through the internet. And then the first meetup we had was five or six people at a Starbucks on South Beach, and we talked about everything from like MySpace to Friendster to HTML, CSS… JavaScript was starting to take off back then, and it was sort of a very nerdy meetup. But that was the first one. And then everyone had fun and they were like, “let's do this next month!” And the next month, everyone brought a friend, and it went from five to eight or nine and then to twelve to twenty. And soon it became this sort of regular thing where we quickly outgrew the Starbuckses and had to find people's offices to hang out in. And people would bring their own beer, their own pizzas, you know, and the idea was very, very ad hoc and everyone was there to share, you know? So, you brought enough beer for you and other people that have some. You brought enough wine for you and other people that have some. And same for food and things like that. Eventually I just started buying pizzas for everybody. I looked at it like this was my contribution-slash-marketing budget that I otherwise would have spent on my business. And, you know, it worked out. It became this sort of, regularly scheduled meeting point for people to find their underground community. And we continued that for years and years. And I think now we've done well over 150 events at this point. Jorge: As someone who has been posting stuff to the internet for a long time, I have experienced the frustration that comes from putting something out there and not having anyone respond or look at it. And it seems to me that your first message that you posted got traction. And I'm wondering what about it drew people's attention? Brian: I think there's a couple of factors. One was, there was no real expectation of people, so the risk level was super low. Like, what's the worst that can happen? If you buy a cup of coffee, you don't get along with everyone, you just leave. And there was no financial commitment, there was no expectation of you showing off your expertise or anything like that. And on top of that, you have to think about the context of the time. So back in 2005-6, there wasn't as much stuff going on online and there wasn't as much content being created on such a rapid clip as there is now. Now you're competing with Facebook newsfeeds and Twitter timelines and all these things that everything is almost ephemeral. And so, if you don't get the right person in the right location at the right time, it's like hitting a target from very far away, you know? If you don't hit that right target, then you miss them forever. And so, I think we benefited from that luck. And I like to think that we succeeded despite ourselves, because we didn't really have an intention of saying, “we need to make this bigger.” It was just, we need to make this enjoyable for the people who are coming and make this something they can depend on and count on and make it welcoming. Because a lot of this was also in response to… I had experienced the local chamber of commerce at the time. And as a young 22-year-old entrepreneur trying to get his business off the ground and being basically told, “well, you're not working at Microsoft? Why am I talking to you?” You know, type of attitude over and over from people. And feeling dismissed, right? And basically, made to feel like I wasn't part of that community. And so, this was the flavor that worked for me and I was solving my own itch and it just so happened there were other people who had that same itch to scratch. Focus, topics, and geography Jorge: And it sounds like the itch has to do with the intersection between technology and entrepreneurship and location, right? One of the things that I'm hearing implicit in what you're saying is that having focus is important to attract the people who are going to be interested in the same things that you're interested in, is that fair? Brian: I think so. I think a lot of it has to do with consistency, with carving out your niche in the broader sense. Miami's got three, four million people in it, and so at the time you could have said, “we're a community for business owners,” and that starts with too broad of a net, you're casting too wide of a net in order to bring in too many people, and it doesn't have the high enough signal-to-noise ratio than if you start with saying, “we're really only catering to other techies or other nerds.” And that I think helped us, because we were self-selecting down to a smaller community of people that are geographically bound and are, career-bound in the sense that like they have the same interests and the same locations. And so, basically saying those are the two variables that we're playing off of makes a lot of sense. I've studied a lot of community-building patterns and trends over the years, and most of it's been after the fact, not preemptively, as we grow our business or as we grow our organization, because it's a nonprofit organization. But there's so much more information out there now versus 15 years ago, as far as how to do this correctly versus what are the steps that one could make? And so, on many fronts, we lucked out along the way, and then in many senses we also could have done better if we'd had more mentorship, if we'd had more guidance as far as what's the right way to do this. It could have been that Refresh Miami, would be at 25,000 or 45,000 people by now. But I'm happy with the levels of growth and the sustainability of it all. The fact that we're going to be on our year 15 in this organization, which is remarkable as far as how long these things usually last, because we've seen so many organizations come and go and attempts at community building in other communities, and even in our own, over the years. Online community infrastructure Jorge: You mentioned the events, these monthly gatherings. I'm wondering if there is an online component to the community as well, where people come together. How does that aspect of it work? Brian: So, over the years, we've played around with different sort of types of online engagement for people. Our main tool for broadcasting and outreach has been email the whole time, because that's been surprisingly effective giving us the control we need in order to keep in touch with our community and also not being platform dependent. Because imagine if we had started off with being a MySpace page, right? That wouldn't have lasted very long. Or if we had focused only on the Facebook group or things like that. So, we do have a Facebook group, and that has about 4,000 people in it. And then we also have a Slack community, which has another three or 4,000 people. And I don't know what the overlap is between the two, as far as who's in which one, if it's a hundred percent overlap or not. And then we engage with people a lot on Twitter as well. But one of the things that we're working on actively right now is actually building out better tools in order to support peer-to-peer direct connections and also to give people the tools in order to allow them to communicate around their own interests. We used Meetup for a long time and we still do, but we use it mostly as casting another net because they have their own audience and their own ability to attract potential new members that we don't necessarily have. Because people who search for “Miami tech meetup,” they will find us on there. But we use that as a funnel to bring people to our other channels. But meetup.com as a tool has gone through its own ups and downs, as far as, the software being maintained properly and then their ownership by WeWork, and then, later spun out by WeWork. And so, we're building our own technology in order to effectively replace that function for our community so that people can start their own micro-communities and have our audience to feed from. That'll allow people with very obscure interests, like, “The Font Designers of Miami,” you know, there might be 10 of them, right? But it'd be impossible for them to find each other without our preexisting community to feed from. And so, that's one of our next things that we're working on and helping to launch in Q1 of 2021, to make that something that makes it easier for these types of groups to form and for them to sustain as well. Jorge: And that would manifest as a web-based tool? Brian: Yeah. So that would be a web and mobile based tool that lives on inside the refreshmiami.com domain. Jorge: You talked about using email as the primary means of communication. How are you managing that? Are you using a mass emailing platform? Brian: We use MailChimp as our email service provider, and we've been using them for probably about 10 years. And we jumped around from different platforms before that. We used Constant Contact for a while. We used a handful of others and the honest answer as far as why we shifted from one to another was cost. It wasn't a matter of, was one a better tool than the other? There was some learning curve at each sort of change, but it was really like, this was the right balance of cost-to-features that we liked. And they also gave us the ability to have portability in that we could take our list, export it, and then import it into the next provider. And so, we weren't locked in and we weren't at the sort of beck and call or at the will of say like Facebook, right? So, Facebook doesn't give us the ability to outreach to all of our members of our Facebook fan page or a group directly. We'd have to pay every single time to run ads at those people because it's such a small percentage that get engaged with otherwise. Whereas on our email platforms, we're regularly averaging… 30 to 35% of our list is opening every single email that we send out. And so that ends up being a much more cost-effective and effective platform and sort of channel for us. Jorge: Are these emails mostly announcing upcoming events? What type of content goes out? Brian: For the last two years, we've been doing news coverage. We hired a reporter from The Miami Herald to spearhead this, and we've been basically the sole source of news coverage in the local startup ecosystem. We felt that it was important to have these stories be told because The Miami Herald was the main news source in Miami, but it was basically scaling back on how much coverage it would give to entrepreneurial endeavors and startups and the tech ecosystem. So, if it wasn't for our coverage, no one locally would be talking about the billions of dollars that Magic Leap raised, or the $1.2 billion that REEF, formerly known as ParkJockey, raised to build cloud kitchens and things like that. We felt it was important for those stories to be told because one of the big challenges when you're building a community is people aren't necessarily aware that there's other people like them around. We want the people who are building interesting stuff to know that there's other people that are building interesting stuff near them in the broader geographic area as well. That helps on several fronts, one being inspirational to people to see that people are trying big things, and the other on making it easier for job creation and job placement. Because a lot of the talent that comes to our community comes from outside of our community or would otherwise leave our community because they don't know that there's second or third options in case of the one job that they come to Miami for fails, they don't have to leave. And so, the fact that you can come get a job at REEF and know that if that company were to fail, there's a half a dozen other well-funded startups that are doing interesting sort of global scale projects that you could go work on. You don't immediately have to leave to go to San Francisco or New York or Austin or Seattle to get another tech job. Jorge: Hearing you describe this just makes me think how complex such an ecosystem can be. You said you have over 11,000 members. Are you using any kind of system to keep track of those relationships? Like a CRM or something like that? Brian: So, we haven't used a CRM. What we've been doing though on some fronts… I'm a huge advocate of Airtable. And so, I've been diving heavily into Airtable over the last six to nine months. COVID has given me an extra time to work from home and dabble on these things. So, we do a lot of Airtable and Zapier. Zapier, I'm also another power user of. I have so many zaps built to automate things and stuff like that, that, if it wasn't for their like pretty interface, I'd have a hard time keeping track of them. But yeah. So, we use Airtable to track all the companies, all the investors, and then a subset of the members that are doing interesting things that we know about. because the idea is that if we can keep somewhat tabs on what these people are doing, we can suggest those people to others or invite them to give talks or speak or share their stories. And having that in an organized fashion has helped us immensely in being able to manage this stuff because Refresh is run by an all-volunteer community. There's no full-time staff for it at the moment. We have a few interns here and there and we have one person who's the executive director who splits her time between her actual full-time job and Refresh. The impact of COVID on regional communities Jorge: You mentioned COVID, and one of the effects of the current situation is that, like you said, those of us who can work from home or working from home. And I've experienced local groups who have meetups and who have regular events for their members, recruit speakers from further afield. Over the last year, I've been invited to speak for a group, for example, in Argentina. I spoke with folks in Peru. Tomorrow I'm speaking at a conference in Amsterdam. And I'm doing it all from the very place where I'm sitting now. And I'm wondering, how has the pandemic changed the geographic nature of Refresh? Brian: So, that's an interesting thread that you bring up. On one hand, one of the things that we were known for before the pandemic was, we were the only group that flew in speakers from around the country to come and give talks and workshops in Miami. And occasionally, we would do a live stream back then to an in-person audience here. And we haven't replaced those events with just purely virtual events. Other groups here in Miami have been doing virtual events with local speakers. But one of our thoughts on this was: there are so many people doing online webinars and Zoom-style video conferences. And they know that model and they know how to monetize that model and make it sustainable. So, we decided we're going to defer for six to eight months or however long, to other groups, because you're no longer competing with your other local geographic groups for online content. You're competing with the whole world, right? And so, if we didn't have a way to enable the peer-to-peer networking that was the icing on top of the cake from our local communities, it didn't make sense for us to go to all the effort to coordinate and organize an online event where it was no more engaging than watching a YouTube video. And so, as a result, we scaled back and it hurt us from a financial standpoint because our revenue came from event sponsorships beforehand, and that went towards covering the cost of flying people in and renting space and catering and things like that. We haven't found a tool that makes it easy to replicate the social aspect of the events. We're still figuring that out. We think that maybe on our new platform, once that goes live, we'll be able to replicate that in that you are watching with your peers, and you're able to interact with them and discover who they are and hopefully get to that sort of serendipitous collision factor that Tony Hsieh from Zappos loves to focus on. Getting that right is more important than having a continuous stream of content, because we could just as easily say, “well, we're going to run whatever New York tech meetup is broadcasting,” and make that our content for the month. Unless we have the social aspect, all our members could find that on their own, you know? They don't need us to curate that, or to produce that for them. Because low quality, unedited and unpolished video conferences and stuff like that are painfully hard to watch for extended periods of time compared to high quality, production-level stuff that's been edited and polished and has all the onscreen effects and things like that. On top of the fact that you're competing with other things geographically, you're also competing with other things on the person's computer. So, people will shift their attention to their emails that come in or back to their work that they were working on and things like that. So it's not a one-to-one substitute to what existed before. Jorge: You talked about the peer-to-peer connections as the icing, but it almost sounds to me like that's the cake and the content is there to give the community a reason to come together. Brian: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And you know, the other… I guess you could say it's sort of the sprinkles were the fact that you could meet the person who came in as the expert before, right? You know, and the 30 seconds of email or business card exchanges with that person or asking them a question specific to your business. You know, like so-and-so grew Wealthfront, so how does his experience relate to my business doing something else — the new Venmo or whatever it is. That's often more valuable than hearing the person's biography, or their pre-cooked-up slides or whatever it is. And so, I think that's a big challenge that's still yet to be solved though for most of these in-person meetups and stuff like that. Networks Jorge: When I reached out to you about being on the show, I mentioned that I believe that we're heading into a period where community building is going to be very important. I feel like we need to find ways of coming together as a society and we are having to do so online especially now, because of the pandemic, and I'm wondering if you have any advice for folks who might be inspired by our conversation and wanting to bring their local community closer together. Brian: So, I think there's a number of layers to this conversation, and it depends on whether it's a macro-level or a micro-level that you're focused on and also whether it's a commercial versus non-commercial. My thesis is that companies that are trying to build brands, all of these D2C companies, the ones that are going to be really successful long-term are the ones that build communities around their products. Because for many products and services, there isn't much of a moat that defends your business from the next competitor that's slightly shinier or slightly cheaper or has better manufacturing or whatever the case may be. And so, community is such a great way to build loyalty in your product and your consumers. And that's also I think important for physical communities too. I think the analog is like you see companies that build strong bonds between their employees end up having higher retention rates, lower churn, and things like that because people feel like the company is connected to them. In cases of geographic communities like Miami, one of our underlying theses here with Refresh is that the more bonds and the more connections that people can make, the less likely they are to leave physically. And if they do leave physically, they'll at least maintain connections with the local community. I guess it's like Metcalfe's law, right? The more nodes there are in the network, the stronger the network becomes. The more individual connections you can create amongst your customers or amongst your constituents, depending on what type of community it is, you know, the stronger the bond can be. You see this in small ethnic and religious and other communities where the communities are super tight because everybody knows each other, and everybody knows who knows each other and who's the right person to introduce to if you need something, or to call. And so I think that's becoming more and more relevant in whether it's technology communities or design communities or different areas of focus, you know? These tribes, the more tight-knit the tribes can be, the higher likelihood they are to survive, and to thrive. Closing Jorge: I'm glad you brought up Metcalfe's law. I think this sounds like a good place to wrap the conversation, this notion of stronger bonds. Thank you for bringing it up. Where can folks find you, Brian? Brian: I usually point people to my Twitter, which is Brian Breslin, @BrianBreslin on Twitter. Or you can find my website, brianbreslin.com, which has links to my Twitter and all these other things, and my occasional blog posts whenever I feel like it. Jorge: Well, thank you very much. I'm going to include the links to both in our show notes. Brian: Perfect. Jorge, thank you so much for having me. Jorge: Oh, thank you for being here. Brian: My pleasure.
In this episode of Experiencing Data, I speak with Jesse Anderson, who is Managing Director of the Big Data Institute and author of a new book titled, Data Teams: A Unified Management Model for Successful Data-Focused Teams. Jesse opens up about why teams often run into trouble in their efforts to build data products, and what can be done to drive better outcomes. In our chat, we covered: Jesse’s concept of debugging teams How Jesse defines a data product, how he distinguishes them from software products What users care about in useful data products Why your tech leads need to be involved with frontline customers, users, and business leaders Brian’s take on Jesse’s definition of a “data team” and the roles involved-especially around two particular disciplines The role that product owners tend to play in highly productive teams What conditions lead teams to building the wrong product How data teams are challenged to bring together parts of the company that never talk to each other – like business, analytics, and engineering teams The differences in how tech companies create software and data products, versus how non-digital natives often go about the process Quotes from Today’s Episode “I have a sneaking suspicion that leads and even individual contributors will want to read this book, but it’s more [to provide] suggestions for middle,upper management, and executive management.” – Jesse “With data engineering, we can’t make v1 and v2 of data products. We actually have to make sure that our data products can be changed and evolve, otherwise we will be constantly shooting ourselves in the foot. And this is where the experience or the difference between a data engineer and software engineer comes into place.” – Jesse “I think there’s high value in lots of interfacing between the tech leads and whoever the frontline customers are…” – Brian “In my opinion-and this is what I talked about in some of the chapters-the business should be directly interacting with the data teams.” – Jesse “[The reason] I advocate so strongly for having skilled product management in [a product design] group is because they need to be shielding teams that are doing implementation from the thrashing that may be going on upstairs.” – Brian “One of the most difficult things of data teams is actually bringing together parts of the company that never talk to each other.” – Jesse Links Big Data Institute Data Teams: A Unified Management Model for Successful Data-Focused Teams Follow Jesse on Twitter Connect with Jesse on LinkedIn Transcript Brian: Hello, everyone, welcome back to Experiencing Data. This is Brian T. O’Neill, and today I have Jesse Anderson on the line, the managing director of the Big Data Institute. Jesse, what’s going on? Jesse: Not much. Great to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Brian: Yeah. So, you have a new book out, this is not your first text. So, first of all, congratulations on that. I know, it’s always a slog getting through a book, at least that’s what everyone says that writes books. So, why do we need a book about data teams? Jesse: you need a book about data teams because I wanted to bring the other teams into the picture. And instead of just focusing on the data s
Janice Cox - Natural Beauty at Home Beautiful Lavender, by Janice Cox An expert on the topic of Natural Beauty and Making your own cosmetic products with simple kitchen and garden ingredients. Janice Cox comes to you with her new book called, Beautiful Lavender. A Southern Oregon native out of Medford, Janice joins us to talk about the wonderful properties that Lavender has and to talk about some of our local Lavender Farms. Please checkout Janice's wonderful book and take a look at some of her other information at her website and over at Mother Earth News at the links below! Beautiful Lavender - https://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Lavender-Janice-Cox/dp/1948734184 Mother Earth News - https://www.motherearthnewsfair.com/speakers/janice-cox/ Natural Beauty at Home - https://www.naturalbeautyathome.com/ Transcription Brian: Janice Cox is an expert on the topic of Natural Beauty and making your own cosmetic products with simple kitchen and garden ingredients. She's the author of three best selling books on the topic natural beauty at home, natural beauty for all seasons and natural beauty from the garden. She is currently the beauty editor for Herb Quarterly Magazine and a member of the editorial advisory board for Mother Earth Living magazine. She lives in Medford, Oregon with her husband. She's a member of the Herb Society of America, International Herb Association, United States Lavender Growers Association, Oregon Lavender Association and Garden Communicators International. Janice Cox Welcome to Grants Pass VIP. Janice: Thank you, Brian. It's nice to be here. Brian: Yeah, it's great to have you on just for a little bit of background for everybody. Janice was on an episode of my other podcasts, Off The Grid Biz Podcast. She was on that last year for some earlier books and for her speaking schedule that she had with the Mother Earth News Fair. So I'm happy to have her back here. Her latest book is, Beautiful Lavender. Why don't you tell us a little bit about it, Janice. Janice: Well, yes, that's right. I talked to you last time at about the fair we had up in Albany and you even made it up there to the fair, which was great, I like that. But this year…so I did that fair, and I think you even came to it, I used to give a talk all about lavender and growing lavender and using lavender and just enjoying lavender. So out of that talk came this book or it's more, real actually written more workbook style, because that's kind of what I like is when people come up to me with my books, which are written cookbook style, and they're all written up and people make notes in the margins are swapped out ingredients and really made it their own. I wanted to incorporate that in this new series of books. I wrote one on loofa and then this one is all about lavender. And so there are pages that you can actually write on make notes, so all your information stays in the same place. If you bought a plant at a nursery and you just loved it. And you want to remember the variety and you want to remember the address of the nursery you can put it in the book, or if you've changed one of my recipes around for shortbread cookies, you can make notes there so we call it it's a book but it's also a workbook. That's kind of the new thing now. Brian: Yeah, absolutely. The subtitle is a guide and workbook for growing using and enjoying lavender. So this is everything from A to Z when it comes to lavender which is amazing because I mean it goes through the history. I mean, I'm not sure how many of you had ever heard that. When they discovered King Tut's Tomb. They opened it up and it smelled like lavender immediately. It's amazing how something like that would last that long. Janice: It shows how important an herb it was because to be in a King's Tomb, right? Brian: Absolutely. And it mentioned you know, Queen Elizabeth the first love lavender and just everything from the history to how you ca...
Steven Sabel - City of Grants Pass Information Coordinator | Host of the Don't Quill The Messenger Podcast | Will play the role of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion at the Barnstormers Theatre starting Oct 23rd City of Grants Pass Information Coordinator Pygmalion starts on Oct 23rd at the Barnstormers Theatre Don't Quill The Messenger Podcast A new Grants Pass native. Steven Sabel works as an Information Coordinator for the City of Grants Pass. Beyond insightful conversation about working for the city, we then venture into his hit podcast he hosts called, Don't Quill The Messenger and just what is the Shakespeare Authorship Question? Also head over to the link below and get your tickets (physical and virtual) for his upcoming theatre event. Steven and his wife Annie will be lead roles in Pygmalion, at the Barnstormers Theatre, starting on October 23rd, 2020 (dates below). Get Tickets today - https://app.arts-people.com/index.php?ticketing=barns Dates and Times for Pygmalion at Barnstormers Theatre Friday Oct 30, 20207:30 PM - 10:00 PM PDT October 23rd - November 8thFridays and Saturdays at 7:30 PMSundays at 2:00 PMNo performance on Halloween Take a listen to the Don't Quill The Messenger Podcast that Steven Hosts - https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/ Transcription Brian: Steven Sabel is the Information Coordinator for the city of Grants Pass. A position he's held for the past year after moving his family to Grants Pass from the LA region of Southern California where he owned and operated his own Theatre Company for eight years. He's an award winning producer and director with more than 130 successful productions to his name. He has an extensive background in journalism, public relations, marketing and the performing arts. Welcome to Grants Pass VIP. Steven: Well, I'm thrilled to be here. I don't consider myself a VIP in any terms or under any circumstances. But I'm thrilled to have been asked to be your guest today and talk to you about how I came to become a Grants Passien. I don't even know yet if that's exactly how you refer to Grants Pass residents. But it's the one that I've seem too stick with since moving here. As you mentioned, in the intro a little over a year ago, my family and I are very proud to be Grants Passien's now. And I'm happy to be here. Brian: Yeah, that's great. So why Grants Pass of all places? How did you end up at this spot? Steven: Well, you know, my wife, her mother and stepfather moved here almost 15 years ago, to be closer to her brother and his family who lived in the Salem area. And so they chose Grants Pass as a means of not having to go quite so far north, so they could still venture down into California to visit California family and relatives. But to be in Oregon, and not California, and to enjoy all that Grants Pass and its surrounding area has to offer, which as you know, is one of the best places in all of Oregon, if not all the country, if not all the world. So when I met Annie, my wife 10 years ago, very early on in our relationship, we knew that it was going to become a very serious relationship. And that sparked our first trip up here. It was the, you know, come spend some time with mom and step dad and sister and brother in law who also live in Eugene close by. So it was sort of, you know, this guy's really a thing and get to know the family better, kind of a weekend trip. And that was my first introduction to Grants Pass. So over the 10 years that we've been together, we've been married seven. Now we just celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary on September 14. Over that 10 year span, we would come up here at least once a year, usually two to three times a year, over that period of time. So during that time, I came to know more about the community, I came to know more about the Rogue River. Their property is right on the Applegate River. I came to fall in love with our beautiful historic quaint downtown ...
Matt Lund - CEO at Grants Pass Family YMCA With programs to serve our youth, to young and middle aged adults, to retiree's, Grants Pass Family YMCA is here to help everyone in our community. Tune in as CEO Matt Lund talks about the important role the Y plays in our community, some thoughts on the impact of COVID-19 and a special announcement on their expansion in the area. Head on over to the Y's website for more on current news and events - http://www.grantspassymca.org/ Stay updated by following them on Facebook also - https://www.facebook.com/GrantsPassFamilyYMCA/ Transcription Brian: Matt Lund has been married to his wife Stephanie for 11 years. He has four kids, ages ten, nine, six and five. Matt loves being active spending time with his family, serving the community and discovering how he can make a bigger impact on people's lives serving a higher purpose. Matt Lund, welcome to the Grants Pass VIP Podcast. Matt: Thank you, I enjoy being here. Brian: Yeah. So why don't you just let us know a little bit about who you are and where people would know you from? Matt: Sure. I don't know how many would know me locally. Although I've been here for a little over a year and a half now. I grew up in Central California. Most of my childhood life obviously. Then for college, I left and went to New Mexico, actually was an athlete played basketball in college at Florida basketball scholarship. From there, I moved out to the Midwest and I played Semi Pro basketball in the CBA. This is now going on 21 years ago. So it's been some years, but after playing I fortunately came across an injury and was it not able to play anymore. Ended up having to decide what to do in life for career, right? What do we do to support ourselves? How do we do it and what's our passion? I decided to go in and work with youth and work with families and do it around what I loved, which was playing sports, and so I ended up getting a job at a YMCA in Wisconsin and started out as a sports coordinator, did it for about two and a half years. Then I ended up going to work for the Chicago Metro YMCA as an operations director. I was running one of the largest sports programs in the country for YMCA's, ended up having about 6,000 kids that came through my sports programs and running another YMCA as well. I was able to then take my career and go down to work for the Wichita YMCA. I became an executive there in Wichita, was there for a few years and then moved on to the Twin Cities and worked in downtown Minneapolis, for the YMCA as well. Was able to really get a well rounded background working in the YMCA and understanding different aspects doing governmental work, doing, obviously nonprofit work for the why learning to work with youth learning to work with older adults, learning to work with families and business ventures. It just really gave me a well rounded background. So I ended up wanting to do more around working with people and understanding how do we help people become more balanced in their life. How do you become healthy spiritually, physically, emotionally, mentally? So I ended up becoming the Executive Director for the National Wellness Institute, which is one of the oldest nonprofit wellness organizations in the world. Did that for about three and a half years, we really focused around the mindfulness and resilience and behavior change. Again, more of the holistic approach, but not so much the physical and nutrition side of it. I got a lot of that information and a lot of that background from the YMCA. Again it was, how do we go about this in the spirit, mind, body? Having that education and that background working at the National Wellness Institute along with the YMCA. When I left the Y to work for the National Wellness Institute, I learned a lot enjoyed my time there. And then I got to a point where it was time for me to come back to where my first love was,...
Brian Burke, based in Santa Rosa, California, is a real estate investor and the President and CEO of Praxis Capital, which is a vertically integrated private equity investment firm. He established this firm back in 2001. He began his career in 1989, buying his first rental property which led him into the world of multi-family then commercial investing. Brian is a successful entrepreneur and syndicator - today he shares how he started his real estate career and giving back to his community after the wildfire in California. He also discusses his investing strategy, where he’s looking to invest, what to expect from an investment and his future plans. Some Of The Highlights: His First Real Estate Investment and His Business Today His Work Strategy and Advice For a ‘Rainy Day’ In Business Brian’s Retirement Plan What is the preferred return? Connect with Brian: Website: PRAXCAP.COM - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - TRANSCRIPTION Intro: Hey guys, this is Eden and today is a very special episode because we are going to host Brian Burke, who is one of the biggest investors on this show to date. Brian had completed half a billion in real estate purchases this year alone after a long and beautiful career that lasted for 30 years and still counting. When listening to this episode, I was personally amazed by how humble Brian is and the sheer perspectives and mindset real estate investors to have despite the fact that they never met before. Also, today we would like to ask you guys for a favor. If you love our content and feel like you're learning from this podcast, please go on iTunes and give us a five-star review. This helps the podcast to rank higher and the best, part if you give us five-star review, shoot us an email at Hello@donandeden.com with the content of the review and your phone number, and you'll get scheduled for 30 minutes phone call with me and Don where you can talk about real estate and get answers for the questions you always had. So, without further ado, let's get started. Lady: Welcome to the commercial real estate investing podcast with Don and Eden where we cover all aspects of real estate investing with special attention to off-market strategies. Don: Hey Brian, welcome to the show. Brian: Thanks for having me on Don. Don: How's the weather in Santa Rosa, California? Brian: Oh, it's a beautiful day today, almost 80 degrees this afternoon and in November, which is a little unusual, but I'll take it. Don: I like to skate. It's like my hobby. So, I went to L.A., I went to Venice. I took a month off, just wanted to skate, took my skates with me and went there. Some people said it's the best place for anything that has wheels. And so, when I got there, that was late May and it was raining. It was like rain in L.A. and people told me it's very rare. That never happens. And it was kind of cold. And so, one of my friends that lives in California said that the weather over there was pretty unusual this year. Would you agree? Brian: Yeah, it was unusual. A lot of rain this spring and a lot of heat this fall. So, it's been a little bit unusual. But I would say the best weather in California is probably September and October. Those are usually some of the nicest months and people think that summer is probably the nicest, but it's not always the case. Don: Yeah not always the case. Is it still burning over there? I know you guys had the wildfires. Brian: There's a large fire. The largest fire in our country's history just got fully contained yesterday. And that was about a couple miles up the road from our office. So, we were under mandatory evacuation last week. And this week, we're back in action here in the office. Don: As sad it is to say that, I'm sure that these wildfires pose some great opportunities for real estate investors. Am I right? Brian: Well, once in a while they do and we had a fire in our city two years ago that wiped out 5000 homes in our city. We raised a fund last year to rebuild homes and our city and we raised about $8 million and we've been building single-family homes on burned-out home sites where the owners decided not to rebuild and elected instead to sell or move to a different area, put their lots up for sale and we're putting spec homes on those lots and got a couple of dozen homes under construction right now. So certainly it does breed some opportunity. Don: Not only opportunity, in this case, also give back to the community that is your city. Eventually, you want people to live in it and feel happy about it. Because that's home for you. Right? Brian: Yeah, people want the city to be put back the way it was. And we're doing our part to help do that and at the same time provide much-needed housing. When you lose 5000 homes in a city of 250,000 people it makes a real impact on housing demand, and there's a need for housing here. And we're helping to provide that which is pretty exciting. Don: That's beautiful. So, I know your real estate career is a very long one. You're one of the most successful entrepreneurs and syndicators on the show to date. I know you've amassed a portfolio of 250 to 300 million if my numbers are right and you've completed your half a billion in purchases of properties this year, am I right? Brian: Yeah. 2019 is a banner year for us. We crossed the half a billion-dollar mark and real estate purchase, which is an incredible accomplishment for me to even say that it is weird. I never imagined that in my lifetime I would do something like that. But we managed to pull it off. Now we've got a portfolio consisting mostly of multifamily properties. Our business focuses primarily a hundred units and up multifamily all across the US and we've got about 3000 units that we've done. Our portfolio now is about 250-300 million of value. We still do some single-family here and there. Of course, our fund where we're building homes in our city, so we're kind of a multidisciplinary real estate firm that started in single-family migrated to multifamily, but once you have developed roots and single-family, it's hard to lose those. Don: Yes. I started single families too, and let's be honest, it's fun. Even when you're doing commercial, it's still fun to do some projects there as well. So, let's talk about how it all started. When did you make your first steps in real estate? What was it back then? Because I know you've been doing real estate for 30 years, right? Brian: Yeah, my first real estate investment was a little over 30 years ago. In 1989 was my first real estate investment. Don: Just a side note. I was born in 1989. Brian: You were born? Yes. So, when you were busy being born, I was busy trying to find a house to buy and I made my first real estate investment. I didn't even own my own home but I bought a rental and fixed it up a little bit and a couple of years later sold that and I started doing some house flips, one house at a time and I was still working at the time and this enabled me to make a living on my job and then invest in real estate to build my future. Don: What a smart decision! So, one thing led to another and now you are in control of over 500 million worth of property in multifamily which is amazing. So, tell us a little bit about the first deal in multifamily. When was the first time you decided to buy a commercial property? Brian: My first multifamily was about 16 or 17 years ago. And it was here in California, it was a 16 unit apartment building. And what I was doing is I trying to figure out how to invest in commercial real estate, but I just didn't understand it very well. I didn't understand what the numbers meant or how to value it or how to evaluate it. Two rental houses that I accumulated through my house flipping business and flip one, keep one flip one, keep one. So, I had a couple of rentals I wanted to sell and I wanted to do a 1031 exchange and exchange up into an apartment building. It just seemed like it was an interesting way to grow the business and have more economies of scale and cash flow and all that. So, I reached out to the real estate agent that was helping me sell my flips because he was a CCIM which is a certified commercial broker. And I said, "Hey, I don't understand any of this and will you teach me?" and he did. He taught me how to read an income statement and what to look for and all kinds of different things. And then not long after that, he's told me my first apartment building. I did a 1031 exchange and never looked back. Don: How was the first investment? Was it a good investment, a bad investment? Brian: Funny story is I just sold that property like two years ago. So, I kept it for a long time and I was able to do a 1031 exchange into an oceanfront condo in Hawaii where I rent that out and, maybe one day I'll even be able to move into it. Who knows? Don: We all have dreams. Being busy in real estate, you never stopped working. So, I know we talked a little bit before the show started. I asked you about the ways that you make money when you own such a massive portfolio, but most of it you syndicated. So, most of it, you had to raise money. And you had to structure a deal in which your investors are being paid first because I know you care about your investors. So how do you make money? How much money do you make on these types of deals that you're acquiring? What are your goals for the future as far as your financials? Brian: I started just entirely doing things with many of the resources that I could collect together. My first single-family investment was done with seller financing and then after that, I was like cash advance credit cards and getting signature lines of credit and all crazy kinds of things. I always tried to learn by putting my own money at risk. Then once I figured out how to do it right, I would go to investors and have investors invest. It took me about 12 years to start raising money from investors. And I did it for my single-family business. First, I raised a blind pool fund and I split the profits 50-50 with my investors while we were flipping homes, and then when we move into multifamily, we're seeing a lot of money from investors. If you're going to buy half a billion dollars in real estate, it takes a lot of capital to do that. We were fortunate that a lot of investors were interested in partnering with us and putting up capital. So generally, the way we work it is the investors provide most of the capital for any multifamily acquisitions that we acquire. And in exchange, the investors get all of the profits until they've received a certain rate of return. Turn, once they've received that specific rate of return, then we start splitting in the profits and our splits usually start around 30% of the profits as the return goes up, then our split can get a little bit higher than that. But generally, our investors always get the majority of the profits, and they always get paid first. So, this isn't a big cash flow business for us. I know a lot of syndicators out there, who'll just have a profit split day one where every dollar that comes in some goes to the investors and some go to the sponsor. Ours doesn't work that way, the investors get a preferred return where they get all of the cash flow until they've received a threshold return and then we start to share. So, we keep the lights on here by doing house flips and having other multiple streams of income. For example, us building homes here in our community and the fire damage lots is another source of income and we have a lending company which is another source of income. Occasionally we sell our multifamily properties and that's when we get paid. We get a payday, not a paycheck. It's not quite as lucrative as many people would think, but eventually, you get there and profit potential is enormous but you never realized that until you start performing for your investors. Don: Okay, so let's talk about the way that you structure your deals with your investors. So, they're getting a preferred return. I guess it's 8% right that's the classic return that they get? Brian: Yeah, ours is 8% general. Don: 8% and then that's going to be a preferred return which means they get that right away as they invested the funds or a little bit after right it could be two or three months after, right? Brian: It doesn't mean anything, they may never receive it. If the dealer loses money and never makes money from day one, they never see a dime. But the way of preferred return works is that the investors get 100% of the cash flow until they've reached that threshold return and that's a cumulative return. So, if you invest today, in the first year, the deal throws off no cash flow, you get no cash flow. But if the second year it throws off 4% you get 4%. In the third year, throws off 8% you get 8%. In the fourth year it throws off 12%, you get all 12 because we still owe you 4% from year two and 8% from year one. So, if for two more years after that it still produces 12%, those two years, you're still getting 12% that makes up the 8% from the first year. And then after that, dropped to 8%, we'd start splitting the difference of what goes over 8%. So, a preferred return is often confused with a dividend and it's they're not the same. A preferred return just means that you're first in line for all cash flow until you receive your hurdle rate. It doesn't mean that you're going to get distributions right away equal to the preferred return. It just depends on what the property is throwing off cash flow wise. Don: Yes, thank you for clarifying that. Now, I know the investors are putting all the down payment and the capital expenses for repairing the properties and improving the properties. And so, they also get a share of the profits of the entire purchase. So, you're offering your investor 70% 30%? Brian: First, they get 100% until you reach that 8%. So, if they haven't been distributed the full 8% through cash flow during the ownership period, then that's where you catch it up. As you take your sales proceeds, you catch up on your preferred return first. After your preferred return is fully caught up, then any sales proceeds remaining after that are split according to whatever the waterfall is. And if it's 70-30, 70% goes to the investor 30% goes to the sponsor. In our case, we have a couple of different hurdle thresholds where it's 70-30, typically to a 12. And then after a 12% return, anything that goes above a 12% return is then split 60-40. And anything that goes above a 15% return if you actually can ever get above a 15% return, if we do then whatever a little amount goes over would be split 50-50. That's the way at least three quarters to 80% of our deals are structured that way and of course, every once in a while there are slight variations on that theme. Don: So, at the end of the entire purchase in the cycle of purchasing a property, renovating the property, stabilizing it, and then you refinancing the properties or you're selling them? Brian: If we're going to hold over three years we like to refinance and return capital to investors. But if we can sell, we will. I always like to say that we're a buy and watch investor, we don't necessarily buy to flip and we don't necessarily buy to hold. What we do is we buy the asset we watch, we improve the asset, and we watch the market for the most optimal exit point. And generally speaking, the most optimal time to exit is going to be right around year two and a half, two year three and a half, right around that point after you've fixed up units and fixed up the outside, you've increased the income, you've pumped the value. That's the inflection point where now the business plan would switch from things we physically do to just simply relying on the market for anything additional after that point. And when we reached that inflection point, that's usually when we like to sell. But if the market isn't cooperating and we don't think it's the right time to sell then we won’t sell. We can refinance, return some capital investors, sit on it for another year or two or three until the market is ripe for a sale, and then we could sell at that point. Don: What would you say you're typically improving the property like as far as the value goes? So, let's say you purchase a property for 10 million. After all the renovations and after improving the property, what would you say, percentage-wise, is the new value that you guys can bring the property to? Brian: On stabilization, we're looking for at least a 20% lift that includes, over and above the renovation. So, if we bought a property for 10 million, and then we put 2 million into it, or 12, then you'd be looking for somewhere around a $2.4 million increase. So, you'd be like 14.5, maybe 15 million to exit. So, we're looking for the kind of like that 20% or more lift within that stabilize period. Don: Of course, we got 2.4 million in profit, 30% of that is going to go to the sponsor or is considered profit for the sponsor after the deal is completed, right? Brian: First, you have to catch up with your 8% preferred return. So, let's say you distributed no cash flow during that period. For example, let's say it was a real deep value add and wasn't throwing off any cash. Now the first thing you'd have to do is give 100% of it to your investors until they got an 8% return. If it was three years' worth of time, then that's 8% times three. That goes off first, and then after that, whatever cash is left is what goes into the split here. Don: So, assuming you were cash flowing, and you managed to pay the preferred return during the entire process, and they always got the 8%, right? Hypothetically speaking, so you would be making 30%. Brian: That's right Don: Of the amount that you generated, which is 2.4 million in case of buying a property for around 10 million. Brian: And yeah, so you're looking at maybe $750,000. Could be your potential payday for the value created. That's right. Don: Yeah. So, it's just a matter of being able to get into a few deals like that every year, and then the profit as a sponsor, right as an indicator, the product It is down the line, a few years down the road. Brian: Yeah, that's exactly it. Like I said investors want to see their sponsor is getting a payday, not a paycheck. If you perform for them, then you do well. And if you don't perform for them, then you don't do so well. So certainly assuming you did your job right, the profit potential is pretty substantial. Don: But, something Robert Kiyosaki changed my life twice. Once was when he wrote 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad.' We all did read this book and got influenced by it. And if you didn't, then you should, because it's like I would consider that the Bible for real estate investing and investing in general. The second time he changed my life was actually when he wrote his book 'Fake,' which he talks about how money is not real and how money is a depreciating asset and why you should never have it, why you should never hold any money. And that's so true when you are trying to get wealthy and I think it's something you understand once you've made some money in your life because you realize that it's not real. But the things that money can buy, it just pays the bills. But if you try to get rich, then the only way to do that is to equity, which is what you're doing right? Brian: That's exactly right. Don: I think once this light bulb goes off and you get that principle, then you're okay with putting all the work and assembling a deal and improving the deal and stabilizing these properties that you're buying, just so you can get wealthier down the road. Because in theory, you are already wealthier because you have equity in the property. So, it doesn't matter. Brian: Yeah, you've got the equity and assuming that the market doesn't turn against you and take the equity back from you, that's happened before too. You saw what happened in 2005 through 2007. Equity is fleeting, so it's 100% true, everything you just said. But there is something to be said for keeping some cash for a rainy day and always having reserves and kind of living a little bit of a low leverage lifestyle. The people with the most leverage were the ones that got hurt the most. And it's funny when you live through an economic downturn like I have and managed to survive it, you see the risk that leverage ads and so you have to strike a good balance and you want equity and you want to use debt smartly to help improve your position. But at the same time, you don't want to over-leverage and you want to keep a safety net. You get it, you guys have built your business completely with equity without debt here so far and seeing what that's enabled you to do. And now you can use debt smartly, to help grow your portfolio. And I think everybody needs to watch that as an example of how to do it the right way, and the safe way. Don: Yeah, I think the main reason why we were able to pull this off was that we were making money in two streams, right. So, one stream was our business, our wholesale business, which created nice paychecks and nice paydays the way you call it before. And it's an accurate way to call it because when you make paydays, then you're able to buy properties and create wealth. And so that was the second way that we've created the portfolio that we own right now, through equity. The equity is the transactions that we made. We never live a lavish lifestyle. And it's different than most people here, Miami because, I don't know if you've been here but if you drive in the streets here, then you're going to see a Ferrari or a Lambo everyday second turn. And that's a lifestyle in Miami. Being a successful investor here in South Florida, we were able to resist that temptation, to invest the money where it should be parked, which is, in my opinion, real estate and stocks and property and equity. There's a beautiful saying that affected me tremendously, "Rich people are busy making money while poor people are busy showing off money that they don't have." Brian: Right. Yeah, you could certainly see a lot of evidence of that around, that's for sure. Don: Definitely. And especially today with social media, everybody's trying to show off, everybody's trying to faking it till they're making it. You're not going to make it, you're going to blow your first 10K on a Rolex. You should be blowing it on education. That's not even blowing it, that's investing and that's the difference, right? So that's what I think like an investor as I'm growing. Of course, I still have a lot to learn and I interview people like you, people that have made it bigger than me, the people that come to the show they have the same perspectives and the same lifestyle as well. Brian: It's just a matter of prioritizing and realizing that the first thing you've got to do is invest for your future. And it's like I spent almost every dime I had investing in more real estate and more real estate. And so, it's enabled me to accumulate a fairly large portfolio of rental homes just for my own, basically, my retirement plan. I don't get any cash flow off of them because I had them all financed on 15-year loans. So that way, they'll be completely paid off when I'm ready to step back and slow down. And it's a sacrifice now because if the property needs to be repaired, I'm probably pulling that repair out of my pocket and kind of negative cash flow, but I look at it as like a deposit into that savings account, right? And then eventually I'm going to have 40 or some rental units that will be completely paid for and cash flowing for me with no debt and right at the time, I would need it the most. So, it's sacrifice now, but it's a payoff later. Don: Definitely. So, let's talk about the future that a bit since we're already talking about it. What would your thoughts on the multi-family market right now and where it's going because I know it's a little bit overheated, a lot of people want to buy multifamily? And I know people buying properties for five and a half cap rate, which is pretty expensive in my opinion. What do you think about the market and where it's going? Brian: Yeah, you're right, the cap rates are low. And we're buying stuff at five and a half and six caps too. So, I get it, it's where the market is right now. And certainly, real estate is desirable, but it's desirable for a reason. And then, the reason is supported by fundamentals. And that's why pricing is so high right now. And one of the most common questions I get is, what inning are we in and everybody wants me to say that we're in the eighth or ninth inning and this is all going to change soon there's going to be a big downturn, you're going to be able to come in and scoop up properties at a big discount. I just don't believe any of that's about to happen, and doesn't matter what anymore because anybody knows that a game can go into overtime and a game can be rained out early, and can't just say that every game nine innings. So, we're not at the bottom of the cycle. And if we are at the top, what does the top look like? I think that a top when we reach one if we haven't already, it just looks like a plateau in pricing where we take a pause and the economy catches up to where we are and valuations are still fully supported with incomes right now, even where they stand today. So, I don't think there's going to be a big downturn or a big buying opportunity anytime soon like some people are holding off for. When that does happen, maybe prices have gone up another 20% then they fall 10%. And if they would have got in today, they would have made 10%. But instead, they're going to buy them and gain nothing. So, we're still buying and I think one of my defense mechanisms is to buy in strong markets that have population growth, job growth, and income growth and that gives me a hedge against the downside. I think it's important to do that. It's tough out there. We have to look at about a thousand deals to buy one. Don: It looks like a shiny market. Everything's growing. The population is growing. The jobs are growing and so yeah, everybody would probably want to buy it there. But we're already talking about that, what would you say that market is? Where are you looking right now for properties? Brian: We're looking in Phoenix, Arizona, Las Vegas, Nevada, Atlanta, Georgia, northern and central Florida, specifically Tampa, Orlando, North Carolina, such as the Research Triangle market, Charlotte, a little bit here and there of Texas. But I think Texas is way overbought. So, we're kind of scaling back in Texas. We still own there, but we're net sellers in Texas. I love to find something in Nashville, but there's very little product coming out of that area. So primarily, I think, Arizona and Nevada, Georgia and Florida are primary markets. Don: So, you're looking at a lot of markets, and how do you analyze all the deals that are coming your way? I guess you got to have some help, right? Brian: Yeah, we've got a fairly robust team here. I've got two other guys on the acquisition side and one analyst. So, we've, every time a new opportunity comes to us, my chief investment officer will do a quick prescreen. If it passes a certain series of tests, it goes to our analysts to build a financial model. And then it goes back to our chief investment officer or our CFO who is like a co-Chief Investment Officer. And then they review the deal and tour it and talk to the brokers and run the comps and tour the comps and do all those other tasks. Our businesses grown pretty substantially, we're vertically integrated. So, we have our own management company and we manage our assets, which means we have employees on the ground, in all the areas where we operate. So for example, we toured a couple of assets the other day, and it just turns out that we had our manager go with our acquisitions guy and manager knows the manager of one of the properties because they used to work together at one of our properties actually, and so, we have kind of a little bit of good rapport there and can learn more about the property because those relationships. So, we've well ingrained in the markets that we're in, we have people on the ground and the markets that we're in, and we have full control over the whole process. So I'm lucky that between me and my CIO, my CFO and the CEO of my property management company, between the four of us, we have 100,000 units of multifamily experience going back as long as 40 years and it gives us a good leg up on being able to stay on top of the markets in the assets. Don: That's not something you can easily find as an investor or a passive investor who's looking to invest with a sponsor. I mean, your team sounds very professional and experienced and you guys are exploring many markets and have years of experience. So, if I was looking to invest as a limited partner, I would give you guys a call. And speaking of which, if anybody wants to connect with you and get to know a little bit more about what you're doing and your projects and your future deals, what would be the best way to do that Brian: Probably the best way to reach us is through our website. Which is PRAXCAP.COM or a company's Praxis Capital and our website is P R A X C A P. C O M and on there, there are contact forms and you can fill out and our senior vice president and investor relations will set up phone calls. And we'll get to know you and establish your relationship before we start talking about deals. That's probably the best way. You can also find me on biggerpockets.com which is a real estate forum website where people ask questions and get answers about all kinds of real estate topics. I'm pretty active there and love to answer people's questions on that website when they post in the forum. So those are probably the best two ways. Don: All right, Brian, awesome. Thank you so much for that. And thank you so much for the insights that you gave us today. And of course, most importantly, time is the most valuable asset and therefore I want to thank you for investing the time to come to the show today. We appreciate it. I hope you're going to have a great day. Brian: Thanks, Don. I appreciate you having me on the show. I had a great time and humbled and appreciative to be a part of it. Thank you for having me on. Don: You're welcome. Thank you very much, Brian. Brian: Sure thing. Lady: Thanks for listening to the real estate investing podcast with Don and Eden. Stay tuned for more episodes. Till next time!
Zach discusses building learning communities with ChangeNerd CEO and founder Brian Hampton. Brian talks a bit about ChangeNerd, a digital learning community that supports change management practitioners and inspires innovation, and he also offers some advice for black and brown folks who are looking to build a learning community of their own.Connect with Brian on LinkedIn!Check out ChangeNerd's home page and follow them on LinkedIn! Want to become a member of the community? Click here!Visit our website!TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate. Now look, you know what we do. We have authentic conversations about being black and brown in the corporate space. Now, corporate space makes it sound really fancy, right? Like you're wearing a suit and a tie, you know, maybe sometimes you have to actually put some lotion on your ankles. That's not what I mean, right? I just mean the place that you actually have to work, right? Living Corporate is a place that amplifies the voices of black and brown people at work, okay? And how do we do that? We do that with authentic conversations with black and brown executives, entrepreneurs, influencers, educators, public servants, creatives, activists, right? And we do that in just, like, one-on-one conversations, sometimes we'll do a two-on-one, sometimes we'll do a three-on-one, sometimes we have, like, a--you know, we mix it up, but the point is we're having real talk, and that's why our tag line is what? Real talk in a corporate world. All of that being said, y'all know we're having dope conversations every time y'all hear this podcast, and today is no different. Today we're talking to Brian Hampton. Brian is the CEO and founder of ChangeNerd, a company that supports change management practitioners and inspires innovation. Brian, welcome to the show. How are you doing, man?Brian: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me, Zach. I really appreciate it.Zach: For those of us who don't know you, why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself?Brian: Yeah. So, you know, I started ChangeNerd. It's primarily a digital learning community. I started it to really bring professionals together, because for us who do change management and help organizations adopt new ways of working, we really just tend to be heads-down, working on our projects, and I wanted to create a way for us to just connect and share best practices. Prior to launching ChangeNerd, I consulted at Deloitte. I also led change management teams at different companies, both private and non-profit. So I love the field. I'm super passionate about it, and I'm glad to talk about it today.Zach: Yeah, man. You know, and coming from a change background myself, you know, I don't see a lot of black men in this space, right? I don't really see a lot of black folks period, but I definitely don't see a lot of black men specifically and just black and brown men in general in the space. Can we talk a little bit about, of all the professions you could have chosen, like, what about change management got you?Brian: Yeah. This is real cool, this is real cool. Nice question, and--great question, actually. So I went to college in undergrad for criminal justice and then soon realized there was no real money behind it, and so I jumped into HR, jumped into the federal government, and at around 2008, 2010, I felt like HR was kind of flat, and then I was introduced to change management because the agency I was at at the time, we were implementing PeopleSoft, and so I was formally introduced to change management, and I really couldn't believe this was a full-time job, right? 'Cause it's really around just working with people and helping them, you know, really adopt new ways of working. And I'm like, "Wow, people get paid doing this?" So I did some research and saw that the pay was decent, and so I jumped into the field. So yeah, I thought--at the time I thought HR was boring, and change management seemed to be the new thing, and there's some really strong transferable skill sets from HR to change management, and so I took the leap.Zach: Man, you know, that's 100%, and it's interesting because my career was a little bit the same. I think we talked about this off the mic, but, like, I started as an HR manager at Target and then transitioned into org design and just being, like, a specialist, right? And then eventually formed all the way into change management. And you're absolutely right, a lot of it's transferable, but you know what's interesting? I think a lot of it isn't, because--I do agree that often times HR gets a tough rep as just being, like, the benefits folks, right? And kind of helping with ER issues, but really they're just kind of--they're almost like the security guards of the company, but they don't have a gun. They've got, like, a roll of quarters to call the peace when it gets really scary, you know? They might have a flashlight so that they can look at you while you're doing something wrong, but they don't really have any actual, you know... come on, man. Yeah, so anyway. Okay, cool. So look, we're talking today about building learning communities, right? ChangeNerd is a learning community, like you said at the top, but to start, like, how would you define a learning community, and what are the benefits of being in a learning community?Brian: Well, you know, quite honestly--and, you know, the whole theme of this podcast is corporate--you know, corporate living, and if you're in corporate, your organization is more than likely changing. It's using and bringing on new technology, new processes, you know, organizations are trying to be competitive, so all of that activity is happening, and what that means for the individual person is that you have to take ownership of your own journey, your own learning journey. And so the best way to do that is really tap into some type of social learning community, and that's part of the reason why I created ChangeNerd. There was nothing out there specifically for, you know, professionals who spend a lot of their time in project management, change management, and so I wanted to create a community for us folks. And, you know, what I'm noticing after doing this just for 12 months is that it's extremely beneficial. We got thousands of people in the community, both at the executive level and, you know, practitioner level, and the people love the community because they can take charge and, you know, tap in whenever they want to tap in. It's LinkedIn on a much smaller scale, you know? And there's beauty in having access to like-minded people. So if you're on a project and you're struggling, you know you're only a button away or an email away from getting help, and that's what it's all about, and for us, we tend not to have those strong networks when it comes to corporate, and so--you know, I'll be honest with you. I'll share this story. Deloitte was--working at Deloitte was the hardest--and it was fun, but it was extremely difficult, primarily because I didn't have that network. Even tapping into, you know, the African-American BRG, it's still tough for us to connect with the right people, people that we can trust in the corporate atmosphere. And so, you know, yeah, you go to work every day and you build a network there, but there's nothing like building an even broader network outside of your organization to give you the confidence you need to be successful.Zach: Man, you know, you're 100% right. And it's interesting. Like, as organizations, or just as technology continues to grow... like, at first the draw of technology and, like, social networking was size, right, and scope. Like, "You can reach anybody anywhere!" Like, you know, big numbers were attractive, right? So if you could say--you know, you say LinkedIn, like, millions of people use LinkedIn every day, right? But then, like, the disconnect is "Okay, what does it look like for me to actually touch somebody?" 'Cause I don't really need to touch a million people. I [may only?] really need to touch, like, 15. So what do I need to do to make sure that I can actually touch those, you know, less than 20 people that I actually need? And so it's just interesting as you see, like, communities change or digital communities change and evolve that, you know, we're noticing that size isn't everything, you know what I mean?Brian: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, building a community around, you know, your role or your aspirations professionally, it's an ongoing journey, and what I will say is--here's the major benefit, right? If you got 100 people, because you were diligent, and let's say you spent, you know, three to six months really building a community around you or tapping into an existing one, and you now have 100 people that you trust that you know you can reach out to. If you get laid off, if you want to go independent and start your own agency. You know, if something bad happens to you, you've got 100 people who got your back, and that's what it comes down to. I can't--you know, just in doing this community, you know, ChangeNerd, I can't tell you the amount of people that I've been able to help, you know? So-and-so got laid off? Oh, I know this partner at this firm, right? And there's a trust that's built. And so, you know, submitting your resume becomes more of a--it's something that happens afterwards, right? Because of trust, that organization is pretty much gonna bring you on, right? And so your resume becomes a formality after the fact, and so, like, that's the beauty of having a network and being tapped in to a digital learning platform or any social learning community that you have.Zach: Yeah, man. You know, it's interesting. You talked about some of your challenges at Deloitte and, like, the barrier being you not having that community, formally or informally, right? So, like, based on your experiences, what advice or, like, what lessons learned would you be able to share and kind of what would you be able to give to black and brown folks today who are looking to build those types of spaces for themselves for their own professional development?Brian: To be honest with you, it's a journey. It's a journey, and the reality is you don't know what you don't know. Years ago when I was at Deloitte, I don't think I had the right mindset, you know? You know, they hired me for a job, you know, primarily to do deliverables on projects, and that's what I did, but to be successful, there are--there are so many other competencies there, you know? You've got to be able to manage up. You've got to be able to build relationships. And, you know, when it comes to corporate, a lot of times, you know, I know for me and probably for the folks that are listening to this podcast, sometimes you may be one of the few black or brown people in a room, and it's difficult to raise your hand, and it's difficult to bring your perspective without being judged, but over time with the right experiences you get really good at it. But honestly, I don't know if there's any advice that I can give to anyone other than, you know, go for it. Continue to build your network out. But ultimately, it's your journey, and you have to own your own learning process, regardless of what type of, you know, leadership development programs you find yourself into. You have to own your own learning. Tapping into a network is beneficial, but just recognize that relationship building and having the ability to build trust with others, those are the things that you'll learn along the way.Zach: Man, well, let's do this. Let's talk about ChangeNerd, because I do get folks who hit me up, right? I have old colleagues, I have people in different, like, just social networks who hit me up about getting into change management. Let's talk about ChangeNerd, you know, why the name, the journey you got there, and then just where people can learn more about it.Brian: Yeah. So it's funny, I knew I wanted to bring--well, I'll tell you this. Me and the team, we were building an app. So we built this nice, sophisticated change management app, and as I was trying to sell it to different companies I realized that change management teams didn't really have the budget for it, so we scrapped it. But I ran into--I live in the Chicago area. I found six large companies all implementing SAP all struggling at the same point in time, right? And it was that moment where I realized "Wow, I need to build a community, because we're just working way too siloed." So I launched the community. And the community is free to join, and every week I interview a subject matter expert around--and we talk about some area surrounding organizational best practices, and every so often we offer virtual courses and we also offer in-person events. And so, you know, when people think of ChangeNerd, I want them to think about the learning community, because at the heart that's what it is. We pay the bills by consulting different companies, but we try to spend the bulk of our time just enriching the learning community.Zach: Well, that's incredible, man. So talk to me about where--at what point did you realize that ChangeNerd was, like, "Okay, wow. This is something serious." Like, this is an actual--so I'm not gonna say it's a movement because that's mad corny.Brian: It is. [laughs]Zach: It's mad corny. People always--man, sidenote. Man, people always talking about "it's a movement, it's a movement." So many--how is everything moving? Brian: I know, I know. So let me tell you how I knew it was real. It got real for me when I got an email. I got an email from an HR VP that said "Hey, Brian. We want to fly you to Boston, and we want you to do a series of workshops for our supply chain leadership," right? That's when it got real for me. So I replied back. I'm like, "Do you have budget?" And they told me the budget, and via email within, like, literally 5 minutes we negotiated budget. That's when it got real for me, because what I found out was when you tap into a community or if you build a community, right, you're automatically building trust with people, right? And so when they see you they trust you because you're giving out good insight, you're giving out--you know, you're helping them, and when opportunities pop up they reach out to you. And so, you know, first it started out as a speaking engagement, right? And I didn't have to give them documents and compete with other firms. They wanted me. That's when I knew. I told my wife, "Honey, this is--like, this is real money," right? And then the phone calls came, you know? Head of IT from this company, head of HR from this company. "Brian, we want to get your perspective," right? And they knew that, you know, I wasn't gonna do it for free, and so they came with the budget, and so it's just--when you have that network of people, you're able to help people, and they can help you as well. And so to be honest with you, that's how I knew that this could be something real, when I started getting emails of different companies, from different companies, that needed my help.Zach: Well, talk to me about what you've been most excited about that ChangeNerd has accomplished, and as you look at 2020, what are you most looking forward to?Brian: Yeah. So when it comes to change management, you have major training companies really trying to control the narrative. You have--I won't call out any names here, but you have companies, you know, controlling the narrative. What I'm so proud of is with me interviewing different subject matter experts every week, it just opens the opportunity for the narrative to change, right? And so for change management not to be come, like, an academic exercise. And so for people not to be locked into one particular framework, and for more stories and experiences to be told. As we move into 2020, we're going to get a little bit more niche. We're gonna have little--well, not little, but smaller digital communities. So change management in health care, change management in non-profits, change management in financial services. We're gonna have digital communities by industry, by specialty, just to give people access to more practical advice. So that's something I'm looking forward to as we move into 2020.Zach: All right, man. Now, look, I wouldn't be a platform if I didn't give you a space to actually plug ChangeNerd. So, like, where can we learn more about it? What's the content? What's the information? Of course we'll have it in the show notes, but go ahead and shout it out right here.Brian: Yeah. So you can dive right in to the online community by going to community.changenerd.com. Community.changenerd.com. That will put you right into the community. Go ahead and join. It's totally free, and I look forward to seeing you there.Zach: All right. Now look, everybody--y'all heard him, okay? So y'all driving, you walking, you're doing whatever you do, you heard what he said. Community.changenerd.com. It'll be in the show notes. And y'all be clicking the links. We look at the Bit.lys. We see that y'all clicking stuff, but you ain't gotta do it. You heard me, right? So you heard Brian, you heard Zach. Just go ahead and click that thing. Now Brian, before we let you get up out of here, any shout-outs or parting words?Brian: No. Zach, I love what you're doing, and it's podcasts like this that really help people like us move forward, so I appreciate the effort that you're doing. And if you're listening to this episode, I would encourage you to reach out to me, and hopefully I can be of help to you, and that's pretty much it. But Zach, I'm very proud of the work that you're doing.Zach: [air horns sfx] Man, them air horns is for you and for me, man. I appreciate you, man. I thank you, and I appreciate the work that you're doing, right? You're demystifying change management. You're creating a space for folks who are interested in change management and who are already established change management practitioners to engage, learn, and build. And this is not an ad. So yeah, just shout-out to you. Shout-out to ChangeNerd. And listen, y'all, this does it for us on the Living Corporate podcast. Thank you for checking in. Now look, y'all typically know I kind of put all the ats and stuff, but every now and then I just kind of flex on 'em, just a little flex. Sometimes I'll just say "Google us." [Flex bomb sfx] You know? Just Google Living Corporate. Just "Living Corporate," right? We're on everything. We're on all of the streaming platforms. We're on Instagram at @LivingCorporate. We're on Twitter @LivingCorp_Pod, right? And then if you want to check out the website, again, just Google us, Living Corporate, or you can type it in the browser - living-corporate, please say the dash, dot com. We're also livingcorporate.co, livingcorporate.org, livingcorporate.tv, livingcorporate.net. We've got all of the livingcorporates except, you know it, livigncorporate.com, 'cause Australia has--Brian, Australia has livingcorporate.com, man. Brian: That's crazy.Zach: Ain't that crazy? Yeah. So listen, y'all. Appreciate y'all. Listen, if you have any questions, anything you want to learn about change management, make sure that y'all contact Brian. We're gonna put all of his contact information down in the show notes. Until next time, this has been Zach, and you've been talking to Brian Hampton, CEO and founder of ChangeNerd, a digital learning community for change management professionals. 'Til next time. Peace.
Achieve Wealth Through Value Add Real Estate Investing Podcast
James: Hey, audience and listeners, this is James Kandasamy from Achieve Wealth Podcast where we focus a lot on value-add, commercial real estate investing and we usually talk to commercial real estate operators who have been very active buying deals nowadays. Today, I have Brian Murray. So if you have not heard about Brian Murray, he's the author of the best-selling and award-winning book: Crushing It in Apartments and Commercial Real Estate. And he owns almost 700 units right now on his own and I think out of 700, 600 of it is apartments and 100 units are on office sites. Hey, Brian, welcome to the show. Brian: I'm really happy to be here, James. Thanks for having me. James: Really happy to have you here. And so tell me about, how did you go from 0 to 600 multifamily 0 to 700 asset classes on your own without syndication? Brian: Yeah, well, you know, I started 12 years ago and I'm located in Upstate New York. That's quite a bit different market than New York City. But my first property was an office building and it was a distressed office building and from that very first deal, I did a lot of value-adds. Frankly, I really didn't know what I was doing, I was kind of figuring stuff out as I went along but I progressively made that property perform better over a couple of years and added a ton of value. On that deal, I assumed the mortgage and on my second deal, I did an owner/finance situation. It was another property that was half full, I filled it up and refinanced out of both of those and bought three more properties and followed that path the entire way. Which is find well-located properties that were not well managed or had some other large value-add component, exercise that value add and then refinance, take cash out and buy more properties. And that's the exact path that I followed to get to where I'm at today. James: That's crazy, which is good. I mean, that's the model that, I mean, it's an absolute value-add model, which is basically the theme of this podcast. And so did you buy and then improve it and then refinance the money out or did you sell it and I didn't get that far, can you clarify that? Brian: Yeah. So I refinance the money out. I am primarily buying hold, still to this day. But especially in the first 10 years, I think I sold one or two properties, smaller properties, for the most part, during that time. I am selling some of my smaller properties right now to redeploy those funds into larger properties, but my strategy has really been buying hold. James: Awesome. Awesome. So before we go further, I want to clarify about your book, Crushing It. I mean, I remember asking this question to you when we met face-to-face. So did Gary take the 'Crushing' name from you or you took it from him? Which one is that? Brian: You know, so his book, Crushing It, came out about a year after mine but he launched a book called Crush It prior to when mine came out. But he took the Crushing It and you know, but that's fine. It doesn't matter. It's all good. James: Well, it must be a good name because both of you are like a best seller, you know, in your own domain. So awesome. So right now what's your plan? I mean you own this many units on your own and what's your plan right now? Brian: So right now, I'm really focused on diversifying. I was really excited to do my first Mastermind, which was last year, which is how you and I met and I met some great people at that Mastermind and highly recommend that to other people; surround yourself with other folks that are doing what you're doing. But when I went off to this Mastermind, it was really eye-opening for me because pretty much everybody there was doing syndication and it was a model that was really new for me and I just learned a ton about what people were doing. And my model has worked great for me up to this point, but I've reached a size, we're growing purely organically. It's becoming more challenging to maintain that pace of growth. I think also with valuations at a higher point, it's more and more challenging each year to pull that much value-add out with refis. I think another factor that's come into play is I've been very, very dedicated to putting every dollar that I've earned back into my real estate. That's been a been a big part of how I've done what I've done is to continuously reinvest back in. As a result of that, to this point, I've been living fairly frugally and you know at a certain point, you want to not have to put every dollar back in but you know, to maintain that growth rate, I've got to look at other options. I also want to diversify geographically because most of my properties are in one location. And so I'm in the middle of my first syndication right now and I've met so many good people that now, I'm developing partners and looking at new markets and it's very exciting for me. I love to learn, I love to try new things and getting into these other markets and, you know, meeting accomplished people like yourself, it's very motivating. So I'm just super excited about it. James: Yeah, it's eye-opening when you go and talk to different people who are doing the same level as you are doing much more higher level because you can see a lot of different thought processes and how people do things. So why are you moving towards syndication? I mean, you own like so many units on your own, can you go into a bit more detail on why do you think syndication is going to be beneficial for you right now in this market cycle as well or on your investment side? Brian: Well, you know syndication, it does open up a lot more opportunities in terms of size. So for example, right now, I'm looking very closely at an apartment complex that's approximately 300 units. It's in a market that's new for me that I've been doing a lot of research on and that would be a real challenge to try to pull off on my own. It really wouldn't be possible right now. So the property that I've purchased strictly on my own, without raising any outside money, I did last year, it was 126 units and you know to try to purchase something that's 300 plus units that wouldn't be possible for me right now. So it's pretty exciting and I think another thing is I really enjoy working with the idea of doing some projects with partners and getting into some of these new markets. So, there's another piece of it that's kind of exciting is, I've reached a point where I've done pretty well for myself and the idea of helping other investors who want to put their money to work to achieve their goals, I think that's going to be rewarding too. That if a project does really well that, it's all those limited partners that come in that can then improve their lives through their investment as well. And if I can be a part of that, I think I'll find that very rewarding. James: Okay, that's awesome. So scalability is important and you think of helping others as well to make money, especially I think other investors or other GPs who needs your skills, I would say? Brian: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and that's one of the things that's great too is I've found that it's meeting these other people that are doing it, I've got a different experience. So just like I'm learning from people like you, I'm finding that partners I can bring some different perspectives and value to the table as well. So you always want to partner with people that have strengths in areas that are different from you and that's what makes a strong team. James: Absolutely, especially in commercial real estate because the number of knobs that you can tune, there are so many knobs and especially like in multifamily because it's very management intensive compared to the triple net, other commercial properties. Multi-family is very management intensive and it gives a lot of ways to make more money or to scale down or to scale up. Even though you'd be really, really skilled at that but it just gives you a lot more opportunity. And the lease is one year term or six months term; you can quickly raise or reduce rents, it gives you a lot more fungibility, I would say. I mean, you have like SAS, we talked, in the beginning. You have like 600 units multifamily and 100 office space? Brian: Yes. James: So can we go a bit more detail into the office? What kind of office is it and how did you strategically balance within the 600 and 100 office? Is it optimistic or what did you see and why did you do it? Brian: So I started off with the office and actually, my second property was retail and so, starting on that commercial side was really interesting. I think one of the things that did for me is really emphasized my focus on customer service and customer care with tenants. And when I tried my first multifamily, I think that there were differences but they're also a lot of similarities. So the value-added approach that I was taking to office retail worked just as well with multifamily. And our focus on really taking care of our tenants as our customers really served us really well in that area also. Over time, as recently as two or three years ago, we had reached a point where up to that point we had more office and Retail and then about two years ago, I would say, we were 50/50 and now we're closer to two thirds, maybe even 70% multifamily with the rest commercial in terms of the makeup of our portfolio. So as time went by, we've really gravitated toward multifamily and that's our 100% focus right now. I think the biggest thing is that there's a number of things we like about multi-family. From our experience with commercial, you've always got a little bit more risk because you tend to have, not always, but you often will have tenants that comprise a disproportionately large percentage of your income and that can leave you really vulnerable if somebody leaves. So, on more than one occasion, we've had a commercial property where someone that takes up more than half of the space in that property, leaves unexpectedly. And then you've got with one tenant leaving, you have a property that is negative cash flow. And if you don't have a portfolio in place to support that, that can be devastating and it's really not fun even if you have a portfolio to perform it. And then when you go to backfill that space, it's more challenging in commercial properties because you oftentimes have to find the exact right tenant for that space, for that location, for the tenant mix and the property, for the configuration of the floor plan. There's a lot of things that you know, different commercial tenants are looking for. If you just adjust the rents up and down or maybe offer some concessions, a lot of times, the market doesn't immediately react to that. So turning that dial like you do in multifamily, you have less control. So if you're looking for a particular type of commercial tenant, it could be, it's not unusual for us to sit on a vacant space for one two or more years before the right tenant comes along and fits in and takes that space. With multifamily, you've got those dials that you can turn and say, Hey, you know, we're going to run a special. We're going to bump rents, we're going to drop rents and you usually will see a pretty quick reaction from the market to the changes that you make and from my perspective, that's better. You always want to have more control and the ability to adjust with your market, adjust to combat your competition and different things like that. And frankly, we've enjoyed working with the tenants. I think there's a perception out there that a lot of people would love to invest in commercial because they think they have this idea that working with white collar tenants would be much better, wouldn't have the problems but in our experience, they can be more challenging. They can be more demanding and sometimes even unreasonable with what they're looking for and you don't usually find that as much with the residential tenants in multifamily. We do primarily workforce housing and the people that we deal with there, tend to be good down to earth people and reasonable. So we appreciate that. James: And when you talk about office, this is the normal office tenants, I guess? Brian: Yeah full-spectrum, mostly professional tenants. We've got plenty of medical tenants. We have lawyers, accountants, all types, we've got not-for-profit offices, engineers and architects that would pretty much any type of white-collar professionals. James: Got it. That's very interesting. So when was the aha moment that, hey, I should do multifamily because you are focusing a lot on office, what was that triggering moment where you say, okay, I may need to look at this multi-family? Brian: Well, I don't know if there was a specific moment. I think it happened gradually over time. When we had about 50/50 multifamily and Commercial, I think one of the big things was watching the performance of the two halves of the portfolio and seeing which half was performing better and part of it had to do with the types of value-add projects we were finding and I thought we were better able to execute on the value-adds on the multifamily side. And that portion of our portfolio just kept outperforming the commercial side and I just saw in the market that we're in, more opportunity there and I felt like it was more stable income based. So, I think I think it just happened gradually over time and you kind of tend to slowly move in the direction that's performing well and where the needs are in your Marketplace. James: Got it. So all the deals that you have done on multifamily, how did you choose? I mean all these deals are in Upstate, New York, is that right? Brian: Yes. James: So you may not choose the city because that's where you live, the area. But how did you select the submarket? Okay, this deal is good in this submarket, what are the parameters that you looked at When you look at a deal in multi-family? Brian: So, we have a really close familiarity with the subtleties of the market and so it's fairly nuanced like there's not one overarching thing. One of the primary drivers of the market where we are is not that far away is a fairly large military base. And so one of the factors that we look at is, well, we definitely welcome military tenants, we have shied away from the properties that are closer to the military base and tend to have a really high percentage of military population. That's just because there's so much turnover, lenders are less excited about lending those properties because they know that long-term, there could be downsizing. A base could close, there's exposure with that. So we have gravitated within our region to the areas that are maybe we will have some military but not be all military and into the communities where people want to live, in the parts of the city that we feel are strong and good safe locations and convenient locations for the major employers in the area. James: Got it. Got it. And on average right now, what is the price per door in that market? Because I never talk to anybody from New York who's buying multifamily. I mean, Upstate, New York, New York City, but in general, can you give us some guideline on price per door? What cap rated stabilize deals are being bought right now? Brian: Yes, absolutely. So it's a really, really wide range. So that's what I would say at first. The most recent stabilized property that we purchased we paid about 60,000 a door. There are properties selling in the area, 80,000 plus per door, not that often but a lot of the properties we've got, we've purchased a couple of decent sized properties at auction. We've purchased a lot of distressed properties. The 126 units that we purchased last year, we paid in the 40s per door and that's pretty low for this area actually, but also the occupancy was below 60% when we bought it and it had a lot of deferred maintenance. So I do feel like we got a fair deal and a good deal on that because there was so much upside but there was a reason that it was priced that low. And so you can come along properties in this area that have low price point sometimes even down into the 30s per door, but usually, there's a reason why they might be in severe distress. But for stabilized properties, I think you're mostly looking at maybe 50 to 70 a door. James: Okay. You also mentioned that you're looking at other markets now? Brian: Yes. James: And why is that and what're your criteria to look for in other markets? Brian: So the number one reason is really a risk management type of approach. Where anybody who's come in and taken a close look at our business and one point even a few years back, I had some graduate students come in and they analyzed it and everybody said, hey, you're kind of crazy. You've got all your properties concentrated right here in this one city and now they're all within maybe half an hour drive of that City and there's a lot of risks involved to that. So if that City that I focused on starts to decline or say that military base that's not that far away, if they downsize then that all affects my portfolio. So I've known for a long time that it would be wise to diversify geographically and it's time to do that. Another factor is frankly, this is not a huge City. It's not a big area that I'm in and we've got limited opportunities for growth here. There's a limited number of properties that come onto the market and realistically, it's time for us to look to other places. So it's a variety of things. James: So let's say you're looking at a new city, a city A and a city B, what do you look for in that city that you think is going to be appealing to you? Brian: Well, I think there's a variety of different factors. Probably the number one thing that makes the city appealing is job growth, job creation. Being located in Upstate New York, it's not a strong area for job growth. There are pros and cons to being in a market that's undesirable. So I have less competition. I can buy things at much higher cap rates and I can get properties to cash flow better if I have less competition and higher cap rates. So, there's sometimes you can look at it and say, hey, if you're in a market that's less desirable, sometimes you're getting properties at a great deal and there's something to be said for that. But as I look to new markets, I'm trying to find something where cap rates haven't dropped too far and you can get a reasonable return but you've got that benefit of healthy growth in population and jobs. But I think because I'm looking for more geographic to looking for a market that's going to show more stability, it's on an uptrend and just like any other place, no matter what market I'm looking at, I've realized over time just how critical the specific location with any city is. So almost any City has their good parts and the bad parts and so you could take any market that you choose and break it down into all different, more and less appealing locations. And so, I wouldn't just throw and say, hey, this one city is great, even though the population is growing and you and I talked about a property not that long ago that you are familiar with the location and you very wisely were like, oh, that's not the right deal. It might be a good city, but that's not the right part of the city. James: Correct. So, I mean, you are sitting in Upstate New York, you looked at the entire nation. Can you give us the top three cities that you think that you want to delve in? James: Brian, so you are sitting in Upstate New York, and you looked at the entire nation, you know how multifamily works because you own 600 on your own. So you just briefly outline what are the things that you look for in a city. So can you name like top three cities that you think that you want to be involved in that you think has a strong growth story? Brian: Well, it's a work in progress for sure. And what I would say is sort of the candidates that I've narrowed it down to the commonality would be they tend to be the places that people are migrating to and being in Upstate New York where a lot of people are leaving the area, I want to look toward the places they're going. And so, primarily in the Southeast, pretty much our candidates or everything from starting in probably North Carolina going down to Florida and you know all the way over to maybe the little bit in Texas, but I think Georgia is an interesting market that a lot of people are pursuing. I'm partnering on a project in Kentucky right now and we're looking at North Carolina and there are some very attractive markets in Florida as well. James: Got it. Got it. Got it. Before I want to go into the deal level analysis that you do, I want to quickly ask this question because you know, it's very unique to you because you had your own deals and now you're going into syndication, right? So what do you think are the skills needed from yourself when you are having your own deals, where you can skip a distribution or whatever happened to the deal is your own problem. So now you're going into syndication, where it involves a lot more people. What do you think is a few skills that syndicators need to be successful in syndication? Brian: Sure. I mean I would say start a start with one of the big ones which is something that I don't have, which is an investor base and that's a whole job unto itself. Over the years doing what I've been doing and getting some acknowledgments for that, I had a lot of people approach me over the years and say, hey, you know, can I invest and I never took them up on that and now I'm doing that. But what I've realized is in getting to know all these folks that are out there that there's a lot of people who are interested in partnering with me who already have those investor bases and have that skill set of managing those investors and taking care of all aspects of that. So at this point, I'm primarily thinking that I bring more value in the weighing on the underwriting and the property and identifying all the value-add opportunities and making sure that people look at it as more than a spreadsheet because there's so much more. I toured a property last week and was able to uncover quite a few things. The broker that was there. I was one of the last people, they had about 40 tours and I came through and identified some significant value-add opportunities that the broker said no one else picked up on. And I think that that's something I didn't discuss but we've managed all of our own properties that whole time and so, the knowledge that you get from that just brings so much better of analysis to a deal to make sure you're vetting it properly, you're not overpaying, you're also not underpaying and that there might be value there that you're not realizing. That some of the assumptions that you're making for rent growth are real and can actually be feasible for implementation. And so, you know, those are some of the things that I bring and the experience and having the portfolio I have may give lenders a lot of comfort. And so, I'm recognizing that, hey, I could focus on my strengths and bring some things to a partnership and take those areas that I don't have and other people might and partner up. So if someone's going to do it on their own, they've got to have a pretty broad skill set and that's a challenge, to have the operational knowledge and bring that side and also have the people skills and the investor relationships, it's not easy. I have a lot of respect for people that are doing it all. James: Absolutely. So you are two operators, where you underwrite deals, you understand the operation and you're doing your own asset management. You're missing the investor base creation side of it, which I think you are either partnering or slowly building that up so which is awesome. For me, the operators are at the top of the food chain because they are the backbone of the whole deal. They know what's happening in terms of the rents, how many percents of rent increase is happening on each unit? How many units are being turned? What is the make ready period, what's the delinquency? What is the idling unit period? That's a lot of parameters in the multi-family operation which can be optimized and if you know that very well, your underwriting can be very, very solid, I would say. Brian: And I think you also bring a reality check. I think that the folks that are operating in the syndication space that don't have as much operating experience, it's easy to look at numbers and assumptions in a spreadsheet and it's challenging to actually recognize what that means in terms of the actual human beings who are there living in the apartments, what it means for the contractors and the property managers and whether what you're assuming is even practical. I look at a spreadsheet and I'm looking at it realizing, hey, you know, I looked at it once a day and I told somebody I'm like, do you understand how much drama will be involved in this? So if you haven't done that you don't know. And sometimes that translates into you might need to maybe tone back your rent growth or you might need to say, hey, maybe we implement something like this over time so that we don't have an all-out rebellion on our hands. So, you know, it's a challenge to bring all those things to the table. James: Yeah, I've seen people who come to me, you know, first few deals and say, oh, this is all bills paid, I'm just going to change it to tenant pay bills. I say, well, that's easy. We can see the value. Well, you do not know how much drama you're going to have there and you might not able to do that on a specific property, a specific location. And they say they want to do them; Utility Bill back, they want to increase the rent, they want to charge covered parking, they want to do laundry increase. So many things they want to do at the same time and I can tell you, they don't have the experience actually. But the thing is, a lot of people have been making money even without all the skills. And I always tell them everybody's a champion in a bull market. Brian: Exactly, yes. A rising tide lifts all ships, right? James: Correct. So, people may not look at that skill more in detail or give due consideration to that type of skills where the operation is important, but I think it's important if you want to sustain good rent growth across different market cycles. So coming back to underwriting. So right now you are looking at deals, how many percents of deals do you reject immediately by just looking at it? Brian: Wow, I would say well over 90%. James: Okay. So the 10% that you have or what do you look for in that 10%? What do you do? What are the steps that you take to look at that 10%? Brian: You know, I think the very, very first thing I do is I look at the T12. I want to start my analysis of a property by looking at actuals. And then I'm going to base the current situation and the actuals, going to kind of weigh that against my own experience. So, how does the target asking price or the whisper price or whatever they have, how does that compare to the actuals? And then based on my experience looking through those actuals, what do I see that jumps out at me that might create value? And if you look down through and start looking at the comps and really piecing together this puzzle about, what opportunity is really here? Is the valuation based on something that's completely unrealistic? A lot of times, you'll recognize that some brokers are way better than others at doing a realistic model and pro forma and that's much appreciated. Because you see too many where they'll say, oh, you know, the labor is going to be whatever, $300 a door, and you know, hey, that's crazy. Like it should be 1100 a door or 1000 a door in that market and you know, you'll find out that well, it's been managed by the owner and they don't track the labor. But if you see that it's based on the labor is $2000 a door and you know, hey, we could get that to 900 realistically and still do a good job of maintaining that property, then you start to see an opportunity. It's a combination of running numbers and logical analysis based on experience, is really what I would say it boils down to. James: So in a new market, how would you determine payroll and [12:09unintelligible] on property taxes because this differs by market? Brian: Sure. So all those things are going to vary by market, although many of them will fall within a range. So you're going to say, well, in that market it's going to tend to be higher or lower and I will use my best judgment but if it passes a certain level of scrutiny, that's when you want to really get an established reputable local property manager involved who could look at it and say, okay, for this market specifically, these assumptions you've made are realistic or not realistic. The same thing goes with construction costs they could vary and I can look at it and say, I think that new flooring should be this much but hey, maybe in that market, flooring is much more expensive or maybe it's a lot cheaper. So, you know it's going to be within a certain range, but you just need to figure out how you need to tweak it to get to that market. James: Got it Got it. Got it. I mean since you have your own property management in your own backyard and now I presume you looking at third partying your property management in this new market, is that correct? Brian: That's correct. James: So, what would you think is the most important factor to look at that third party property management company? Brian: Well, at this point, I would say yes, we're relying on third-party property managers. We may eventually consider expanding into new markets or operations, but not doing that right now and evaluating the property managers, it's been a very interesting process. I think you need to look at the full picture. I don't think there's any one thing you can look at. For a project that we're underwriting right now, in evaluating the various property managers, of course, we weigh referrals, you know, that's always good to hear referrals but I think one of the things that are appealing about the property manager that we ended up selecting for this project that we're pursuing is they actually specialize in this specific type of property that we're looking at. So, they have a track record and experience of nearly 10,000 units that are specifically C-Class properties that they've done value-add and executed those successfully. And a fair percentage of those are in the specific market that we're looking at and so there's a lot of things that just lined up. I think if I had to pick the one thing from my interaction with this firm because they toured the property with me as well, but I actually was very impressed with their analysis of our underwriting. They actually went through our assumptions and they toured the property on their own before I got there and gave us their own analysis and without us asking, they also toured the comps and gave us some feedback on that. I was impressed. You could tell that they went out of their way to look at the right things. They looked at the types of things that I would look at and they identified things and based on that write-up, I just said, hey, this is a firm that's experienced. They get it. They did a thorough job. They were professional, they were responsive and you know, it really checked a lot of boxes in terms of giving us an overall sense of comfort with the possibility of working with them. James: Awesome. Awesome. Let's go to a bit more on the value-add side because you have done a lot of value-adds because you buy refi and keep it more long-term. So what is the most valuable value-add multifamily from your experience? Brian: I would say that the most valuable is it's different for almost every property. If I had to pick, you know, I think that sort of the Big Bang low-hanging fruit tends to be the, I'd say, clean paint landscape, kind of like the surface stuff. If a property is dirty and not well kept and then you make it clean and you put a fresh coat of paint and you landscape it, it can change the entire image of property of fairly modest cost and that can have a huge impact. The rent adjustment is sort of obvious, I think everybody looks at that. I guess big picture if the landlord is way undercharging, of course, you know, that's an obvious big easy one, but one thing that we've ended up doing in a number of cases that is less obvious that people almost never talk about is lowering rents. And in the 126 unit that I mentioned earlier, that's under distress, that's the first thing that we did is we went in and by our assessment, they were trying to charge too much which was a major factor in why the occupancy was so low. So we immediately went in and cut all the rents and that might seem counterintuitive for a value-add person but over the last six months, we've raised the occupancy 25% and one of the big reasons is we lower the rents and so the net change in terms of the net operating income of that property it skyrocketed by lowering rents. So that also further demonstrates that it really varies, you kind of have to you know. It's sort of like if you look at five different people and say, you know, what change would you make in each person to improve their overall wellness? For some people, they might say stop smoking and some people might say, well, that one needs to eat better so you can't kind of really say well, what's the one thing overall? James: How did you decide to lower the rent? What was the data that you looked at and decide, okay, I just need to reduce the rent here? Brian: Well, you know, that's one of the fantastic things when you've got so many properties in one market. You know immediately that based on your other operations that something's off. You know when it's low, you know when it's high, you know when the fees don't match what's present in that market or the concessions don't match. It becomes very simple. If you're going into a new market, you've got to study those comps and do the best you can and hopefully, tour those comps and do your own homework. But it's one of many advantages of having a concentration of properties in one area. In addition to all the many operational efficiencies that you can have is that you have that market specific knowledge that is there's no substitute for. James: Got it. Got it. So when you decide to lower the rent, I mean it is a counter-intuitive but I think it makes sense in value-add, especially when you go with that kind of low occupancy. You need to do something to bring up the occupancy because once you bring up the occupancy, you can do a lot of other things. Brian: Exactly. James: You can't do it when the occupancy is low and you're adamant about pushing up the rent. So was your thought process, rather than I leave this unit vacant, that's the biggest loss compared to giving [19:48inaudible] $25 or $30 increase that doesn't make sense. Brian: Yes. That's right. So, you know that's been one of the strategies that I've adhered to and has worked well; you lower the rents and lease it up and then you make improvements as you go and then you raise rents from there. Nothing more expensive than vacant space. The other piece of that which is an advantage of not syndicating is that I have been able in many cases to fund many of the improvements out of cash flow. So with this particular property, we did lower the rents, but the occupancy has been brought way up. So we've just crossed a threshold where now this property is cash flowing again and all that cash flow is going to be directed right back into making improvements, probably, for the next few years at least. And so, that's a perfect example of well, if you're going to syndicate and you need to pay investors, you really can't be investing all of your cash flow back into a property. So what do you need to do? You need to raise some money up front to pay for those improvements and not count on cash flow so that you can achieve your investor returns and start to get them their money back. James: Yeah. That's the one thing different with syndicated deal versus owning your own deals. You don't have to raise so much money so you can take your cash flow and just put it back. With a syndication [21:27crosstalk/inaudible] and you may lose deals because you're competing with somebody who has a lot of money versus somebody who is syndicating. Brian: That's right. James: It's very interesting. So in terms of, I'm going to your personal side, is there a proud moment in your life or not in your life, toward your real estate career, that you think, I would remember that moment throughout my life until the end; can you describe that moment? Brian: Oh, wow, you know there's been so many moments, but not all good. James: No, no, the proudest moment where you think you really made a big impact on something. Brian: I never really expected this but some of the proudest moments that I've had has been since my book came out and I would have never guessed that that would lead to that but some of the feedback that I've gotten from readers that they've shared with me that it's changed their lives that they started into investing and have already built portfolios. And to see the direct link between the book and people, you know, really making improvements in their lives has been extremely rewarding. So I think one of the great things is that I really went into the idea of writing the book just because I wanted to share what I've learned, the mistakes I've made and to help other people, but I never really thought that it would sell very many copies or that people would have that kind of effect and the fact that it did. When I get a letter, a note from somebody, it's been extremely rewarding. So now I kind of remember that I think that's been a big impact. James: Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, I get a lot of notes from my books as well and sometimes you don't really take it seriously because for us it's just common knowledge from what we have learned. But some notes do make us think, oh, I really really made an impact on someone. I mean, it's mind-blowing in how many lives can be changed with the things that you share in a book. Brian: Right, right. Yeah. Absolutely. James: Yeah. So the next second question is why do you do what you're doing? Brian: Well. You know and it's interesting. I mean actually, in the book I share at one point, this was a few years back, I had somebody come up to me and they said you know, how much is enough? Like you are so greedy, why do you keep going? And I just realized that this person doesn't understand, they missed the whole point that it's just rewarding to take a property that's not performing, that's in distress, that's maybe even a bad thing in a community and to turn it around and make it a better place for people to live. You help the tenants and you help the community and to do that and start to get involved. Like I do meetups now and I met new people and threw those in the book to help other investors, and so, you know, I look forward to going to work every day. I enjoy it. I enjoy the challenge of finding and executing on properties that aren't achieving up to their potential and making a better place for people to live and more profitable at the same time. So I just think it's fun. Like I enjoy what I do. James: Yeah, it's like a discovery, you're trying to discover these from your paper to the real stuff. Especially when you are underwriting because you're assuming a lot of things and how does that whole assumption become a reality? You know, it's very interesting to see the output of that become [25:42inaudible] people's lives, which is just... Brian: Absolutely. James: So we really had a really good knowledge box from you, Brian. So can you tell our listeners and audience how to get hold of you? Brian: Sure, you know, your listeners can find me on Facebook. You can find me on LinkedIn, you know, you can find the book on amazon.com or on the book website is crushingit.info and my company's website is Washingtonstreetproperties.com And if anybody is interested in reaching out, I'd be glad to hear from them. James: Awesome, Brian. Thank you for coming and joining us. I think that's it. Thank you. Brian: Thanks, James, was an honor.
Achieve Wealth Through Value Add Real Estate Investing Podcast
James: Hi listeners and audience, this is James Kandasamy from Achieve Wealth Through Value-add Real Estate Investing Podcast. Today, we have Brian Hamrick. Brian owns 370 units which 2/3 of it is syndicated, the remaining is owned by him. He's from Grand Rapids, Michigan. He does multifamily, self-storage and also non-performing notes and Brian is also the past president of Rental Properties Owner Association. Hey, Brian, welcome to the show. Brian: Hey, James, great to be here. Thanks for having me. James: I'm really happy to have you here. I mean, you have been podcasting for the past three years. You have a really good audience because I remember after showing up on your podcast, a lot of people did contact me. So I'm sure a lot of people love your podcast as well. Brian: That's fantastic. I'm glad to hear that. James: Yes. So can we go a bit more detailed into what is this Rental Properties Owners Association, how do they add value to syndicators or landlords or tenants? Can you describe a bit more on that? Brian: Sure, the Rental Property Owners Association, which I'm a past president of, I'm currently on the executive committee and I sit on a number of different committees, they are a landlord representation organization. So we also work a lot with Real Estate Investors and provide all kinds of training for both landlords and Real Estate Investors. Every year, we have an annual conference where we have National Speakers come in and talk about all different types of investing asset classes and whatnot. And really I got involved with it because when I moved here to Grand Rapids, 15 years ago, I was looking for a professional organization that I could become part of that would help me network with other professionals in the industry. People who own rental properties and knew how to profit from it and also just an organization that would help teach best practices so I could learn the ropes how to do it and certainly through the Rental Property Owners Association and the people I've met there, I've learned a lot. We provide a lot of training but probably what I consider most important of all is we have a legislative committee that works with lawmakers, both local and at the state level, to help push through bills that help rental property owners and also help prevent bills from becoming a reality that would hurt us; anything that has to do with like rent control or some of those hot button issues that as landlords and rental property owners would like to avoid. James: Yeah, very interesting. So like New York and I think, Oregon now is rent control states, if I'm not mistaken, so they probably have similar Association like yours in that city, I guess. Brian: I would hope so. It sounds like they're fighting a losing battle as you and I both know as rental property owners, you know, I believe you invest out of state, out of your area, is that correct? James: No. No, I'm from Austin. I invest everything in Austin and San Antonio. Brian: Okay. So would you even consider investing in a city or a state that has rent control? James: No. Of course not. Brian: Yeah. It's really detrimental to the market and I think it's going to cause a lot of problems. I used to live in Santa Monica, California where they had rent control and you can see the negative results of that. James: Oh, Santa Monica in California, did they have rent control in the past? Brian: Yeah, a lot of the Los Angeles counties, you know, it's kind of county by county, city by city, area by area, but there is rent control in Los Angeles in certain areas and you can just see how rental property owners, who own buildings in rent control areas, have no incentive to put money back into them. They're not putting the capital expenditures back into their property to keep them in good shape because there's no incentive to do so. They can't raise rents beyond a certain amount each year and you know, so why would you invest $100,000 back into your building if you're not going to get that out in value? James: Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't make sense for a business. So you may not run it as a business, you may be just run it as cash flow, I don't know, it's like a cash flow investment. I guess you don't have to spend any capital on it. Brian: I can see how if you've owned the property for a long time and you bought it at the right price at the right time, you could probably be doing well with cash flow. But in these markets where you see a lot of rent control, they're expensive markets. So I'm not really sure once rent control is instituted in these markets what's going to incentivize new investors to come in and bring fresh money into the market. James: Interesting interesting. So coming back to your portfolio, can you tell me in terms of your holdings, how much is multifamily, how much is self-storage? How many percents of each one of these and how much is non-performing notes? Brian: Sure. Sure. So multi-family is my bread and butter. I've been doing that since 2008. I moved to Grand Rapids in 2005 and 2008 the bubble burst, you know, we entered the Great Recession, it was a buyers' market. I bought my first 12 unit, I was using my own money in the beginning, started using other people's money and then started syndicating. We currently have about 370 units here in the Grand Rapids area, Grand Rapids, Michigan and that's multi-family residential. In 2018 we purchased a self-storage facility, it's about 28,000 square foot, we're currently adding another 15,000 square foot to it and that's been a fantastic investment, I really love self-storage. And then, as you mentioned, I host a podcast - The Rental Property Owner and Real Estate Investor Podcast - and one of my guests over two years ago was a gentleman by the name of Gene Chandler and he was investing in non-performing notes and I really liked his strategy so much that I ended up investing well over 300,000 dollars with them and the results have just been fantastic. James: So, you now do multifamily and now you're doing two other asset class. So can you tell me what does multifamily did not offer that these two other asset class offers? Brian: Well, I like you, I'm investing in my own backyard for when it comes to multifamily. Even though I've bought and sold over 450 units, in 2015, I stopped buying multifamily altogether because the values had gone to a point where I could no longer justify syndication. I couldn't get the returns that I needed for my investors to be able to to pay the prices that people were asking. The last two deals I found - one was off-market, one was kind of in between market - and I can go into details on that but anything that I saw after that point just, I was so spoiled by the prices I was getting between 2008-2014, that I started looking for other asset classes. And there were probably about 3 years where I just sat on the fence, waiting to see if the market would change or something else would come along. And at some point, one of the people who I met through the podcast, brought me a self-storage deal that he had found off-market. I looked at it, I like the numbers. His underwriting was very conservative, but the numbers were very compelling and we ended up buying that in 2018. And just in one year of basically bringing the rents up to market value and switching to a virtual online web-based management system, we were able to add over $700,000 in value to that property. So I like the simplicity of managing and owning self-storage more so than multifamily because in multifamily, you have tenants and plumbing issues... James: So it's very Property Management intensive, right? Brian: It definitely is and the self-storage, it's not. When you have turn-over, you're basically sweeping out a metal shed, you know, so it's a lot easier to manage and own and operate self-storage, especially when you're in a good market and I think we bought in an excellent market. It's just north of Lansing, Michigan. And then with the non-performing notes, I found a strategic partner who handled a lot of the nuts and bolts of that and I was able to invest with him somewhat passively so I enjoyed that aspect of investing there and the returns we were getting were very good. James: Interesting. Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned in my book, commercial asset classes go in cycles. I mean, I know I'm a multi-family guy and your bread and butter is multifamily but if you find the right operators in other asset classes, you can make a lot more money or equal amount of money as what you're making with multi-family. So, would you think so? Brian: Absolutely. Finding the right strategic partners in other asset classes that's one of the things I set my mind to when I realize I'm just not seeing the returns I want to see in multifamily and apartments in my area where I'm comfortable investing. Now, have you looked at other asset classes? James: I did look at a few asset class. I mean the asset class that I looked at is also like, you know, self-storage or mobile home parks but it's also in demand. I'm surprised to see here that you found something in 2018 because I thought self-storage is a hot asset class as well, I will risk going after that. Brian: Yeah, it was a lucky strike and we've been looking for similar opportunities. But yeah, we're not finding them. What we're doing instead is building ground-up construction in self-storage, finding locations where the demographics are right and the need for more square footage of self-storage space is there and then we go in and fill that need. James: Yeah, but I'm happy that you are looking at multifamily is not like the only asset class throughout the whole real estate cycle. I mean you felt like in 2015, things picked up and you really can't find the prices that you want and you have changed strategy which is how an investor should be. You always want to look at what's available out there, the deal flow because the economy is still doing very well. There's a lot of capital out there and it's just harder to find a great really-making-sense deal. I wouldn't say deals, making sense deals in multi-family, something that makes sense. It's just so hard to find out nowadays. Brian: Absolutely. As an investor, you have to stay nimble and flexible and be open to other opportunities. Now, I know a lot of people in our field, our asset class of multifamily and apartments will find strategic partners outside of their area like in Texas or Georgia or wherever and partner with strategic partners who are able to find better value and better yields in their Investments. But I've had some bad experiences early on with some single-families that I owned out of state so I've always been very hesitant since then to own rental property, residential rental property, out of state. James: So you like to have any property within your own backyard, but you like to diversify within asset classes. Some people have one asset class, but they go across the nation. Like some people like to buy multi-family across the nation, wherever make sense but you are doing it the other way around. Brian: Yeah. Since I've branched out into self-storage and non-performing notes, I'm comfortable switching up asset classes. James: Awesome. So on self-storage, are you the operator, are you the primary guy? Brian: No, my strategic partner is. He's the one who found the deal off-market, he negotiated it. I basically came in and raised the money; we syndicated that and raise the funds to be able to acquire it. James: Got it. Very interesting. And on the performing notes, you have a strategic partner, I would say, right? Brian: Yeah, I have a strategic partner on that. He's the one who knows that world. He's been doing it for well over six years now and really knows how to negotiate with the lender who we're purchasing a non-performing note from. He works with the homeowners to try to keep them in the home and figure out if that's even possible and then knows who the title company is that he should work with to get the right due diligence done and he's got the different scenarios in his head of how we can profit off of these notes. If we keep the homeowner in the home, what are the strategies there for us to maximize our profit or if we have to go through the foreclosure process. How do we go about that and maximize our returns in those cases as well. James: Interesting. Interesting. So if you get a multi-family deal today, would you still do it? Brian: If I found a deal that made sense and my underwriting shows that I could get the returns to my investors that they're accustomed to, I'd do it in a second, absolutely. James: Okay. Okay. So let's talk about the market and submarket selection. So why did you move from California to Grand Rapids, Michigan? Everybody's heading to Texas and Florida from California. Brian: I'm from Michigan, originally. James: Oh, you're from Michigan? Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Brian: Yeah, my wife is from here as well. So we met in California but decided okay, if we get married, start a family we didn't want to do it in Los Angeles, it's just too busy there. James: Makes sense. Yeah, I mean just based on data that 50% of the population move to Texas And I think there's a lot more but Texas and Florida is the favorite destination for people from California. That's why I was asking the question. And how do you select the submarket in Grand Rapids, Michigan? Like how do you select which submarket to really do the deal? Brian: Well eyes because I live here, I am looking within a half hour to an hour of where I live. Grand Rapids is very strong, has very strong demographics. It's one of the few Midwest cities that really bounce back strong from the Great Recession. A lot of diversified manufacturing industry. Furniture, Amway is here, we've got a lot of different industries and employment based here. So when I look at submarkets, I'm looking more at the neighborhoods, what's the crime rate in that neighborhood? What's the income level in that? What kind of rents can we command and by the way, I'll buy B properties and C properties or you know, C minus properties that we can push into that C plus B minus range. But I will avoid the The D areas and I've seen a lot of opportunities in the D areas. And by D, I mean where you have a lot higher crime rate, where you have a lot more evictions and tenant turnover and problems. So I'm just very careful about and I work with the property management company that has a good grasp of these areas. So when we look at a property, we can really get a sense of if we buy this, is there an upside value, can we improve it and get higher rents, get better residents in here or is it going to be bound by the neighborhood it's in, that where it is now is what just where it's going to be? James: Got it. Got it. Interesting. What about underwriting? I mean, when you look at a deal like I mean when you are buying multifamily, right? So how would you select the deal? Let's say a hundred deals been sent to you, do you know how many percents of it you would reject? Brian: Right now 100%. I'm not even looking right now, but what I'll do is I'll do a quick rule of thumb. Okay, what's the net operating income? What's the cap rate that they're asking? Is there upside potential? And of course, if it's listed by a broker, they'll always tell you the market the rents are way under market. you can raise the rent. No problem. That's sometimes true, sometimes not true. But this area is so strong that any seller right now knows that they can get top dollar and while there's a lot of Institutions and out-of-state investors and even International investors who are willing to pay top dollar, the yields that they are willing to accept are much lower than what I'm willing to pay, which is why I'm not even looking at the moment. James: Very interesting. Now I see it's happening across the country. I thought it was only happening in Texas and Florida but looks like across the country, that's what's happening. It's just so hard to find deals that used to make sense to us long time ago, right? So it's crazy out there. Brian: Yeah, and it could just be that I'm spoiled because I was buying during a period when I could buy it at eight nine ten caps. And now, when I see things at five six, six and a half caps, I don't even want to consider them. But had I bought it at those cap rates between 2015 and 2017, I would have made a lot of money. So maybe I'm just a little too stringent in my criteria right now. James: Yeah. That could be it as well. Brian: Are you buying right now? James: Well, I mean, well, I'm still buying if I find the right deal. It's just so hard to find the deal that makes sense for my criteria, and I'm sure that's the same thing as your criteria. I'm still buying if I find the right deal but I'm not underwriting a hundred deals, you know, in one month. You know, whatever deal comes to me, I usually know that within the quick look, I know whether it makes sense for me to underwrite or not. And sometimes brokers will call me if they know that a certain deal is something that I would do. That's the only deal that I look at. Brian: What's your quick back of the napkin way of determining whether or not you want to invest in something? James: If it's an email blast, I probably wouldn't look at it. Brian: Yeah. Yeah, you kind of eliminate the ones that go out to everybody. James: Yeah, it's already got everybody on his shop date and coming on an email blast. You know, you have to go on a best and final and best and best and final and then this ultimate best and final offer, which is you're shooting in the dark, right? You're basically bidding against yourself. [20:45 inaudible] I'm not really in a desperate mode to buy deals that go through that kind of process. So when I look for value-add if there's a true value-add deal, I mean, minus the crime rate area, I definitely know the area that has high crime rate, I can check it out quickly Class B and C, but need to have true value-add that we can go and add value. I don't really look at the entry cap rate, but I look for the spread of the cap rate from the time I buy to in the next two years kind of thing without any rent increases. Brian: I think part of part of my problem, one of the reasons that I've just been on the fence is because we bought a value-add property back in 2015. It was an older building, built in 1920 and it was such an exhaustive process to go in and add value to that property. I was over there like every day. James: It is very tiring to do those value-add deals. To do deep value-adds, I would say. Brian: Deep, deep value-add. And so my bandwidth for more opportunities was just completely limited because I was so exhausted by working on this one particular project. Now, luckily, we got it to a point where we added tremendous value to it and we're very proud of the work we did but you have to weigh the opportunity cost when you do those value-adds because sometimes they're so intensive that some of the lower hanging fruits, you bypassed that. James: Correct. Yeah. I see some syndicators doing deals every month and they're not doing a deep value-add or they're just doing the lighter value-add. Maybe they're just doing a yield play. [22:30inaudible] they can buy every month. They can claim 5,000 units or 3,000 years versus deep value-add to be like 100 and 200 and 300. It's a really really deep value-add. You probably make a lot more money than the guy who owns 3,000 to 4,000 units, but it's a lot of work. Brian: It's more than just asset managing. You kind of become a de facto developer. James: Developer, a huge project manager. Yes, so many things but the deep value-add gives you a sense of accomplishment. Brian: It does. I'm very proud of the work we did on this particular property and more so than any of my other properties because I didn't have to put nearly as much work into them. James: Yeah, and the deep value-add it becomes a case study, right? Because it truly shows your skills to turn around property. And people who have done deep value-add it's going to be easier for them to do the lighter [23:30inaudible] Brian: Yeah, yeah, that's an excellent point. James: So that's very interesting. So can you name like 2 or 3 secret sauces to your success? Brian: The two or three secret sauces to my success. I'm sorry if you hear that printer going in the background there. James: It's okay. No worries. Brian: Hopefully that ends soon. Secret sauces to my success; I think doing the underwriting, running my numbers. I always like to say, I like to see my numbers in bullet time. To see all the Matrix, you know, everything slows down and you can see it coming at you. I want to know what are the real expense is going to be after we've acquired the property. One particular mistake that I see a lot of investors making is they assume that the property tax is going to be the same as what the previous owner was paying and that's just not the case. So right there that's one of the main factors that I look at right away, is what is the property tax going to become once I buy this property and that eliminates 50% of the deals that I would even consider. So number one secret sauce is just really understanding the numbers. Not just where they are today, but where they will be once we acquire the property. Number two is having the right team. I am all about partnering with strategic partners who add value because they understand inside and out the asset class that you're investing in. The reason I was able to expand my multifamily portfolio was that I partnered with someone who owned his own property management company and managed the type of properties that I wanted to acquire. That without his assistance and without his team that really knew how to go in and do the due diligence and help me assess upfront, what are the capital expense costs going to be? What are the true costs going to be when we acquire this property? Without that, I would have made a lot of mistakes. The same with self-storage. I partnered with someone who even though he's young and new, somewhat new to the business, he had really studied it, talked to a lot of professionals, been mentored by people and really understood inside and out how we could add value to that self-storage facility. And everything that he put in his pro forma ended up becoming a reality. With my non-performing note partner, I mean he knows that world inside and out. So when we acquire a note, the first 12 that I bought with him, we only had one that we lost money on and that was about $1,700. James: Out of how many notes? Brian: We bought 12 notes to start with because I like to test before I bring other investors in so I bought 12 notes with my partner, I JV with him. Five of the notes our average return was over 80%. James: Wow. What timeline? Brian: A year and a half. Well, actually, each note is kind of on its own timeline. So I'll tell you that of the twelve notes that he and I purchased together, five of them are closed and paid off like we've made our profit. Our average return on investment, before we split 50/50, our average return was 81% and that included the one note that we lost $1,700 on. Some of the returns that we're getting are phenomenal. Five of the notes are re-performing, which means that we were able to keep the homeowners in their homes, which is fantastic. That's our number one goal. Our average return on those notes as we collect the monthly income is 30%. And then two of them are in some form of foreclosure. In fact, we're about to sell one. We just listed it today actually, so we should make a decent return on that. We always try to work with the homeowner and keep them in the home. Half the time we're able to do that, half the time it just doesn't work out. But you asked me the timeline so, of those five notes that we closed, our average return was 81%, the average number of days that we were in each of those notes was 163 days so that took less than half a year. James: I mean, those are good great numbers. I mean, I mentioned in my book, find the right operator in that asset class and partner with them or invest with them for passive investors. So as I said in every asset class, there's always good operators. So the numbers you're telling me in non-performing notes in self-storage are huge, right? I mean, I know multifamily you can make money if the market went up and you have a really good operator that can handle that. On average, not everybody is making what you just told me right now on self-storage. So why is multifamily more popular than other asset classes? Brian: There are more people teaching it. James: That's absolutely my point. Brian: Yeah, I mean like there are some excellent instructors out there in multifamily and you and I are both the part of a group with one of them. I mean great top-notch training material. Okay. Yeah, there's just fewer people out there. Whereas you have between 10 to 20 people out there teaching multifamily, you could count on one hand the number of people teaching self-storage and it's even less teaching the non-performing note. James: I understand. Yeah, it is it is true. There's a lot more people teaching multifamily, a lot more boot camps, a lot more 2 days weekend seminars on multifamily compared to self-storage or non-performing notes. And I think multi-family is also very simple to understand, it's a house. Not many people understand what is non-performing notes. Brian: Yeah, there's all that educational like just understanding and wrapping your head around the concept. I got into multifamily because I understood the economy of scale and I understood people have to have a place to live. So if you can get them to pay their rent and that rent pays all your expenses plus the mortgage, well, you can make a lot of money that way. And then once I understood the next level of value, which is the income valuation method, how commercial multifamily is valued based on the income method and you can increase your returns exponentially if you understand that. The relationship between cap rate and your net operating income and value that was very compelling to me. And I think that still is very compelling when it comes to investing in commercial real estate whether it be multifamily or self-storage. I think non-performing notes, there's a lot more perceived risk in that because it's not valued based on any - it's hard to understand how that's valued because there are so many different scenarios in which you can profit from non-performing notes. That you can't just say well we value it this way and if you buy this note, this is what you're going to make, it's kind of a crapshoot. But if you do it right and you partner with someone who knows how to avoid the dogs, you can actually make a lot of money doing it. James: So what is the most valuable value-add in non-performing notes? Brian: You mean an example of one of our...? James: No, not an example. I'm talking about what is the one thing that if you do the most of the time or the frequency of things that you do in non-performing notes that you get the most value out of? Brian: Well, yeah, it differs note by note. I'll give you two examples. One is a property that was pretty much a teardown property that we bought the note on in Middlebury, Indiana. We paid $5,000 for this note and I asked my partner, I mean it's $5,000, this property is a teardown. How are we going to make money on this? And he said, well, we're not buying this for this property for the house that's on it. We're buying it for the land because it's right next door to a farm and this farm is owned by this Amish family. So he sent a realtor over to the Amish family and they ended up paying $35,000 for that note. So after closing costs and paying the realtor and getting our initial $5,000 investment back, our profit was over $24,000 that represented a 245% return and we did that in less than two months. James: Yeah, but you need to identify that opportunity. I mean, it's not like you can go and buy any deals right now. Okay, very interesting. Brian: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Another quick example of how you can profit on notes and I don't want it to lead you to believe that your best profit is always going to be a few foreclose or take possession of the property because you can still make a lot of money if you can work with the homeowners. We bought a note on a property in northern Michigan, probably about 9 or 10 months ago now. And I believe the numbers were in the line of we paid $20,000 for this note, got the homeowners re-performing, the unpaid balance on this note is $41,000. Once we have them season for 12 months, meaning that they're paying on time for 12 months - we've been working with them with a mortgage loan originator, where they can go and get new financing, permanent financing of FHA or Fannie Mae type loan in place with much better interest rate much better payments. Well, when they go do that, they're going to pay off that unpaid balance. So our $19,000 investment, now that I'm thinking about it was $19,000, our $19,000 investment, we're going to get paid that $41,000 of the unpaid balance on their note, plus the money that they've been paying each year. So our return on that is going to be 100%, it's actually over a hundred percent. James: Across how many years? Brian: We'll be out of that in under 15 months. James: Okay, interesting. Brian: Because they're going to refinance and when they refinance, we get paid that unpaid balance. James: Got it. Got it. What about on the multifamily properties that you own before 2015? What do you think is the most valuable value-add that you really like? Brian: Well, they're all great because just anything I bought between 2008 and 2012, I've achieved an infinite return on those. James: Okay. So refied it by and you kept it? Brian: Yeah. Yeah, we've refinanced, pulled our initial investment out. We have no money in the properties and we're collecting cash flow every month. So you can't calculate a return on that. Probably one of the best examples is a 37 unit that we purchased. We bought it at a short sale in 2009, was about 600,000 is what we paid for it. We put a $200,000 into it right away to replace roofs, windows. It was a hodgepodge of heating systems. There's electric baseboard heat and hot water boiler heat and then gas forced-air furnace heat. It just depended on which unit you were looking at. So we replaced a lot of the mechanicals, made it as much of a new property as we could, as far as just the mechanicals and the roof and the windows. And we refinanced it once it had over 1.1 million dollar value, pulled all of our initial investment out plus some extra cash flow and then we just refinanced it again, put a tenure fixed loan on it through the Freddie Mac. small apartment loan. So we got great terms on it, 30-year amortization. At that point, it valued over two million dollars. So we've added a lot of value to it and the compression of cap rates didn't hurt either. James: Yeah. Yeah. Those are the awesome deals, the deep value-adds. That's where you can go and refi and make it infinite written because you pulled out all your cost basis. Brian: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's the goal to achieve infinite return. Whenever we can do that, that's what we do. James: Absolutely. Aren't you worried about the state of the market right now in real estate in general? Brian: You know, gosh, I was more worried about it two years ago than I am now probably. James: What has changed? Brian: Probably because two years ago, I was thinking, oh, it's going to turn any minute now and then it only got better and better. You and I both know Neil Bala and we talked to him at the last event we were at together and he made a very good case for the continuation of this market. And it basically rests on the fact that the United States, it's one of the few, if not the only places in the world where you can go to get real yield on your investment. We're seeing a lot of international money coming into the United States because in their countries, they're seeing negative yield or 0 yield. Here even if you can still get three or four percent yield on your investment, that's a lot of money. It's bringing a lot of money into this country and that's going to prop up our values for quite a long time. On top of that, I've always fought or believe that interest rates were going to rise and I've been believing that since 2000 and they keep going down. And even now, as we're speaking, they're talking about lowering the rate again by the end of the year. So that interest rate risk, I know we're playing with fire here and eventually, we're going to have to pay the piper but our government seems to keep coming up with ways to prolong this growth and the increase in prices. So am I worried? Not in the short term. No. No. The Economists I listen to are saying, oh, it's going to be a roaring 20s for us. Things are really going to hit the fan and. 2027, 2028, 29. James: Interesting. Yeah, because I think I don't know, maybe my thoughts are similar to yours somehow the Fed has figured out how to do quantitative easing and quantitative tightening. Somehow they're able to contract the economy and bring it down. So they could have found some new mechanism to keep the economy going even though our thought process always has been real estate goes in cycles. But at some point, you will hit an affordability issue, it can't [40:13unintelligible] go up all the time, right? Brian: Yes. James: The prices can go up because the interest rate is coming down because now you can get more cash flow. But at the same time, you can't keep on increasing rent because our wages are not going up so much. I mean, I'm not an economist but at some point, you will hit some roadblock, but I'm not sure where is it and how is going to come. Brian: Yeah, well, we're seeing a plateauing I think right now in just the rents that we're able to charge, the prices that people are willing to pay but it's still a very strong market. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not going out there and just buying stuff like crazy because I am very conservative and like I said if I can't get the returns that I need to bring investors into my deals, I'm just not even looking at it. I don't anticipate that the market is going to have a huge correction, there might be a bump, I think if you're in a good market, like Grand Rapids, that bump won't be nearly as severe as some other places. I'm keeping my eye on the market but at the same time, investing conservatively in asset classes that I think will be able to withstand the next correction. James: Awesome. So let's go back to a personal side of things, right? So is there a proud moment throughout your career in real estate that you will remember for your whole life, one proud moment? Brian: One for a moment to put on my tombstone. James: Yeah, absolutely. That you really think that hard, I'm really proud I did that. Brian: Yeah. So a couple of answers. I mean any time we're able to go in and improve a property and improving neighborhoods, that always makes me proud, you know, that we're adding value to a neighborhood and community. The older building that I told you about here in Grand Rapids, it was built in 1920. When we bought that it was very tired, kind of poorly managed, it was losing money. We were able to turn that around so I'm very proud of that. I'm very proud of the fact that we also fought very hard and work very closely with the city to be able to put a restaurant in that building. So the fact that when we bought it it was 96 apartment units and about 6,000 square foot of vacant commercial space. Now we had to work with the city to get it rezoned because it had been vacant for so long, it had to be reverted to being zoned residential. So we spent over a year trying to get it rezoned so we could add commercial in there, but we filled up all 6,000 square foot including a restaurant and that took about two or three years to do. So when I think about what I'm proud of I think I'm definitely proud of that. James: Awesome. That there is hard work because you're turning the zoning from residential to mixed use. Brian: Yeah, mixed-use residential commercial, just dealing with parking, number of parking spots and green space and tree canopies. I mean, it was a massive undertaking. James: Yeah. It's very interesting that kind of work. I did one that was borderline and we merged it with an apartment and we did so many things. It was a very unique value-add that we recently refinance. Brian: What was it, a lot of work for you? James: It was a lot of work because you have to go through, you know, buying the deal - you had to buy two deals at the same time. One is the apartment and one is the land and then we have to go to the city to merge these two plots. Then you had to rezone it, then you had to - I mean replot it, rezone it And then after you do a tree survey, you have to do so many different surveys have to do to get that. It's not normal in a residential, you know, where you buy today and increase rent, reduce expense kind of deal. But it's very interesting and people got 80% of our money within 15 months, which is huge, just by doing this creatively. Brian: That's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, you talk about its zoning and tree, you know. James: Yeah, zoning and tree and all those. Brian: So it's a whole new world and it definitely is costly and time-consuming because you have to have experts on your team. You got to bring experts like architects. James: Yeah, we brought in architects, engineers. Brian: Yeah, engineers who even understand what it is that the city is asking for because if you were trying to do that yourself, you just would be a mess. James: Yeah. I mean the good thing about what you said about what I'm proud of this kind of process and 99% of the syndicators don't have that kind of experience. Brian: Yeah. I didn't have that kind of experience but now I do. James: Most of the time, you just buy buildings and, you know, look at increasing income and reducing expenses and after that, at some point you sell but you don't do different contracts buying land and doing kind of things. So another question for you, Brian, why do you do what you do? Brian: I love it. I love what I do. I feel very entrepreneurial about it because I've been an employee up until about five or six years ago. Whatever it was I was doing, whatever job, I always embraced it and did the best I could. But what I love about being an entrepreneur, being a full-time real estate investor, now syndicator/asset manager is that it's all very self-motivated. I'm the one who decides what needs to happen, what I need to pay attention to on a day-by-day basis. I don't have a boss or anyone else telling me, 'Hey, Brian, go do this' when I'm like, 'no, I want to go do this instead.' I get to call the shots. So that's what I love about it. I get to call the shots, I get to take time off if I need to take time off and I get to kind of fill my day with activities that I want to be doing. James: Awesome. Hey Brian, you want to tell our listeners and audience how to get hold of you? Brian: Sure, James. First of all, you can go to my website, which is higinvestor.com. That's HIG is Hamrick Investment Group. You can also listen to my podcast and James you've been a guest on there so you can definitely listen to me interview James. It's the Rental Property Owner and Real Estate Investor Podcast and it's sponsored by the RPOA, which we begin this conversation talking about. And if you want to get in touch with me, you can also email me Brian@higinvestor.com. James: Awesome, Brian. Thanks for coming in and adding value to my listeners and audience and to myself as well in the kind of things from our discussion here. I think that's it. Thank you very much. Brian: All right. Thanks, James. It's been a pleasure. It's a lot of fun. James: Lot of fun, thank you.
In today's episode, we help Brian figure out if his business idea will make money online. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn: Hey y'all, on today's podcast we help Brian figure out if his business idea will make money online. Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started. Shane: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to talk to another member of the Flip Your Life community. You'll have to bear with us. Jocelyn and I are just getting back from a conference, and both of our voices are a little shot. We're still a little jet lagged, but that's not going to hold us back from helping today's Flip Your Life community member, Brian Kelley. Brian, we're tired, but welcome to the show. Brian: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Shane: And Brian's on the road too. He's on the road too. Brian: I absolutely am, yup. Shane: He's in Chicago at a conference, so he might be a little tired too. We're going to go through this now. We're going to fight through it together. How's that? Brian: That sounds great. Jocelyn: We're excited to talk to you today, Brian. You are coming to our event, which is coming up very, very soon so that is super exciting. And I know that you have been taking a lot of action lately which is how you got on the show today, so congratulations for that. And we can't wait to hear a little bit more about it, but before we get there let's hear about you and your background. Brian: All right. I work in restaurants. I've been in the restaurant industry for about 25 years, and I actually love it. I love my job. I'm married with two kids, and the issue I tend to run into is that I'm concerned about our financial future. I like what I do, but both of our kids have special needs, and it requires extra planning for the future. I don't think that there's a way for me to get my family where we ultimately need to be at retirement with just our incomes. So I'm looking to supplement it with something online. Brian: And then the other reason that I've been pursuing it is just because I think it's a lot of fun. I've listened to your Podcast for a long time now, and I've actually been a member for a year. Everything that I learn that's new and sitting down and actually creating a website and stuff is really intriguing to me. I find it exciting, and I like it, so that's kind of why I chose this path. I'm just looking for any bit of success at this point. I think I've done a lot of the base level stuff. I'm up and rolling, and I'm just trying to get that first dollar made. Shane: Dude, I get it, man. I sat there for months and months waiting for any amount of money to flow into my pocket. And what's crazy is we ask our guests on the show, we look for people in the forums who are taking action, filling out success stories, helping other people, and you have just had this flurry of activity. You've been taking all the courses, talking in the forums, coming to the live event in September, and all of this stuff lately. And that's kind of how we were like, "Whoa, what is this guy doing? He is doing everything. We've got to get him on the show, we've got to help him because we really want to reward action takers in the community." What caused this flurry of activity. You said you've been in the community for a year now. What's happened lately or changed or how'd you [inaudible 00:03:42] to get moving forward in your business? Brian: It was two things. It was, one, probably first and foremost, a new idea for a website. And secondly was I just got really angry that I hadn't finished my last idea, that I hadn't succeeded with it. I got mad and determined because of that. So I just committed and said I was starting again and going to try to do it again. Shane: And are you looking to create a full time income right now or is it more like a side hustle like you love your job? Are you looking to create something on the side that's more like, "Hey, now I can make a lot more money and still do this job that I love, and then maybe someday I can use it to get some time freedom back?" What's the ultimate goal right now? Brian: The ultimate goal is to create a full online business. Shane: Right, right, right. Brian: [inaudible 00:04:39] I want now like I really meant it when I said I think this stuff is really fun, and I'm extremely dedicated to it. I don't have to have ... I'm not beating down the door to escape my job. I love it. I love the people I work with. It's not an urgent need, but there is that need. It has to happen over the next 10 to 20 years for sure. Shane: For sure, yeah. Recently I met this guy named Mark Mason. He has a Podcast called Late Night Internet Marketing, and his story reminds me of yours a lot. He was like, "I love my job. I've got a great job. It fulfills me. I love the people I work with. But I like other things too," is what he said. And he's like, "And of course, if anything ever happened I've got this other thing. It's sitting there waiting for me. I've got choices in my life." And that's what online business can do for you. It gives you choices, and it gives you exactly what you need in the moment. Some people may love their job and just want some extra money or some people may love their job, but they're not quite sure how it could handle a recession, so they want to have something in their back pocket to do that. And some people are like, "Man, I love my job right now, but I'm smart enough to look into the future and see I'm going to need something different later," right? Brian: Yes. Shane: All of us should be doing that. Even in our online business right now we do that a lot. We look into the future and be like, "What is our business going to look like 10 years from now? What does it need to look like based on our needs, our kids' needs, our future needs as we get older or whatever?" And we have to think about those things, and it's really cool that you're seeing the flexibility here of, "Hey, let's not get desperate. Let's not get crazy. Let's just build something cool and have fun with it, and it will be there for me if I need it and my kids need it. Brian: Yes. Jocelyn: All right. So you like your job now, but you want some options as far as making extra income, which I think is a great idea. I actually used to work in the restaurant industry too years ago. I don't know if you've ever listened to our Podcast where I talk about I used to work for a commercial dish machine manufacturer. Shane: She puts your dishwasher in the back room is what she did for them. Brian: Right. I heard you say that on the Podcast. I think about it every day when I walk by a dishwasher]. Jocelyn: Yeah. Shane: That's hilarious. You might be the only person that sees a dishwasher and thinks- Brian: I know people who sell this equipment. That's right. Jocelyn: So I actually didn't do a lot of end user work. It was mostly to manufacturers' representatives and that type of thing. But anyway, so yeah I know about the restaurant industry. I've been to many trade shows and all that kind of thing, so I know a lot about restaurant stuff. Anyway, I love that you are trying to branch out and do something different. Let's talk a little bit about that. What have you tried before, and what are you doing now? Brian: Okay. As far as what I've tried before there's probably a list of five or six, maybe more, things going back 10 years all the way starting with Etsy and just trying to make products for Etsy. I looked into doing drop ship stuff for a little while and decided that totally wasn't for me. Most recently when I joined the community I had an idea for online fishing tournaments. I thought it would be really fun to do online fishing tournaments. I have a lot of friends and family that are competitive at fishing, and I thought it was going to be a great idea. The issue I ran into was two-fold. One, it really wasn't ... What I had created wasn't conducive as it was, so the membership model and I really wanted to do that, and it required so much involvement that it just was never going to work with my schedule. I didn't have the time to execute the operation, so I kind of let it die, and I got discouraged because that was my favorite idea at the moment. Shane: What is an online fishing tournament? How would that even work? Would I fish at my house and you would fish at your house and we'd take pictures? Jocelyn: No, this is what I think of. Do you remember there used to be the Nintendo Wii that had those little controllers. There was a fishing tournament on there. Shane: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Jocelyn: That's what comes to my mind. Shane: Oh yeah, we would compete on ... What was ... Brian: Actually it was like real fishing, and it's modeled after the capture, photo, release style of fishing, which is what a lot of kayak fishermen do. So instead of wait it's on links, so I built an app and people could just take a photo of the fish they caught on a fish ruler and upload it. And basically it allowed people to compete wherever they were on the same species of fish. Shane: That's actually a really cool idea though. Brian: It is, but the problem is I had to be there to launch the tournaments, and I had to be there to judge the tournaments, so there were specific times where I would have to wake up at like ... Fishermen wake up at, like, four in the morning, right, to launch a tournament. And then I had to judge it, and then there were issues with faking species. Shane: Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Brian: There's some logistics that ... I still have that website. I have not thrown it away. I still have an e-mail list for it. There's a ton of interest in it. I just can't execute that right now. Shane: Interesting. We'll keep that one in your back pocket, okay? Jocelyn: I have never heard of an online fishing tournament. This is a first. Shane: My nephew comes over. We've got this lake behind our house. And he'll just sit here and catch fish for five hours. He's all by himself, but I could picture that being like what if he was virtually with other people fishing at the same time? Brian: And could win money for if he caught a big fish. It makes it a lot of fun. Shane: What a cool idea? That's an amazing idea. What else did you try? Brian: Oh gosh. We were doing ... I was trying to do something connected to restaurants so I modeled a website after some others I had seen that were basically just promoting websites kind of like an affiliate except it was locations and venues would pay a fee to be listed on the website, and the website would market to people that were traveling to the area, give them itineraries, lists to view, things like that. Shane: That sounds cool. What was the holdup there? It's too hard to get every restaurant in the world on it kind of deal or ... Brian: No, it was honestly ethically I didn't want to promote ... I work at a restaurant. I didn't want to promote my competition, and I didn't think that was the right thing to do. And it was honestly that started out as a way for me to gain a marketing strategy for my own restaurant briefly, and I just didn't feel okay doing that. And also there's a reason that ... I'm very experienced in the restaurant industry, but there's a reason that the things that I'm choosing to do are not related to the restaurant, and that is because I don't want burnout. Restaurant hours are long, so if I were to tackle more restaurant stuff after that I just feel like it's restaurant all the time, and that's just too much for me. I think I'd burn out because [inaudible 00:12:11] something new. Shane: For sure. A lot of people come into the community, and one of the things that you hear online a lot is, "Chase your passion and the money will follow." And there is a lot of truth to that, but like Jocelyn and I usually try to start with something you're more familiar with because it's actually a lot easier to create something and make money with something you're trained for or that you know. But if someone doesn't want to do that there's lots of other alternatives. You don't have to do that, and I totally get the burnout stuff. Shane: Even as much as I used to love football coaching, like I loved it. I ate it, I breathed it, I slept it. I was always on football coaching. But after you start a community for football coaches, you talk to coaches, you go to work and coach, you come home and coach, and you make playbooks, and you go study playbooks, then you use your playbook on Friday night I really felt the burnout. It didn't matter how much I loved or was passionate about coaching football, at the end of the day you've got to do something else, like you've got to do something else. I can totally get onboard with that. Shane: Tell us about your idea now and how did you switch to that, and when did you start it? Brian: All right. My ideal now is to educate people on credit card points, travel points and miles that you can accumulate spending on credit cards and how to cash them in for maximum value to book free trips and vacations. So my website now is learnthepoints.com, and there is a strategy in there which we teach people so they can earn eight to $10,000 worth of free travel in basically nine months. So that's my goal is to have people that are willing to pay for a monthly membership for even if it's a short term be educated on the best way to accumulate these points and to redeem them for the most value. Shane: And also, too, make sure you're paying off the credit card, staying out of debt? Brian: Yes, 100%. Shane: It's always free money, right? Brian: It's free money. Don't spend anything that you weren't normally going to spend and set up automatic payments, pay everything off every month. I came up with this idea. I got shocked, honestly, just recently. My wife and I do not have any debt. It took us a while to get there. We're very credit card averse. I had just never looked into credit card points before. I had heard people talk about miles and flying and all of that stuff, and I just assumed in my head that these were people that fly all the time, and that's how they do this or they're on these big corporate accounts, so that allows them to rack up all these points. And that's just something that's not for me, and I don't apply for credit cards, so when offers come by I don't look into that stuff. Brian: But what happened was we went through a dark time in December as a family, and when the end of the school year was rolling around and it was summertime was coming up, and we were like, "We need a vacation." All I had set aside for vacation for free money was, like, 500 bucks, which is not bad. We can have fun as a family on 500 bucks, no problem. But all of our other money goes to saving. It all goes to retirement accounts or education accounts or you name it. So we've never really taken a really awesome vacation. Brian: It was kind of out of desperation or just, "You know what? I'm going to look into this and see what it's about," that I discovered what the possibility was with credit card points. And then when I realized all these bonus sign up tricks and stuff I just got obsessed and started doing all this research and figured it out and based on that developed a strategy and a plan that's basically going to get us free vacations for the next three or four years for our family. I was like, "This is awesome. How did I not know about this for so long?" I was like, "Hey wait. This could totally be an online business. Other people need to know about this." So I just popped up a website real quick and then got enthused and jumped back into the trainings. Shane: Wow. Brian, what happened in December? Brian: Unfortunately in December we lost our daughter at birth. She died, and we were really excited. We have two boys that are young. They're four and five. Both of our boys have special needs. They're both autistic, and my oldest son has Down's syndrome. We were really excited not just to have a girl in the family but to have what would be most likely our first typically developing child as well. And it was just we were really excited about it, and there were complications during delivery, and she passed away. So it was a really sad time. There's a lot of grief and anger that comes with that, and it really ... My wife and I both went to counseling. We both got help through our church. We had spent probably three months was just like in shock and recovery. And then the next three months was kind of like just rebuilding your life a little bit and trying to return to normalcy. Brian: But after being through those last six months and dealing with that there's just this need for a break like from all of life almost in a way. We work hard. We have separate schedules. It's crazy at the house because the kids are crazy. So I could see it on my wife's face like we need a vacation. Shane: Like an actual remove from the world like- Brian: Like the community pool is not going to cut it this time. We've got to go. Jocelyn: Absolutely. Shane: How did you explain it to your kids? It would be hard enough explaining it to kids who are developing at normal rate. Was it tough? Brian: It was tough because we did a lot of practicing. We did a lot of therapy going up, so we had a doll that we carried for half a year before the due date where we were training the boys on, "Hey, this is Baby Sister, and this is how you hold Baby Sister." It took us three months before they stopped throwing the doll around. We were practicing and training and getting ready, and we had her room ready of course. We found our own special ways to talk about her with the boys and remember her. I feel like we're in a really healthy place thanks to the involvement of others in the communities that we're in mostly. It's always sad. It's just something that you're never going to forget. You don't move on from it so to speak, but you cope better and better every day. Shane: Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that. I know that's probably really hard to talk about. Jocelyn: That's just heartbreaking. I'm so sorry to hear that. Shane: It is. I'm having trouble even not crying right now, and I stammer over my words for a few minutes. I also want to just kind of highlight that you did recover, and you did move forward, and I love how you harnessed the negative thing to think about something positive like my family needs to more forward. We need to go on a vacation. That's not trivial. That's a thing that's going to help us to take the next step because we have to take the next step. Brian: Right. Shane: And then even to come up with an idea like we have a saying that we always say around our house and around our kids and others is like, "Successful people don't say I can't do that. Successful people say how can I do that?" So you didn't say, "Oh there's only $500 in the bank. I can't go on a vacation." You said, "No, this thing is important for our family. How can we make it happen?" And that's true for life. That's true for online business. That's true for anything like if you're going to be successful you've got to figure out how to do it. So regardless of whatever happens with this online business idea, dude, just the fact that you made that happen, and your family did the thing was totally worth going down that path. Brian: Yeah. Shane: That's a powerful story, man. There's an awesome story in the Bible, I believe it was David's son passed away. I don't want to butcher the Bible, but I'm just going off the cuff here. And he mourned, and then he immediately put on his cloak and got back to work. In the story people were like, "What are you doing?" And he's like, "I have to move forward. I've got other sons. I've got a kingdom I have to do," and I really felt that kind of story coming through when you were telling us that, man. I have no words about something like that, but I am very impressed and inspired by that story you just told me because if that ever were to happen to us I know, "Hey look, Brian got it, he stepped up, we can do this." So anybody else out there listening to this I hope you are really inspired by Brian's story too. Jocelyn: Okay. I am kind of curious, and I'm sure other people are too. So you got this credit card thing going. You started learning about it. And were you able to book something? Brian: We're actually we've racked up a ton of points, and we're saving them. We started kind of at the beginning of the summer, and my wife works for the school district. School's about to start, so we're just deciding what date we're going to book and where we want to go. Shane: That's amazing. Brian: We're kind of lined up and ready. We're all excited now. It's like one of those things where we were really anxious to go anywhere. We would've taken anything, you know what I mean, but now that we've got these points in the bank and we can pretty much go anywhere for free we're like, "Hold up, hold up, let's think about this. Let's pick a really good one." Shane: Right. We get a lot of points too. We're like you though. We're like we hate debt. Credit cards scare us. I pay out credit cards. Any credit card use that we have I pay it off every week, every Thursday. I don't mess around. Every Thursday I sit down. But we use two cards. We have a business card, and we have a personal card. And we put everything on it, like everything. And we pay it off once a week because man those points are like free flights here, free all-inclusive vacation in Cancun. You can just book hotels. Jocelyn: We travel a lot because our daughter's on a travel cheer team, and I got every room last year except for one for free. Shane: Yeah, and that's like nine cheerleading vacations. Nine weekends of the year we're on the road staying two or three nights. And it's just you show up, and you have a room for free. Brian: And what I think is crazy is that there are just so many people that were like me six months ago, had no idea that you could do this. Shane: I didn't know you could do it either because we were Dave Ramsey people too of course. We're like, "Get out of debt. Never use a credit card. Credit cards are evil." And I'm like, "But they're giving you free money. Wait a minute. Let me look at this for a minute." Now, you're not going to get rich off of it, but free money's free money. It doesn't matter how you look at it. Jocelyn: And disclaimer, we do not advocate going into debt to get credit card points. Shane: No, don't go into $10,000 in debt to get $5,000 in credit card points. That doesn't make sense. You're losing money there y'all. Tell us a little bit more about that. Brian: What I try to get people to understand, and I don't know if my message is really good. I'm still trying to perfect it to get it quick because there's a lot of pushback. People just don't know that you can do it. There are credit card fees on some of these cards, but essentially I had $500 in the bank. For $500 you can afford the credit card fees on eight different cards at one time. And if you were to do that you'd have somewhere between, depending on your spending, $8,000 and $12,000 worth of free travel. So it's not that it's- Shane: Right, you're spending 500 for 8,000 basically. Brian: Yeah. If you were going to spend 500 you have two options. You can either spend $500 on your vacation or you can spend $500 on the credit card fees and take a $10,000 vacation. Shane: Yeah, that's incredible. We actually know a guy that does something similar to this. He was a member of the Flip Your Life community. His name's Brad Barrett. Have you ever heard of Brad Barrett? Brian: I did. I started researching everybody. I found his ... He has a Facebook group and a training that he does. And it's awesome. Facebook group is an awesome community. He built something really great there, and his training is very to the point and succinct, and it's good info to. So I really liked looking at his stuff. Shane: Yeah. And he was an accountant, and he really did want out of his job. He just went all in. But he focused. He only went like ... It was to go to Disney. It was straight up to go to Disney. That's how he taught it. And we've met other people who do successfully do this. And I was just at a conference this weekend, and someone was telling me like, "You know, I feel like I've got to invent a brand new thing. I've got to go the blue ocean." You guys hear that blue ocean, red ocean stuff? Brian: Right. Shane: And I looked at him. I said, "No, that's not what you do." You don't have to bake a new pie. You don't have to invent a new recipe. You've got to look around and find a pie, and you just want a slice of that. So that's why we always really encourage people like if you see someone else doing something similar to you that's not bad. That's good. That means that they've figured out how to make money at it, and there's 4 billion people connected to the internet. I promise you they're not selling to all 4 billion people. You just need some of the other people that are interested in that space. It's like abundance mentality. There's more than enough customers out there. You don't have to invent the better mousetrap. You just need to find people that need a mousetrap and sell them one. You're on the right path, and there's definitely something to this. So what's holding you back right now? Is there a mindset issue or an obstacle from doing this? Brian: Okay, so I went back and I watched the Vetting Your Idea video. So I had jumped into this full force before watching that video. I wish I would've watched it first. Shane: Wait a minute. So you're saying you should do the Flip Your Life blueprint in order? Brian: Shane, I knew you were going to say that. I knew you were going to take this opportunity to tell people to follow the plan the right way. Shane: Right. People jump in all the time, and they're like, "I watched video 12, and it was awesome." And I'm like, "Did you watch one through 11 because they're important?" You've got to do it in order. The Vetting Your Idea course, you know what's funny about that course in particular. I laugh because I'm saying watch it in order. When we made the blueprint, when we created the blueprint that course didn't used to be in there. Yeah, because we were so caught up in helping people find their idea and get started. I kind of looked at it, and I was like, "I go through the process whenever we have a new business and I'm like is someone else doing this? How do I find out if it's making money online?" I have a process that I check things, and I realized we were ... Because a lot of times people get held back, and I didn't want to put too much information in front of someone like I just wanted you to get your idea and start because that's where the real magic is when you start. Shane: But then I thought, "Wow, there's really an easy way to tell if people are making money on this, and I just need to show that to them." So we put that course back in later. I actually made that course after the original blueprint was created so that people could properly vet that, yes, this is a real idea. People are definitely making money online, and I can check it empirically. I can go and say, "That is a 100% truth. This can make money online. I just have to do it." And that's kind of probably what you saw when you watched that with the idea course. Brian: Yeah 100%. So I started looking, and what I found a lot of regarding credit card points and miles there's a ton of people who are offering free courses, and they are using affiliate links for their credit card sign-ups. Shane: Yes 100%. Brian: That is what most, like 95% of what's out there is affiliates for the credit cards, which I don't think there's anything wrong with necessarily although I have started my website and really pushed that I am not an affiliate for the credit cards. Shane: Great differentiator. That makes you different. Brian: Yes. I've also noticed affiliates have different promotions and all that stuff, and sometimes teaching others isn't true. It's just not the best version of the information because they're promoting a specific credit card before another one, so I really wanted to focus on ... yeah. I really want to focus on what's going to be my users, my guests on my site, and what's going to get them the most bang for the buck the right way to do it. I'd rather not get involved with affiliates at all. I'd rather just tell them the truth like if you want to get the most money this is how you get the most money. Shane: So one sticking point is like you're kind of ... You said a lot of other people have went down the road because if I can get you to sign up for the credit card I might get a $100 fee. The bad part about that strategy is you're really relying on a lot of traffic. You've got to have a lot of traffic coming in to make that work because you're not getting any recurring off these credit card points that you get people to sign up for. It's just you get 100 bucks, you move on. You know what I mean? So you almost have to get them to sign up for five at once just to make a good chunk of change out of the beginning. Are you concerned that nobody will pay for it because the other ... Brian: Right. I was concerned that nobody would do a membership for the information. There is a lot of free information out there. It's just that my information's better than the free information that's out there, but I need to be able to convince people that it's worth whatever I'm charging right now I set it up to charge $25 a month. Shane: Right. Brian: I did find at least one site that is doing a membership model, and that gave me hope, but it was hard to find. Shane: To be fair the internet's a big place. You know what I mean? So there's probably other people out there doing it to. If you found one there's probably more. Brian: Yeah, I would think so. There is another aspect to it. Some people are also doing one-on-one coaching and booking trips for people using their credit card points to get the most value for it. So those are some one-offs that I found. But my biggest concern is that looking for validation that approaching this from the membership model setting up a $25 a month membership to educate people and provide them with free tools and resources is something that somebody will pay for, that it'll work. Shane: I would say they would if you position it correctly, right? Because there's an old saying in copywriting where if you can give people free money they'll buy your product. And this is a free money product. It is. It's like if you get the cards you will get free money. You will get the points. So if you can say, "Hey look, I ..." Telling your story is the most critical part of your marketing because you literally did this. You're like, "Look, I have no debt. I have these cards. I've got three vacations, enough money for three vacations over the next three years. I have $8,000 in credit card points. I spent $500 to do it. I made $7,500." This is true. These are all facts. You can check it. It's 100% real, and it happens when you do it this way. So like that's free money. It really is. It sounds so scammy but it's not. It's free money. It really is free money. Brian: It is, yes. Shane: And you've actually done this. Your story is where you have to start with your marketing to convince people that that's going to happen. Jocelyn: I almost feel like this is one of those situations where it's a side-by-side. And what I mean by that is that you have a course on one side, and you list all the benefits of just doing the DIY course. And then on the other side you have your monthly payment, which is the same price as your course, but it just recurs. And you position that as this is the courses plus support from me as you go through this. Shane: Yeah. So it is kind of two products. The content is isolated, but then there's a way to interact with you like I'm going to help you make purchasing decisions, and I'm going to help you. I'm going to walk with you as you spend the money. We're going to have a ... A buddy of mine does a membership, so listen to what this is. He does this membership where basically it's a writing hour. So twice a week he shows up, he does a quick writing tip, and then basically he has, like, 300 members and they all just show up to write together. That's what they do, but it's accountability. It's to ask a question. It's to just hang out really. There's no relieving content involved in the membership, but people love it because they've got somewhere to go in the moment to either get accountability or ask a question. Shane: So it's like you could have a weekly pay off your credit card party. Hey guys, last week we got our groceries. Hey Jim, what'd you do? Oh man, I bought a subscription to Netflix. Okay, let's pay that off. You could keep people out of debt parties. It's not like you're really even answering questions. It's just you show up, and everybody's accountable to stay out of debt while they're accumulating their points. And then they can ask questions to you like, "Well, I found this other card. Is this a good card Brian?" Yeah it is. That's a good card. You should do this. You should do that. Don't worry. You can trust my advice because I'm not an affiliate for that card. Brian: Exactly. Shane: But you can throw stones at the other people like, "Hey guys, all these other people they're recommending cards that give them the best affiliate payout. Not me. Brian you can trust because I'm here for you." I love the idea that the course is separate or they can work with you for real, work with you. And your whole story then becomes so important because now they trust you to join your membership community. So you're not selling them content anymore. You're not selling them the path anymore. You're really just selling you. You know what I mean? And your experience, your coaching, and your leadership. Brian: If I switch this over and change it so I've got this side-by-side thing going on on the website would you market or promote the course, and then when they get to the landing page they would see the course or the membership option then? Shane: I'm going to give everybody that's listening a tip right now. Nobody cares what's in your course. Nobody cares about the course. All they care about is your story. The only thing I would be telling yours like you need to go on this vacation, and you need to have some pictures of it, and you need to be able to talk about it, and you need to be able to blog about it. And everything happens going forward is I had this horrible experience. I knew my family needed vacation. I found a way. We did it. And now I'm bringing the torch back from Mt. Olympus. This is a heroes journey story if there ever has been one. Jocelyn: I agree. And I don't think that the course material is unimportant per se. Shane: Right. It's not unimportant. It's just not the most important. Jocelyn: But I do feel that the most important things are being able to relate to you, can you solve their problem, and then the course material is way on down the list. Shane: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like the second thing. Jocelyn: And I think people get this backwards. People always want to do their sales page look at all these wonderful things that I have in my course or program. And they want to give you the 10-minute rundown of every nut and bolt in their program. People don't care about that. People care about can you solve my problem and do I like you? Shane: What most people remember at any event, like let's say you go to a rock concert, when musicians create their set they really focus on the first song and the last song because that's what you're going to remember. It's like a movie. You remember how a movie started. A lot of stuff happens in the beginning, and we all remember the end. You know what I'm saying? Jocelyn: Right. Shane: It's like Avengers. There's like 18 movies over like 20 years, and pretty much it all boiled down to at the beginning Thanos wanted some rocks, and at the end Iron Man fights him. That's what we all remember in between, right? So that's kind of what you're doing here. It's like, "This is my story. This is real. You can trust that it's real because all these other people are only recommending things that pay them good. I'm not because I'm not an affiliate for any of these people. I'm telling you the truth, and inside my community I'm going to help you do it. Shane: So you can have a general list of things like categorical these are the results you'll get inside. Know the first thing you'll buy. Know the first card to get. Know the order that they're going to get. You're more telling the results, but you're not telling the exact courses and all that stuff. There's no reason to. No one cares. But when they get inside we get into detail. Jocelyn: Okay. Shane: First course, blueprint one, second course, blueprint two, third course, blueprint three. That's when you get really into it. Don't try to sell the content. Like you said the content's free. I hate to tell everybody this. All content's free. Every piece of content that has ever existed inside of any course is somewhere free on the internet. Now, can you find it? Is it hard to find? That's where curation and courses come into play. But it's all free. You've just got to figure out how to make your free stuff look better, and your story is the best way to do that. Brian: Okay, great. Jocelyn: Okay, Brian. I think that we have some good ideas about moving forward as far as your product goes. What else do you need help with right now? Brian: I think I'm up to close to 400 people on my e-mail list. That's mainly coming through Facebook and Facebook ads with my lead magnet. However, I have not converted anybody on my e-mail list into purchasing as of yet. Shane: How often do you e-mail your list? Let me ask you a couple questions here. It's a big list. You should've converted something, so let's figure this out. Brian: Yeah. I have an auto responder set up for the first eight e-mails that follow very closely the e-mails in the blueprint. So those go out, and I follow the same timeline, so it's like a couple immediately and then about a week later and then a couple days later. And then there's one at the end two weeks out that's like, "Hey, I'm not going to send you anymore. You'll just continue to get vacation updates from me basically." And I send out whenever I have time to design a new vacation that somebody can take for free I just e-mail that to my whole list. Shane: So basically your e-mail ... So only your auto responder is what's tried to sell this so far. You've only [crosstalk 00:40:30]. Brian: That's true. That's correct, only my auto responder, yeah. Shane: Okay. What if you sent them a message that said, "Hey, I'm doing a live training this week, and I'm going to show you how to get $8,000 for free?" Brian: I haven't done that yet. Shane: Okay. You've got to add more layers to it. The auto responder is just for picking low hanging fruit, the lowest of the fruit. Actually it's like walking under an apple tree, and the apple has already fell off, and you bend down and pick it up. That's where automation comes in. You're never going to convert more than a single digit percentage off of your e-mail list, right? You have to add live Webinars. You have to add weekly Podcasts or blog posts or something. Shane: I'm also looking at your site here, and it definitely needs a facelift. It's just too plain, and it's also too ... It looks too pie and the sky. For example, let's take you. I'm going to describe your website as I go through here. One, at the top you've got all these credit cards. That's cool. Then it says, "Become a member." You know what I'm saying? It's just like okay that's cool. Then it's like a picture of four probably 18-year-old girls running down a beach. That's not Brian. Brian was a dad who had just lost his daughter and went through a dark time. And the rest of his family needed him to step up and help them climb out of the darkness, right? Brian: Right. Shane: So Brian, with his two children and his wife went forward together. I need to see a family here. That's what I need to see. I don't need to see this. Shane: Then the next one is a guy with like a mini Afro and a surf board. He's like, "Whoa, dude, I'm a cool 18-year-old dude on a beach in Thailand making six bucks a day or whatever." That's not Brian, man, I really came home from work at the restaurant and I was tired, and I knew we needed a vacation. So you're not talking to the other guys out there that are like, "Yo, I'm tired. My family really needs me to step up and figure out a way. I've not been able to afford a vacation in three years. What can I do to help my family get a little break?" You know what I'm saying? Brian: Right. Shane: It's just not resonating. The people who are on your list are just not resonating with what they're seeing and hearing in your marketing. Brian: Ah, that makes sense, okay. Shane: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your story is not being told, and that's why nobody's buying anything from you. We tell some pretty deep stories, and we wrestled with how much of our personal life we always want to share on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast or when we speak on stage. And 99% of the time it's be an open book because our stories are what really help someone else. And we told our stories this week. We were at FlynnCon, and we spoke with Pat Flynn on stage, and we told the story of Isaac being mistreated in a daycare center. That's a really hard story to tell when you find out someone was literally locking your child into a bathroom to punish them for potty training accidents at three years old it's horrifying to even say that out loud. But that story always makes people realize how important their kids are, how important their time is. They want to get their kids out of daycare centers and home with them. Shane: I have to tell that story because if I don't then I can't relate to someone enough to make them change their life. So your story has to take over this page. Your family has to take over this page. And you have to say to somebody, "If we did it you can do it too," and that'll resonate more as well. And then showing up live not just in their inbox is going to give you a better chance to convert those. Shane: If you could get 50 of those people to come to a Webinar, and you told us your story like the way we even talked about it off air today before the Podcast started people are going to resonate with that because they're going to look at their kids, and they're going to look at their family, and they're going to realize this guy's for real. If he wasn't for real he'd be signing up for all the affiliate things just trying to get my affiliate check, right? But he's telling me the truth, and I need to listen to this guy, and he can help me. Where do I sign up? So if you could just plant some storytelling overtop of all of this, and then do the work. And I know you're going to do the work because you're an action taker, you could turn this thing around. 400 people, man, you've got members. We just have to get the message right to do it. Shane: I'd love to see your e-mails too. We don't have time to go over every e-mail in your auto responder today, but your e-mails should be telling the story. It shouldn't just be here's all the benefits. It's like in 2018 December this happened. It moves into why you went down the path to the credit cards, and that creates trust, and it shows them like, "Hey, this guy figured it out. I can figure it out. Let's do this." Brian: Okay. Yes. Jocelyn: All right Brian, it has been great talking to you today, and I can't wait to see what you do next. Before we go we always ask our guests what is one thing that you plan to take action on based on what we talked about today? Brian: I am going to ... Since I am out of town right now I am going to set up the side-by-side course versus the membership on the website and just get that done quickly. And then when I get back home I'm going to start taking some pictures with my family and redoing my story on the website. Shane: Love it. I love that you're like, "I'm going to take some pictures with my family. We're putting them on there." That's good. And I want to see the website, so make sure you send it to me in the forums or hit me up, and I want to see the link when you redo it because it'll be awesome. Brian: Will do. Shane: Hey Brian, before we go let me ask you a question. What made you come to Flip Your Life Live? Flip Your Life Live happens in Lexington, Kentucky on September 19 through the 21st of 2019. It's our big Flip Your Life Flipped Lifestyle Podcast family reunion where all of our listeners, fans, followers, and members can come together in one place to hang out together, eat together, work together, and really get inspired to do big things for our families. I always love to hear people's stories. Why did you come to Flip Your Life Live? What made you look at it and go, "I got to go. I just got to go to Flip Your Life Live?" Brian: I wanted to dive all in. I didn't want to leave anything on the table. Really I am not afraid of failure. I am really afraid of not trying, not giving it my all. And I just felt like, "Hey, this is something I haven't done, and I can't say that I gave it all I could if I didn't go." Shane: I love that, man. No regrets, right. I'd rather have a life full of failures than a life full of regrets at the end of it. Brian: Also I'm not paying for the flight, so that helps. Shane: Shameless plug for the credit card points. I love it. That's amazing. Jocelyn: Love it. That is awesome. Shane: Listen. If you would like to join us and Brian in Lexington, Kentucky at Flip Your Life Live this year go to flippedlifestyle.com. That's F-L-I-P-P-E-D lifestyle.com/live. We have a few tickets left, but they are almost sold out, and this will be the last big conference Flip Your Life Live that we do for a while. We are not doing the event in 2020, so you can't go all in next year. You might as well go all in with us and Brian this year at Flip Your Life Live. Jocelyn: And who knows, maybe if you join Brian's membership maybe he can get you a free flight too. Shane: That's right. Maybe you can fly there too. Go to flippedlifestyle.com/live. We'd love to see you at our live event. All right guys, that is all the time we have for this week. Thank you so much for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast today. We would love to see you inside of our community as well. Who knows, you may end up right here on the Podcast just like Brian did. So if you'd like to take action today go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and you can check out all of our membership options. Shane: Before we go today we like to close every show with a verse from the Bible. Today's Bible verse comes from 1 Thessalonians 5:16-19. The Bible says, "Be joyful always. Pray continually. Give thanks in all circumstances. This is the will of God for your life." Shane: Until next time, guys, get out there, take action. Do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then. Jocelyn: Bye. Links and resources mentioned on today's show: Brian's Website Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information Flip Your Life community PROLIFIC Monthly Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what's possible for your family! Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month! https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife
I think Thomas Sharp should be the ultimate villain in Mormonism, but I'll bet most people don't know who he is. In our next conversation with Brian Stutzman, we'll learn more about the man who incited a mob to kill the prophet Joseph Smith. https://youtu.be/4uhEG0wjhHY Brian: Thomas Sharp came from a Methodist family. In England, in the late 1700s, John and Charles Wesley started the Methodist movement....Thomas Sharp was 22 years old when he came to Warsaw in 1844 or 1840, rather, so he's a rather young man. He tries his hand at the newspaper business with a partner named James Gamble. They spent six months, about, down on the river at the foot of Main. Then they move their press and change the name from Western World to the Warsaw Signal and they go up into an unknown location up on Main Street. Now some of the tour buses stop and point to building at 204 Main. They say, "This is where Thomas Sharp published." That building wasn't built till 1851, way after Thomas Sharp published there, but it was after the Mormon period. ... But the turning point and Ben A. Marshall wrote a paper called the Turning Point of Thomas Sharp. There's some discrepancy over some of the facts here. But when they set the cornerstone for the Nauvoo temple, in April six of 1841, Joseph Smith had a table up front for the dignitaries and some of the dignitaries, one of them was Chief Keokuk, from Iowa, who this town is named after, and he was up at the front table. He invited young Thomas Sharp, again, 22-23 years old to be up at the head table with him and they had this big feasts and a military parade and they set the cornerstone for the Nauvoo Temple. GT: So at this time, Thomas is still friendly. Brian: Yeah, neutral at best, neutral or friendly. Sometime after--now, people speculate that that day he turned against the church. There's another historian and she's kind of in my house with me and my wife. We've done some history, Brooke Lethar. She was at BYU. Now she's studying at the University of Utah, and she has found research that it was awhile later before, Sharp turned negative. So there was a time where he was friendly and that he turned negative. So he goes up there and he starts writing terrible things in his paper. There was a term in in that area about Masons. If you were not a Mason, but you're referring to Mason's there was a term called Jack Mason. ... Thomas Sharp is sitting there, seeing this bloc-voting going on up Nauvoo, and the two main political parties at the time were Democrats and Whigs. He says to his fellow people, fellow residents, he says, we don't have a shot in heck of getting somebody elected unless we join together, put our differences aside, and maybe we can get somebody elected locally. So he and Aldrich, again, these are two guys stood trial, and the guy named William Roosevelt. William Roosevelt was the cousin to Teddy Roosevelt's father. They're living in Warsaw and they get together and they create this political party in 1841. It's called the anti-Mormon political party. That wasn't a mob. It wasn't hostile, at least at first, but it was a political party to try to outvote the Mormons. Well, in 1842, Thomas Sharp decides to run for a seat in the state legislature. Well, who was he was he opposed by? The prophet's little brother, William Smith, and William Smith beats him. In 1844 when Joseph Smith was running for President Thomas Sharp talks about running for the United States Senate, and then he learns that Hyrum Smith, the prophet's brother was considering running for the same seat in the United States Senate and Sharp withdrew. Check out our conversation…. It is surprising that Thomas Sharp is not more well-known among Church members. He literally started the anti-Mormon political party! Don't miss our previous conversations with Brian! 307: Economic Reasons Warsaw Hated Joseph 306: The Anti-Mormon Triangle: Warsaw, Carthage, Nauvoo
Innovation. We love to talk about it, everyone wants it. Innovation is critical for people and organizations to grow. But we all mean different things when we say it. Today I have a conversation about how innovation is a conversation with Brian Ardinger. He's the director of Innovation at Nenet (which owns my student debt! Hi Nelnet!) and the host of InsideOutside.io, a community for innovators and entrepreneurs that produces a great podcast and a conference that brings together startup and enterprise organizations to talk innovation. There are three key conversations worth designing that we discuss and I want you to have your ears perked up for each as you listen to this episode. Each conversation can help you navigate the innovation process inside or outside your organization. These three are the pre-conversation, the conversation about where to look for innovation and the conversation about patience. Brian specializes in a unique perspective on where to look for innovation. More on that in a moment. The Pre-Innovation Conversation Before you even start to talk about ideas or technology, it's essential to start with the end in mind. What kind of innovation is the company really looking for? Skip the pre-conversation and you have no idea of where you're heading. As Brian points out “without having that definition, then it's sometimes hard to know if you're playing the right game to begin with...the process itself of level setting... I don't think it takes a long time.” Brian and I didn't dive into tools to help with that conversation, so I put a few into the show notes. Mapping the innovation conversation can be done in lots of ways. One is thinking about evolutionary vs revolutionary change, another is about tangible vs intangible change, like rethinking policies or business models vs remaking product or space design. I *just* did a webinar on this topic with my partner in the Innovation Leadership Accelerator, Jay Melone, hosted by the amazing people at Mural. Templates of the two innovation leadership frameworks we outlined are there in Mural for you to download and use, along with the webinar video to help you along. Also check out Mapping Innovation, by Greg Satell. You can download his playbook free in the show notes. Where to look for innovation Brian's Inside/outside perspective is that innovation can be a conversation between the inside of a company and the outside world. Some innovation will happen internally, and some innovation can be brought from the outside in: the exchange and acquisition of ideas and technology from outside your organization is an important conversation for enterprise organizations to be having. When you're trying to innovate, it can be tempting to look in familiar places. If you're a financial technology firm, it can be tempting to look to fintech startups for what's next and to try to innovate through acquisition. But you'll also be looking were your competitors will be looking. Try an innovation approach based on Horizontal Evolution - look to the sides and edges of the landscape. Brian describes this approach as “playing a different ball game”. The conversation about patience Innovation does not happen overnight. Real change takes time and that takes real patience. Brian also points out that organizations need to be having a bigger conversation, about what else needs to change to make real innovation flourish inside the organization. Hint: it's generally more than you bargained for. As he says “Corporations are doing exactly what they should be doing...They figured out a business model that works and they're executing and optimizing that particular business model...And to radically change that, the people, the resources, the compensation, all of that stuff has to kind of morph or change to play in a different environment. And so I think that's where the challenge really begins.” Often people think innovation is about the idea, but it's a much, much longer conversation. That is, in fact, the first “Myth of Innovation” from Scott Berkun's excellent book: The Myth that innovation is about an epiphany, not hard work. It was a real treat to have a conversation with Brian about some of these key issues...I hope you enjoy the episode and happy innovating! Brian on the Web: https://insideoutside.io/ https://twitter.com/ardinger https://www.nxxt.co/ Innovation Leadership Models from the Mural Webinar https://blog.mural.co/innovation-leadership Mapping Innovation by Greg Satell https://www.amazon.com/Mapping-Innovation-Playbook-Navigating-Disruptive/dp/1259862259 Download the Playbook for Free: https://www.gregsatell.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Mapping-Innovation-Playbook.pdf Horizontal Evolution https://evolutionnews.org/2015/08/horizontal_gene/ An amazing summary from Scott Berkun about his solid book, Myths of Innovation: https://scottberkun.com/2013/ten-myths-of-innnovation/ A few more gems from Greg Satell on the Rules and questions central to innovation: https://medium.com/@digitaltonto/on-december-9th-1968-a-research-project-funded-by-the-us-department-of-defense-launched-a-ee063b7585f0 https://hbr.org/2013/02/before-you-innovate-ask-the-ri Transcription: Daniel: Welcome to the conversation factory. Brian, I'm glad we made the time to make this happen. Um, the reason I'm excited to talk to you is, is that not everybody is, is open or interested in the, the analogy that a company has to have a conversation with the outside world that they can't just, you know, put up some walls and just figure everything out inside those four walls that they have to go outside and have a dialogue with the world in lots of different ways. And the way you do that is, is through helping companies think about inside innovation versus outside innovation, which is my way of like teeing up the how you, how do you talk about what you do with people when you, when you meet people, like how do you contextualize what it is that you do? Brian: Well, I think a lot of things, uh, Daniel around this particular topic, it's this whole inside/ outside innovation. It's kind of come to us over the years of working first on the outside with startups and trying to understand how do they develop new ideas and, and build things. And then, uh, you know, as I was having conversations with startups and helping them navigate that, I kept having conversations with corporations and bigger companies saying, you know, how are you doing this? How are you taking these early stage companies and through an accelerator program and that, and, and kind of getting them traction in that faster than we can do in our own walls. And so that started to have conversations with the corporations and the people inside organizations and saying, hey, how can we interact with the outside world and, and think and move and act more like a startup or, uh, become a little bit more adaptive in how we do that. So I think it was an evolution of just having conversations and figuring out what's working, what's not working in this world of change and disruption that we're living in. Daniel: Yeah. So like there's two layers here, which I think are interesting to unpack. I've learned this new term, the idea of an accelerated work environment and this idea of like, let's speed up the conversation about innovation and let's not just put our feet up and look into space and hope a great idea comes to us. Like, let's structure it and let's do it faster. And so can you talk a little bit about like how you structure an accelerator? Like what does it mean to accelerate people through the innovation process from your approach? Brian: Yeah, so I think a lot of it, like when I go in and talk to bigger companies, first thing I like to do is kind of do a level set of what does innovation even mean to the people in the room. Uh, because innovation has become such a word that's, you know, so limp, so to speak. It can mean anything to anybody. Uh, and so kind of understanding that level set of what does innovation mean to the company? How do they define it? Um, is it transformational innovation where it's, you know, we've got to become the next Uber and disrupt our industry? Or is it a innovation from the standpoint of value creation where we're looking at ways to optimize and incrementally improve what we're building? And so from that perspective, you know, it's, once you have that level set, then you can start thinking about, well, how, what are the particular tactics that you can work through depending on what kind of objectives you want to have and, and what you're trying to accomplish. Brian: So I think that's the first place we start. And then how we do that. Um, again, I think a lot of is trying to help them understand that you've got to place a lot of bets on innovation and innovation is not, um, you know, it's by default working in the new, it's working in this area of gray and this area of uncertainty, Daniel: which means there's got to be failure, right? Like there's going to have to be failure. Brian: Yeah. So, yeah, this uncertainty by default, requires you to figure out and make assumptions and, work through this... Areas of the unknown. And that's very difficult for, a lot of folks to work through. You know, especially at companies and people who are used to having a plan or having an execution model that, that they just execute on. Corporations are doing exactly what they should be doing...They figured out a business model that works and they're executing and optimizing that particular business model… Brian: And to radically change that, the people, the resources, the compensation, all of that stuff has to kind of morph or change to play in a different environment. And so I think that's where the challenge really begins. Daniel: So...I'm comfortable with taking this seemingly simple question of like, we want to innovate more and turning it into this, really stretching it out into a much more complicated conversation. Like I'm wondering if people you deal with ever get frustrated with, (you): "well, Brian, you're just making this complicated. Like, we just want to innovate. Just teach us how to innovate. Let's get started." Versus like, let's talk about your strategic goals. Like I can see how some people might get a little impatient with the, with the bigger picture, with the strategic thinking approach. Brian: Sure. Yeah. And I think, and I think it doesn't have to take a long time on to go through that particular process, but I think if you don't start off on that common definition, then you run the risk later on. And you know, why are we doing this? Why is it not working? You know, we said that, uh, you know, we need to have x, Y, z outcome and these brand new bets that you're putting on the table are not getting us an outcome that we want. Um, but you know, without having that definition, then it's sometimes hard to know if you're playing the right game to begin with. So I think, so the, the process itself of level setting I don't think takes a long time to, to make that happen. And I think, but I do think in general, to change a culture or to move the company towards having that innovation mindset set or innovation as a competency to so to speak, does take a long time. Um, but you can do that through a variety of tactics and in ways that doesn't, um, change, change it all overnight. You know, it doesn't have to be something where, um, you know, you're basically creating something brand new and, and throwing out everything that you've done in the past and, and hoping that the new thing works. Uh, it's really a series of iterative bets that you kind of de-risked these new ideas as you're, as you're approaching them into the world and seeing what happens. Daniel: Yeah. Now, now here's the, the piece that I think that, that we were talking about that's interesting is that companies can innovate through outside acquisitions or through outside collaborations, like through working with startups. And maybe that makes it seem "like, wow, that's neat, there is an easier way to do this". we don't have to do it all ourselves. We can, we can turn outwards and see, uh, not just learn from other people, but actually like bring that outside innovation inside. Like, and that seems to me like, uh, a complicated process to navigate. Like how do you facilitate, how do you facilitate that conversation and make it smooth for people? Brian: Yeah. So I think, at least for a lot of folks, you know, the idea of looking outside is not become, it's not a novel concept anymore. You know, maybe five or six years ago it was like, oh, what's one of these things called startups out there? And you know, we're, we're seeing more and more hearing more and more about it. So it's, it's not a novel concept that, hey, the ability for two women in the garage or in a dorm room to spin up something and get some traction and create something of huge value in the world...that's, that's there and that's not going away. And that's speeding up. And so I think, uh, that, uh, first part of the conversation happening, having people understand that, people have the power and tools and capabilities and access to markets and cheap technology, et Cetera, to really disrupt things is there. Brian: So if we understand that, then what can we do to kind of help navigate that? And, and I think the first thing is just, you know, raise your hand and say, Hey, there are things going on outside. Let's, uh, let's take an inventory or a map on discover what's going on...and one of the, pitfalls I see a lot of companies jump into is let's look in our industry. You know, what's happening in our industry. And that's great, and that you should do that of course. But, um, that's also probably where 99% of your competitors are also playing in that same field. And so I find a lot of times it helps to look at adjacent industries or industries far and away, uh, different from your own to see what's going on, and look for clues or models or technologies or, or talent that may give you a different advantage, if you put those pieces together differently than playing, in the same ball game as your competitors are playing. So, you know, I, I see a lot of people going to these conferences and looking for startups in the fintech space and all you have are corporations in the Fintech area looking at Fintech startups where a lot of times I think, it's better to maybe go to a more of a horizontal conference and looking at AI or uh, you know, different types of data conferences and that would give you a different perspective on how those technologies could be used in your industry or in somebody else's, industry, for example. Daniel: Do you have a story like, cause it's funny as you're telling me the story, like I'm realizing this is, this is the classic innovators trick, right? Which is, yeah, it's, and it's a classic trick from nature, right? Which is, people don't realize that evolution isn't just, um, vertical where you adapt and survive. But there's horizontal transfer of, of genes in nature. Like literally the reason we have mitochondria is because we ate them, you know, a billion years ago. And all of the energy in our bodies is made by an alien organism that has its own DNA, which I find a very, it's always just like an extraordinary fact. Um, but you know, and I've been telling my clients this for a long time too. Like what do you, do you have, uh, a story to share of a surprising transfer of, of innovation from industry to industry in case there's any doubters in the world. Brian: Yeah, it's, let, I'm trying to think of one off the top of my head, but I know I've seen it on the reverse side. For example, we've seen, because I run a conference called inside, outside/innovation. And, one of the things we do is we, uh, go out and find startups in a variety of different markets, bring them to a showcase and then bring corporations around to kind of see what they're building and why and hopefully make some connections for that. And where I've seen it happen is a lot of times where, a startup will be working in a particular vertical market, early stage, uh, and they think they've got a solution in, you know, retail or whatever, and a corporation conversation will come around and they'll say, hey, I love your technology, but you're looking in the retail space. Did you know that you could apply this to insurance? Brian: And the light bulb will kind of go off in the entrepreneur's mind. It's like, oh, this is an opportunity for me to potentially go into a different market or get traction with an early customer that I didn't have before. And so I need to happen that way. Um, and I'm sure the reverse could happen as well where a corporation, uh, is, you know, looking at a variety of startups out there and say, hey, that startup's, not in our industry, but we could definitely apply that technology to what we're doing and leverage it in some way. Daniel: So that actually sparks, I mean, I definitely, I want to make sure we talk about the conference before we, before we leave, but in a way, like you said, this thing that was really interesting about startups, you know, they're, they're trying to, uh, you know, iterate and build their own, um, you know, their own growth engine. Right? Um, I would imagine that some of them are not necessarily open to this idea of like, well look, we're, we've got our roadmap and we're trying to build our own flywheel and move it, get that moving. This, they may not be open to this, this pivot or this expansion. Uh, there's like, oh, you know, well, we're just focusing on market X and like, do you want me to also like expand our, our code base so that we can also take advantage of, of why and collaborate with these guys. Like I how do you sort of, I know you've done a lot of work on building community through, through the conference. Like how do you find startups are expanding their perspectives to being open to this collaborative conversation versus like, nope, we're just doing our thing. Brian: Yeah. And I think a lot of it depends on where the startup is in their lifecycle. A lot of the folks that we bring in are probably seed stage and so they, they haven't figured out their business model. They haven't figured out the exact markets sometimes. Uh, and they're looking for that early traction. And you know, one of the reasons we hold this in the Midwest is because, you know, venture capital and the traditional ways of kind of scaling a business in Silicon Valley don't exist out here. And so you've got to find customers. You've got to find ways to, um, to, to get that early traction. And a lot of that means, you know, getting out and finding those early customers. And so having conversations with customers, uh, real people out there and trying to define what problems are out there in the marketplace and then create a solution, uh, to meet those problems and then meet the market where it's at, I think is more effective way a lot of times in the Midwest here or in places outside of your core tech hubs that don't have the, the against the, um, the advantage of getting a venture capital and being able to have a year or two young, two year runway to figure out, uh, how, where that market is. Brian: So I think, I think so part of that is that, um, I think when I'm talking to start ups, you know, I put my "accelerate" hat on and working as a person who is helping startups through that process, a lot of times I'll quite frankly tell them to stay away from corporates until they, until they figured out some of that stuff. Cause it's very easy to go down the rabbit hole of um, hey, if we just get this one big customer on our plate, we'll be good to go. But a lot of times you know that the timing of the two types of organizations don't match up and it can very, very easily kill start up really pretty quickly. Daniel: Yeah. And it can kill them in that what they're, they're focusing, they'd lose their focus or their, they spread themselves too thin. You know, so like what, what sort of, I think beautiful about what you do is that there's this symmetry in a way you have a community driven approach to innovation through the conference you do building community, but building community so that you have a group of startups who are interested in this type of thinking so that companies can have an innovation community. So they're not just going it alone, that they have a view to what's, what's open in the world for them. I mean, I guess my question is like, have you always been so community driven? Like how did you come to value community as an approach, as in a solution to, to these challenges that you're seeing? Brian: So, I mean, I guess I've always felt community is, is a way to accelerate your learning. Uh, and I think early stage ideas, no matter what they are, whether they're inside a startup or inside a corporation, the key to a lot of those taking place in actually taking hold is that the speed of learning. How fast can you, um, take your assumptions and navigate those and understand where you're on the right track or not, and, um, get to that next stage that you need to get to. So, um, community's always been away from me, uh, personally and otherwise to help accelerate those learnings, whether it's, you know, again, connecting somebody to somebody else who can, uh, an expert in a different field or, um, someone who can help me navigate to something else that I didn't know I needed. Um, and so I think it started from that perspective and it started because, uh, you know, quite frankly, when I started a lot of this stuff seven, eight years ago, uh, the, you know, entrepreneurship and startups were, were smaller, uh, both, you know, nationally as well as in our own backyard. Brian: And so part of it was like, well, if we're going to do this, we're going to, we can't do it all are ourselves. So how do we create a community that allows startups to raise their hand and first say, Hey, I want to be entrepreneurial. I want to try some things. I want to build something. In my backyard. Yeah. And then what do I need and what am I missing and how do I then can be that catalyst to help, um, folks figure that out. Uh, and so it was an evolution of just having conversations, going to different cities, uh, meeting different people, starting a podcast, you know, telling stories, um, you know, starting a new newsletter and then, uh, eventually a conference and everything else around it. Um, and then all the while, you know, consulting and helping companies kind of figure it out on both sides. Brian: And, um, it's been fun. It's been fun to see that journey and continue to figure out what the, what the next phase is as we build it out. Daniel: Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess I'd begs the question, what is, what's the next phase? Can you talk about it? Is it Secret? Brian: Yeah, no! Um, so yeah, so inside, outside innovation, you know, we started four years ago actually with the podcast and the original idea was it was called inside, outside, and it was an inside look at startups outside the valley with the idea that their stories, outside the tech hubs that need to be told and how can we help our entrepreneurs, uh, figure that stuff out. And so that's where it started. And again, it'll happen with further conversations as, as we built that particular audience and had conversations around those particular topics, we kept getting asked by innovators in bigger companies, you know, it's like, how are we doing this? Brian: How, how's this working? We want to be connected to startups. We want to understand this new way of innovating things like design thinking and lean startup in that work, uh, becoming methodologies and tactics that could apply to, you know, start ups outside of a big corporation or, or startups within a corporation that were trying to spin up new ideas. So through that we started the inside outside innovation podcast as the, as the way to have those conversations and talk about corporate innovation and how we're corporate matching with startups and how corporate venture play out differently and how we're internal innovation accelerators popping up all around. And what were the different tactics that folks were using through that. We've kind of created this weird community. It's almost like two communities, but the, the advantages by bringing them together, they both learned from each other. So that's kind of how, that's how it's kind of evolved. What's next? We're trying to figure out the third year of the insight off the innovation summit. Uh, we haven't got the dates and, and that solidify, but it's looking like we're probably going to do it sometime in the end of October. I'm in the process, I'm looking at writing a book around this concept of collaborative and innovation and this innovation as a competency. And then, um, we'll just continue with the podcast and the newsletter and keep growing our conversations with great people out there. Daniel: You know, Brian, it's really, it's, I mean it's, it's lovely to talk to you about this stuff because, you know, the, the ecological approach you have to this, to this processes, you know, it's, it's clearly organic. Like, like anything else, it's starting a conversation and then you've gotten feedback from the world and over time you've, you've built more than you've added to it. Like it's, it's a, it's just guy. It's a wave that is sort of, it has its ups and downs clearly. But you're just continuing to, to ride that wave, which was really awesome. Brian: What the, it comes back to, you know, my feeling is that obviously with the world changing in the, in the speed of change that's happening out there, everybody is going to have to take on some of the skillsets of, of the early innovator. You know, again, a startup entrepreneur or, um, or innovator are going to have to have kind of core capabilities or characteristics that allow you to adapt and be nimble and, and, uh, execute. Daniel: Unless you want a robot to do your job! Brian: Yeah. That's executing different ways that, that you didn't have or that were different in the way that you could execute in the past. So things like, you know, curiosity having a bias towards learning characteristics like having a, an a customer focus and this bias towards problem solving for that customer. You know, the, the skill of collaboration and you know, knowing that you can't build everything yourself. Brian: There's bias towards team, um, you know, some of the characteristics of just speed, you know, how can you have this bias towards action and experimentation. And then finally having kind of the reverse of that you are having patience and that bias towards that long term value creation. You know, I think those are some of the core concepts that make up, um, this new world that we're living in. And the more individuals, whether you're, you know, a traditional manager or a entrepreneurial founder, those are the skillsets that are going to take you to the next level in the world that we're living in. Daniel: It sounds like a good book already, Brian. I don't know. I like it. Brian: I'm still outlining. Daniel: It sounds like a pretty good proposal to me. Um, so listen, I, I, we're, we're up against our, our, our time together. Uh, is there anything I haven't asked you about that I should, that we should talk about? Any, any, any final thoughts? Brian: Yeah, I'm curious for, you've obviously been in the space of helping people have conversations and that I'm always curious to understand what have you learned from helping companies and people kind of navigate a, this world of change, uh, and in this world of innovation, what are some of the things that are obstacles or things that stand out that, uh, I could take back to my audience as well? Well, Daniel: I mean, do you have a hard stop in the next three minutes because, no, go ahead. We can go over a little bit. Well, I mean, for me, what really resonated in what you were talking about is the necessity for patients. And I think this is one thing that's really, really hard, um, for people because we want to go fast and we want to have results. Um, but we also need to slow things down. So one of the things that like I'm becoming more aware of in my own work is psychological safety, which people, you know, Google identified as like the main characteristic of effective teams. The ability, the willingness, the openness to saying what's happening, to be able to speak your mind, to say what's right or to say what's wrong. And that, I don't know, that stuff doesn't really come for free. Uh, it's a really, you have to cultivate that environment. Daniel: And so for me, you know, my angle and entry point is always that somebody, somebody has to design that conversation. Um, if a group of, you know, if a group of people is gonna talk about what we're going to do next and how to innovate, we can either contribute content or we can contribute process. Um, if the, to me, the most important and precious conversation is when a group of people is coming together, the fact that you're willing to, that you have a framework, I'm guessing, to stretch out the conversation about what's our innovation roadmap and where are we placing our bets allows people to say like, okay, what's my holistic view of this? It creates, it creates safety, right? It creates a moment where, where we can have the conversation about innovation, we can have the conversation about how we're gonna brainstorm. Daniel: We can have the conversation about how we're going to, uh, evaluate ideas and how we know if they're good or not. Um, and so for me, I think, um, I feel like I'm ranting now, but I was at a problem framing workshop, uh, with my, my friend Jay Malone, who has a company called new haircut. They do a lot of design sprint training and he was teaching a problem framing workshop. And at the end of the workshop, he presented, uh, you know, on one hand, a very straightforward, like, here, this is what problem framing is in the essence. Like, uh, who has the problem, uh, why does it matter? Um, when does it happen? Uh, like, you know, think about like, where to play and how to win. And this one woman said like, well, yeah, what about, uh, uh, how do we know when it's been solved? You know, how do we know if it's working? And this is, I think one of the biggest challenges with, with companies is we don't know like what good looks like. We don't know when to start. We don't know how to stop working and grinding it out. Um, well, and the metrics Brian: are so different from existing business model versus a new business model that you don't even know who the customers are and the value proposition you're creating at the beginning. Daniel: Yeah. So I mean, for me, like I find the, one of the biggest challenges of innovation is that people bring me in to say like, okay, let's help this team coach through this process. Meanwhile, they've already got a job that takes 100% of their time. Um, and they look at me and they're like, this guy has just given us extra work to do. You know, the workshop that I come in is taking them away from their quote unquote real job. The, the work that I asked them to do to go out and do the interviews and to, to get customer contact looks like it's taking away time for them. And so this idea that that innovation's like something you can buy or pay someone else to do. To me, I want people to be earning their own innovation. But the problem is that most people are at 110% capacity. Daniel: And You bring in somebody like me who says, okay, let's do some design thinking stuff. Let's do a, you know, even if it's a week long sprint, which doesn't give you everything you need, you know, if it's a six week process, it's people are like, Oh man, that was great, but oh, that was hard and I never want to do that again. It's like, it's really, really challenging to get people to find time to innovate. And that's frustrating to me. Brian: Absolutely. Daniel: As a person who just really wants people to get their hands dirty with it so that they value it and, and participated in it. So, I don't know. I don't know what the balance is there. That's... I don't know. I don't know if that's a question with an answer, but Brian: I don't know if there's a clear answer for that one. No, no. Daniel: that, oh, so, yeah, I mean that, that's, that's, that's my perspective. I don't know if that, if that's helpful to you at all, but that's, that's… Brian: Very much so, very much so. Daniel: Is there, is there anything else we should I this, this is definitely the shortest episode. You know, I'm, I'm sort of enjoying or slash you know, floundering in the, in the 30 minute time zone. So I just want to make sure that we've covered everything that you want to cover … Brian: No, it's been great, thanks for having me on the show and the opportunity to talk about insideoutside.io and everything we're doing. Daniel: Yeah. So like that's the, that's the final question. Like where, uh, where can people find all things insideoutside and Brian Ardinger on the Internet. Brian: Yeah. Thanks Daniel. Yeah. So, uh, obviously you can go to the website insideoutside.io that has our podcast, our newsletters sign up for that. Um, and obviously I'm very, um, out there on Twitter and Linkedin in that happy to have conversations. So reach out and say hi. Daniel: Well we will do that. Um, Brian, I really appreciate you taking the time. It's really, it's always interesting to have some patience and just slow down and have some of these conversations about this stuff, that's I think really, really important. Like you said, the future is unwritten and uncertain and all of us need to have skills of adaptability, the inside and I think both sides of the ecosystem that you're a co-creating - the innovator, the startups need to learn from big companies how to scale and big companies need to learn from startups, how to be more nimble. So I think it's really a really important dialogue that you're facilitating. It's really cool. Brian: Thanks for having me on the show!
Chris Morris and Elizabeth McCall are no strangers to the show so we're excited to have them back on again. This time, we explore the controversial topic of “what is a master distiller?”. How is a title like that earned through years of service? How is Brown-Forman laying the foundation for Elizabeth to take over when Chris is ready to retire? We also talk about barrels from their cooperage, the influence of char on their whiskey, and this week's Whiskey Quickie, the King of Kentucky. Show Partners: The University of Louisville now has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at business.louisville.edu/onlinespirits. At Barrell Craft Spirits, they take blending seriously. They spend months obsessing over hundreds of combinations until they figure out the perfect blend for you. Find out more at BarrellBourbon.com. Check out Bourbon on the Banks in Frankfort, KY on August 24th. Visit BourbonontheBanks.org. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about rapid aging. Lawsuit challenges out-of-state retailers' ability to sell, deliver and ship alcohol to Kentucky consumers - https://www.wdrb.com/news/lawsuit-challenges-out-of-state-retailers-ability-to-sell-deliver/article_4881080e-acc4-11e9-9dbc-8b443dc97b9e.html Join us on barrel selections and see what other perks await. Support the podcast at https://www.patreon.com/bourbonpursuit Come drink some beer with us at 3rd Turn Brewing on July 26th from 4-7pm https://www.facebook.com/events/327452114804983/ Elizabeth, tell us about your role. Do different Master Distiller's have different styles? Is there a Master Distiller training manual? What do you think of everyday people becoming Master Distillers without significant training? What is a Master Distiller today? How do you know a bourbon will be good once it's aged? What flavors or notes do you consider defects? Are we going to see more single malts come out of Brown-Forman? Why is there such a fascination with making malts work? Tell us about the latest Distiller's Select? Are there two different char levels on the double double oaked? Talk about owning your own cooperage. Tell us about King of Kentucky. Why did you chose this label? Is there any pressure on Elizabeth to live up to Chris? How did you feel when you became a Master Distiller? Recorded live at Down One Bourbon Bar in Louisville, KY. 0:00 I love bourbon, but I'm not ready to restart my career to be a distiller. I have a bachelor's degree and I want to continue to use those skills in the whiskey industry. So check this out. The University of Louisville now has an online distilled spirits business certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry like finance, marketing and operations. This is perfect for anyone looking for more professional development. And if you ever want to get your MBA, their certificate credits transfer into Ul's new online MBA program. Learn more about this online program at business global.edu slash online spirits 0:38 the king right there brother 0:40 if you want to use if you want some of that make sure you crack it open now because it's not open. Oh, I feel 0:45 that is it yours? Yeah, I product Yeah, open it. 0:49 Like always calls Kenny $1,000. 0:52 Bottle every every time it comes over I lose $1,000 1:07 Hey everybody, this is Episode 211 of bourbon pursuit. I'm one of your host Kenny and let's go through a little bit the news. Woodford Reserve has announced the release of its newest permanent expression. The Woodford Reserve Kentucky straight wheat whiskey with wheat as its dominant grain at 52% followed by 20% malt 20% corn in a percent rye. This whiskey was created by master distiller Chris Morris and more said that Woodford Reserve now has all four whiskeys as a part of its permanent family of brands. You have Woodford bourbon, Woodford rye, Woodford malt and now Woodford wheat. The Woodford Reserve wheat is 90.4 proof with a suggested retail price of 3499 verse 750 ml. That's quite the segue into our guest today, but we'll save that here for him. It was just a few weeks ago, we talked about the Supreme Court ruling that lifted the ban on out of state retailers in the state of Tennessee that could potentially affect shipping across the nation. Well, I think we're about to start witnessing the start of the domino effect. A Louisville attorney recently filed a lawsuit in federal district court against Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, Kentucky Attorney General Andy this year and the executive director of the Alcohol Beverage Control, Norman, our flag. This complaint argues that the law is unconstitutional because as we've said before, it violates the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution, because by quote, It discriminates against out of state wine retailers engaged in interstate commerce. It also argues that it violates the privileges and immunities clause of Article four section two of the United States Constitution because it denies non resident wine merchants the privilege of engaging and there are occupation in Kentucky on the terms of equivalent those given to the citizens of Kentucky. And that's all according this lawsuit. We are going to continue to pay very close attention to see how this plays out and other states in the upcoming few months. On Monday, this week, we got to take a trip over to Cox's Creek with a few of our Patreon community members and select two barrels of four roses. The team came together and selected a nine year six month old BASF and a 10 year six month OVSK we're really looking forward to getting these barrels out to the art community sometime in September. We also selected a new riff barrel once again. You know if you want to see more about all the perks that are offered by supporting this podcast like going with us on barrel selections, please do us a favor go to patreon.com slash bourbon pursuit and get more information. Now if we rewind the clocks back to around February of 2018 all the fellas from the bourbon Community Roundtable we met up in Frankfort, Kentucky to select a barrel of Buffalo Trace what happened next With that said barrel is the next part of this story. When you have a used bourbon barrel you want to repurpose it. And what better way to do that then letting it age with some delicious Imperial stout, we teamed up with third term brewing and did just that. We aged a stout at 12.2% ABV and let it rest in that barrel for an entire year. And now it's time to release it. On Friday, July 26. from four to 7pm. Ryan and I we will be at third term brewing located in JA town in Louisville, Kentucky and we want to share a pint with you Please come on out and try this beer on tap. And if you really like it, you can take home a crawler for yourself to take home. We hope to see you out there. More information about that can be found on our Facebook page under the events section. Now today's podcast was recorded while ago when we were on site at down one bourbon bar in Louisville, Kentucky. So if it sounds like we're recording in a bar, no, it's because we were, however, Chris Morris and Elizabeth McCall. They're no strangers of the show. And we're excited to have them back on once again. But this time, we're excited to hear them talk about the job of master distiller and how that title is earned through years of service. And really how brown Forman is now laying the foundation for Elizabeth to take over when Chris is ready to retire. We also talked about the barrels that they have in their own Cooper bridge, the char and this week's whiskey quickie that ended on Tuesday, the king of Kentucky. All right, you've heard me talk long enough. So let's hear from Joe over a barrel bourbon. And then you've got Fred Minnick with above the char. 5:50 Hi, this is Joe Beatrice from barrell craft spirits. I work with a team that takes blending seriously, we spend months obsessing over hundreds of combinations, until we figure out the perfect blend for you. 6:01 You can find it on the shelves at your nearest retail store. 6:05 I'm Fred Minnick, and this is above the charm. Every week I asked listeners to send me an idea for above the char, I get so many. But the one request I get most of all, is what do I think of rapid aging. This is the process that new distillers or chemists use to try and make bourbon faster. And I want to tell you, this has been going on for a very, very long time. In technology, they like to seek solutions for problems. And the fact is making Bourbons biggest problem is the fact that making it right and making it tasty, can take anywhere from four to 15 years. So if you're a businessman or woman, and you want to make some money, it sure looks good if you can make a six month old bourbon taste like it's 15 years old. Now a little history behind this. The Romans actually employed rapid aging techniques and wine and spirits. You know, the mid 19th century we saw incredible amounts of people attempt rapid aging technology. In 1867. a Frenchman use a roadable wouldn't paddle to agitate barrels like a butter churn. Using a similar concept. The 1871 us patented peifer and Richards apparatus place barrels on roller slats and a heated room and agitated the barrels back and forth. The inventors claim that this ripened whiskey within a few weeks, several others hit the market in the 1870s to include a heat and motion device that offered practical value and utility. We'd also see ultrasonic radiation center in the 1930s. And the Germans would do things like raise the Ester content up to 120%. And wind is toilets, they also used sound technology. By the 1960s rapid aging fell out of fashion, it was not considered very satisfying. In fact, you would see distillers openly speak out against this. Today we have seen the rise of smaller barrels claiming that it's aged faster. We've seen people play heavy bass music to make the whiskey come out quicker. There's been chemical reactions there have been agitators very similar to you know, mixing a paint can. There's been all these efforts to make whiskey faster, and I've tasted almost all of them. They all lack a certain depth, a certain mouth fill a certain flavor that makes you want to buy it. In fact, I'd say the thing that we should really look at here, is there a problem with whiskey. And the fact is there is not. The problem is is in the making money of whiskey. So as long as you somebody could make money trying to figure out a solution to getting good whiskey to your doorstep, we will always see rapid aging technology. And I will always give it a shot. But I have yet to taste one that is better than even some of the worst craft distilled whiskies. Rapid aging technology doesn't add anything to the quality of the whiskey, at least from what I've tasted. Instead, it strips out a lot of character, and it doesn't have the time that's really required to be a good or great bourbon. So what's the old saying, if it's not broke, don't fix it. And let's face it, Bourbons now broken. And that's this week's above the char Hey, if you have an idea for above the char hit me up on Twitter or Instagram. That's at Fred Minnick again at Fred Minnick. Until next week. Cheers 9:55 Welcome back to another episode of bourbon pursuit. The first of the Live podcast we doing here at down one bourbon bar in Louisville, Kentucky, Fred Ryan and Kenny back here. Once again, and we this is a this is a new home, this is actually going to be pretty fun because Ryan and I had a tasting here last week when we did this. But this is going to be a new adventure bringing a guest Yes, I'm looking around and like I'm remembering our first time we record a podcast was in my basement. And like, just me and you and a laptop and like there was nobody there. And now there's like, like 15 people around us watching there's all these lights, we got master distillers here, there's reserved tables even though they're not for us. 10:37 But people thought they would act like there is it's like kind of crazy. You know, it really is and, and I'm Fred This is how many times you've been down one. 10:46 So it's a problem anytime I actually been here so often that I got my own car back there in the closet of things getting too far. But this is a this has been a fun bar to kind of see it develop. There's been a lot of talent from Louisville, Kentucky. I'm from here and go on to be brand ambassadors for for distilleries and go on to like other opportunities. But this for me is this is one of the places where I come in, and I assess talent for for things that I'm doing and they do a great job here. And of course, they're connected to the Galt house or part of the Galt house family. And so and never hurts from a purchasing opportunity, you know, for a bar to have that kind of purchasing power to be connected to someone like the Galt house, so they they get a lot of good things that a lot of smaller bars don't 11:35 and hold on. I want to know about this scouting report. 11:39 Like Like are you like NBA Scout, you know, going around? Well, 11:41 I you know, as, as you know, Kenny and Ryan, I do a lot of festivals. And I'm also on a lot of education committees for for for, you know, cocktail cocktail. And then I try to do things I try to create content for live festivals and and I usually have to tap into bartenders. And bartenders have to In my opinion, from a career perspective, they have they are a lot like an NBA player. Yeah. And like some people come in are like, really great for two years and then they're gone. Some people come in and they're wanting to the cocktail world. It's true. It's true, like bartending talent is something that from an education perspective, you have to scout you have to find the people that will you know, put on good seminars and can actually make a Daiquiri in a grown in an old fashioned and a man had don't they don't they serve the great Chris Morris the right way. 12:45 Don't give him the cocktail get give him the right cocktail that you know, he asked for 12:51 a frozen concoction. It's amazing Jimmy Buffett, 12:54 but but the Daiquiri actually was not meant to be 12:57 a blended 13:00 auction. Although it's tornadoes. 13:01 I love the blended 13:03 a bottle and you put a margarita or blender and shake it up, and it's ready to drink. But 13:09 all right, Kenny said about to explode. We got him. 13:14 Chris, as you may know, our friend candy here. He's a little he's all right. 13:23 We got it. We got him taking off the guardrail. Sometimes we gotta bring it back in focus. But that's really what we're talking about today's not cocktails and we are talking about bourbon and most important, we're talking about Woodford Reserve. So today we have Chris Morris the master distiller at Woodford Reserve and Elizabeth McCall, the Assistant master distiller at Woodford Reserve. And both of these people are alumni of the show. I believe it was back in the episode 40s and Episode 60s when when you made your parents so welcome back on. Thank you. 13:50 Thanks for having us back. So have you been 13:52 Yeah, and get to get this kicked off a little bit. Elizabeth, I kind of want you to kind of give people another recreation of really what your role has progressed to since the last time you're on because you were in the lab. You are the head taster, I believe and now your assistant master distiller so what what's what's that look 14:10 like back when we go back in time as Chris's wonderfully made Manhattan made its way to him. So when I last was speaking to it was master taster and senior quality control specialist at Woodford Reserve. Working production part of the time and the other part of the time was working with Chris on innovation and of course, tasting batches and all of that and it shifted to more focus on really getting in the weeds of trying to understand how Chris's mind works. Which 14:42 Hold on wait that out. 14:44 I have not figured it out yet. He's kind of 14:47 nice. You know how your mind when I respond 14:48 to emails as genius? I do he so he's being very embarrassed. But I really do because I won't ever be able to understand fully how his mind works and how he puts patches together and how he pulls in history and an actual where's this the market going? I mean, all that is very interesting, but I try to learn as much as I can. So I'm trying to just follow in his footsteps and learn that and that's just spending as much time with him as possible. He gives me projects. And he's like here the other day. I'm like, Okay, how do you build a new grain recipe? And he handed me the book of corn. He's like, I read this on a trip, like one string of corn. Yeah. 15:30 Like a Bible. textbook on corn. 15:32 Yeah, there's a book on corn. There's a book on corn. And I mean, that's the kind of thing Morris does when he when he thinks there's a lot of conscious thought. 15:40 It's amazing Kenny, but actually authors write things. 15:43 Yeah, let me know when it turns into an audio book. And I'll 15:48 forget on Audible 15:49 or the movie, the movie version. 15:52 But that but that's a lot of what I've been trying to learn that and then of course, still learning in the production side of things I you can never, you'll never know everything. I still have a lot of learning to do in terms of getting my hands dirty at the Cooper bridge and other distilleries outside of Woodford Reserve. So my and then education. I work with Chris and the team of other masters Stiller's at Brown Forman on educating our sales force and distributor folks on the whiskey category. So there's just lots of things nuances that go into it. 16:22 I got a question for you to Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt but like, so does the master is still or just do each different distillers have different styles or methods? Or is it more like plug and play? Or like, what is Chris's style? And what's yours? Or like, how are they different? Or same? Or? 16:38 Well, certainly, in my experience, 16:42 we see differences good talk with Fred before we stepped in this afternoon, that each company has its own criteria. For the job. There's no uniform, what is a master distiller what is the distiller it varies from company to company. And we're are of course, very proud to be the oldest spirits company and in America, the the round form and parent company. So we think we know what we're doing. And I am the seventh in the history of the company. And Elizabeth is, is working away to number eight. But we have criteria that differ from other companies. But you do see a difference in style. And interpretation. Of course, I everybody knows my mentor. My first boss in my whole life was Lincoln Henderson. And I'm very different than link. In fact, my palate is different than Lincoln. Near the end of his career, we would have arguments, because I was tasting things he didn't taste and he would get upset. Sorry, that's the way that it was. Because we know as people age, their sense of taste deteriorates. So a younger person will have a better sense of taste. I know that 17:58 I trying to say that you already kind of like see inevitable coming is that was that was happening, and you're trying to groom her to do 18:03 that. That's part of the process. One of my key roles today is to develop Elizabeth, to succeed me. So that's part of our brown Coleman process, passing on the mantle from generation to generation, so that nothing changes. Wink wink, things will change. Because Elizabeth is not Chris. Yeah, I wasn't Lincoln. 18:26 But we got a ways before we see that change, right, Chris? 18:32 I hope so. But not that I don't want Elizabeth and 18:38 I have a lot to learn. 18:39 But we're having such a good time together. And we got our new master taster over here. Katie joining us tonight. But that's that's just if you're making 100% natural product with reserve is corn, rye, barley, or how many whiskies? It's the limestone water, its yeast, its exposure to copper, and maturation and an oak barrel. It's as natural as you can get. And as you put those batches together, based on your perception of our standard, it will evolve. Because again, we're all individuals. And I think that's one reason people will love a brand, like what preserve it is our collaborative interpretation of this product. And again, it will change with the changes are subtle, the changes are evolutionary. But the The bottom line is it's it's it's a real product that somebody or some persons a team are putting together. It's not artificial, it's not manufactured. It's not a committee in in some corporate office, it's real. 19:54 Yeah. So is that like training manual? Is that something you do? Or is that something that, you know, brown Forman has like, here's how we want it done. And Chris is like, Yo, this should be done. Like so how's that kind of work in that process? Brian Yeah, 20:09 it's an audible book I had, 20:10 I had produced for me or developed for me. The that manual before it didn't exist. And when I was coming up, it was a guidepost for me, you know, sort of tailored to me, and, and that was back in 2019 years ago. And, and I've taken those that original work as as we've evolved and developed and tweaked it. And now brown Forman does have a professional development guide for master distiller, which means assistant master distiller we have a professional guide for master taster that both Elizabeth and of course Katie have gone through courses of the destruction experiences. 21:04 Let's take it Okay. All right. So you're just talking about like all these manuals you have and all this effort that you put into the terms and titles master distiller master taster system master distiller when I can just go right down the street, and get a diploma from a moonshine University, and then come out, start my own distillery, or Heck, I don't even have to go there. I can start a distillery tomorrow and say, I'm a master distiller even watching YouTube channel, I could watch it and 21:32 say, I'm a master distiller in the old Ascot brand takes off from there, 21:36 that's right, was shaking her head. What in the world is happening to American whiskey right now, where you have one company who's going through all this effort for the titles of distiller and then you have some random schmo wearing wherever and USA saying that they're a master distiller and they haven't done a liquor distilling What's going on? 22:03 Yeah, Elizabeth, I kinda wanna get your take on that one. Because you're, you've been, you've been trying to groom yourself for this role, and you've been really putting years of effort into it. So 22:10 so I only have 10 years in this industry, and which some people are like, Oh, my gosh, that's a long time. Long brown Forman that's not baby. And, and in this industry, in my opinion, that's not I don't feel it's a long time. And I am very, very much very proud and I think you hear it when I talk about Chris's going nowhere, I hope anytime soon, because I have a lot of pride in the fact that I'm assistant and that in implies a great deal of learning I had still have to do and the respect I have for the title of masters Still, if they were to tell me tomorrow, you're going to be masters still or I would have serious issues with being called that for especially for a brand like Woodford Reserve or or any of our brown Forman brands that have some much weight behind them. Um, it's just a title to me that I look to and I think of somebody like Chris Morris, who is a it has lived and breathed bourbon and whiskey his entire life. And it's not just about running stills, anybody can learn that skill. You really can you 23:20 think anybody can run a still. 23:23 If you have the right manuals, and you go out and you spend time training. Now you can't just walk in off the street and do this. No. But can you learn anybody can learn how to do that. A lot of people can learn maybe not anybody, 23:35 but there's a lot of people in backwoods that have stills before 23:41 you can learn how to do these skills. And but there's time and thought and experience that goes into something that really makes you want to believe that your product like what Chris Morris, I mean, what he's done for Woodford Reserve is unreal. You look at the like we sit down and we talk about things and we talked about brand planning. He introduced like, was he there for the start of the actual bourbon. No, that was he was with a different company at the time. But when he came in, we have right we have our masters collection that came out you have our malt you have wheat that's coming out soon. And that's not all out of just willy nilly. Like ma this would be fun. It's it's a lot of it is well thought out when you look at history. And when you look at what's the plan we we talked about flavor with Woodford and I mean, that's his genius and experience in the industry that led him to that path and that guided vision for brand and that takes nothing but time. I mean time is Yeah, I think is so hear 24:45 what you're saying there like with with with branding and everything like that. I think we don't know, as a society when I when I say society, I mean bourbon society. What a master distiller in so Chris, I'll bring that to you. What is a master distiller because it meant something in the 1800s and the 1950s? It means something different today. What is a master distiller? 25:12 Well, of course there is no, there is no criteria. In terms of industry, there's no set of requirements. As I mentioned earlier, it varies from company to company. And I believe ground Coleman believes. Number one, you're responsible for the overall quality of the product that your name is associated with the distillery associated with. And as Elizabeth said, that means a whole lot. If you're our colleague, Jeff Barnett at jack daniels, you're the master distiller of jack daniels. That's sort of important. Woodford Reserve, my gosh, old Forester, you know, those are important brands, not only to our company, but to the history of our industry. So there's there's a lot of gravitas, there, there's a lot of response ability. And also, I think it means your brands that you have helped create and develop, have won awards are recognized as good brands, you're, you're a master of what your master of a brand that is acknowledged to be of the utmost quality. You haven't won an award. I don't know how you can be a master yet. But again, that's our opinion, not a global opinion of any degree. 26:27 So again, I think it's a nice baseline. I mean, Kenny, wouldn't you agree that it's at least a baseline for what is a master distiller you have to have a wonderful an award when you have so many? 26:39 I don't know. I mean, you kind of you kind of take the anti part of that, right? I know that you're you're a judge at San Francisco, and then you've got the other group of bourbon enthusiasts out there that say, don't don't take that as as gospel. Right. You take that as as a as a way that you can start learning about a spirit or anything like that. But when you see gold, double gold. 27:01 Well, in fairness, I wasn't thinking about San Francisco. Question. I was thinking of like best bourbon at San Francisco, or, I mean, one of the three medals there. I 27:13 think that's what Chris was thinking to, or I could just pay off the 27:15 Forbes writer that I know Yeah. 27:20 Let me add maybe as a close to this, or we continue. But that's one thing brown Forman and the Kentucky distillers Association because this was the this was a subject of discussion years ago with the the membership, and we don't think anyone company organization can define or impose any restrictions on the rest of the industry. As Fred said, if a little startup distillery wants to call its whatever person master distiller that's up to them, that's fine brown Coleman is not gonna say you can't do that. It's not our job to improve punk upon the industry, our opinions. This is America, we don't do that. So I think the ultimate, the ultimate, the bottom line is, our brand speaks for itself. 28:13 Does it taste good? 28:15 Good. taste. I think that's fair for for the professional side. But now we're starting to see like this growth within like, the bar community. And everybody's saying they're an expert, about whiskey. And you in and Kenny brought up, you know, the judging competitions and what is best. There was just a gas station whiskey, that one world's best whiskey. And I seriously question how that one, you know, and I'm a judge or a lot of those things. And I and I know like people have to pay entry to get in that. So there could have been like a low point of entry, there might not have been a lot of, well, Chris, what do you think about like this rise of so called x books that are tasting things and putting their names on on things and hosting podcast hosting podcast, 29:09 full disclosure, we always say, and we 29:12 never ever named a whiskey of the year, you to have never done anything like that. So like, now we're in a situation where there are 1500 different, you know, whiskey, Somali A's, or experts or whatever. And, you know, they're not coming from the ilk of brown Forman. And you may even think that I'm that, too. But I'm curious as to what your thought is, in terms of like the people who are tasting. Consider the tasters of the community, 29:41 I would just be curious to know I mean, for me, like, you know, we're tasting and we want to know quality. Do you know what are the all the defects you can find in bourbon, whiskey distillate? And when you find them, like, Can you describe like, well, what did they taste like? What are those those defects? Where did they come from in the production process? How do you troubleshoot and work around that and get through all of that, and 30:09 I guess it important to know how to fix it, or it's just important to spot it as a taster. 30:14 As a taster, you probably don't have to know that if you're going to be a master distiller, you have to know how to do that. 30:19 But a taster can't fix it. Because it's already the 30:22 case. Yeah, you're tasting it at the end of the year. It's already out there too late, I guess. But you could maybe you could talk about but if you're a taster, you should know. I don't know. I mean, will will does this as if it's a new mic. Does it stay in new mic? What happens to that defect? Does it age out? Is it something that and so if you're tasting it something at New make and then you're tasting something? That's a finished product or maturing? How do you troubleshoot it on that end? If you don't know where it comes from in the production process? I don't know. I don't those things are important, I guess because my background and where I 30:56 that's an interesting question. Are you talking about how it push through the age and improve? How How much does that like experience like with Chris, are you like, you know, that like, what are those some of those notes? I guess that you're like, well, that 31:10 that is this is going to eventually work itself out? That's where 31:13 experience helps. Yeah, but sometimes you're surprised either positively or negatively. But that's an interesting point that everybody's bringing up. How has this person this expert been trained? As Elizabeth said, we're professionally trained, we're trained. We have PhDs on staff for professional professionals in the sensory science. Elizabeth is a sensory scientist, has her beginnings at Brown Forman. We have sensory science consultants come and test us and work with us. So we're, and these just aren't whiskey sensory scientists, they work for food on aroma only like perfume companies. These are experts, and sensor science. And so it surprises me and sometimes alarms me. When we taste a whiskey, and we note, defects. And a person critiquing that whiskey is just singing its praises. And you're like, there's these obvious defects in the whiskey. And this person either doesn't understand them doesn't recognize them, and 32:25 what they want in their 32:26 whiskey or they like defects. And so things become more complicated, Fred, when I almost had when I started the industry, because there was nothing like this in the industry. But when early books Gary and Marty Reagan and way Mac and Harris and the legendary Michael Jackson are starting to write about whiskey when nobody's right about whiskey. 32:52 It was a very tight 32:54 sorority and fraternity of whiskey riders and everybody knew each other. There weren't that many whiskeys. You know, there were a handful of Bourbons a handful of this. And they had there was nothing that we see today pre micro distillery movement. And pretty much everybody was on the same page, you understood what you're talking about, right? And as bourbon and rye and whiskeys have become popular, and everybody jumps on, which is fun. Again, that sort of dilutes the level expertise. And I think today, people well can be self styled experts, but what is their their base. So again, we leave that to the consumer. To the side, somebody says something good about a brand new glass of whiskey, try it, if you like it good for you, if you don't learn from it. So we can't impose upon the entire industry. Our views, again, we just have to hope people pay attention to what for reserve and what we're doing and, and go from there. 34:00 So I kind of want to educate some of the listeners and the watchers out there. Because, you know, you've talked about and both of you have talked about trying to find defects and whether it's in new maker whether it's in aging whiskey, and you know, today we brought these, I'm going to put words or words in Elizabeth now here, we brought our Bourbons to compete is because last time we talked, you said that compete is where sort of the, the way that you like to use in the tasting room to kind of get the most flavors, Adam because of the tool of shape and stuff like that. But I kind of want to pick your brain a little bit. What if there's somebody that's at home, and they're listening? And they want to try to understand what flavors to pull? And what are those possible defects that they're buying, or they're finding. Now, of course, not coming in at Woodford Reserve or this double out. It's definitely not going to be in this. But however they're going to go and they're going to find some random bottle you ever heard about and they're gonna buy it? And they're going to taste it and be like, Oh, what is this? So what what are those some of those of those flavor, those notes that you really think are the biggest defects that 35:04 that any good master distiller should be able to find. And before Elizabeth jumps in, again, we're looking at two sides of the coin, the first four sources of flavor, which is our mantra of the five sources, what is the water, the grain, the fermentation distillation bring to the palate. So that's our new make our new spirit. So we judge that. So it has a set of criteria. And we're looking, of course, you never look for good things, because you, you assume the good things are there. So we do look for defects. And at that point is too late, unless there's a certain defect, or saying forget this. But we want to know that defect is there as we barrel and then adjust as we go forward. But we use those defects to then go back into the distillery and say, something's not working here. Let's fix it, because where do you go to first to fix it? What do you like? 36:00 This is probably mostly the 36:02 reverse engineering part of it was 36:03 that you go to grain you go to fermentation, you go to distillation, yet one of the one of the three, the water, the water is going to be solid. And then we go into the would go into the barrel for maturation. And then of course, 678 years later, there could be different defects, because now the wood character has come into play. So it depends on where we are that we're looking for certain defects. Because as Elizabeth said, some of the new mech defects can be overcome by maturation. They're still there, you just don't know them because the wood has taken lead wrong, but you don't want them there in the first place. So we now have two places to adjust. New make means we adjust the distillery but what's in what's there can't be adjusted. But we can do that on a week basis. Years later, we adjust by bashing barrels together. So we can fix what we have in front of us except for one defect which is unfixable and, and go forward from there. So bad, she becomes very important, you know, a couple of barrels of this with 98 barrels of that are going to be okay. We don't like that. But it's 37:25 just one one bad apple makes them all bad. There's the one defect that we can't hide it. We can't hide 37:31 it. And what is that? Oh, my god yesterday. That's right. Jackie told us. We probably 37:37 got a little bit of that going on with all this rain right now. A lot of mas probably going in those non Pete cycle. Yeah. warehouses. 37:45 Yeah. Or if you have a leaky roof. 37:48 I got I want to switch gears a little bit for a second. 37:53 Brown Forman is such a dominant American whiskey company. And then last, like I'd say, 10 years there's been a such a dynamic effort to pull in malts like to try and do like, not necessarily a single malt, but some kind of like malt mash, or the five malt released from a few years ago. And I was and I know your passion, you have so much passion for single malt scotches. You have a you have a real like, craving for those and sometimes, Chris, but are we going to see a stronger effort from Brown Forman on the American single malt category that's just taking off and I know we've had some releases of late, but are we going to see more of that? 38:45 Yes, that let Elizabeth talk about our particular products. But 38:51 yes, I'm a big fan of single malt Scotch, if that upsets anyone, I'm sorry. 38:57 He's not really sorry. 39:00 And of course, brown Forman owns three single malt Scotch distilleries, which we Elizabeth and I visited back in July that we're just so proud of that. But I am the only Kentucky bourbon distiller who's a keeper of the quake. I'm the only Kentucky bourbon distilleries been honored by the Scotch whisky Association, which I'm very proud of. So scotch whiskey, of course, is our is our ancestor, you know, the bourbon tradition is, is the evolution of scotch whiskey evolving in Kentucky, in the 1770s through the 1850s based on our environment, so we love We love that, that that touchstone of Scotland and Ireland are is where our tradition comes from. But we released a Masters collection as as this group knows, and maybe many of the listeners do not know we released a Masters collection do I many years ago, that was 100% single malt, or hundred percent malt question say that was our distillers malt, it wasn't painted. It wasn't smoked. It was the same malt we make our wood reserve bourbon with. And we distilled that 100% malt fermentation and inner half of the volume produced and used Woodford Reserve barrels so they'd held Woodford Reserve bourbon one time. And then we barrel the other half of the volume produced a new with reserve barrels. And that became season seasoned malt and new cast some silly name. I can't remember what we called it, because we didn't want to call it single malt. Because at that time, if you said single malt and probably to this day, if you say single malt people immediately go to Scott. Hello malt. Yeah, you know, some 40:58 change up the verbiage and malt 41:00 and they weren't. They didn't. They weren't very popular. 41:05 You know, I remember the, some of those like, there was one classic malt. 41:11 Right. Thank you for remembering. Yes. 41:15 And there was classic malt in there straight malt. I can't remember which one I like more. He has a good memory. 41:22 But I liked one of them more than the other classic was 41:25 that you liked the I liked the the straight malt. I knew Cooper edge. 41:31 It might have been but, 41:33 you know, 41:34 I've always and I wrote this in one of my reviews. And and I have to tell you, Chris, I've always appreciated the fact that if I've ever been critical of your stuff, you've never taken me to dinner and yelled at me for an hour. 41:46 I've never taken a dinner. Yeah. But 41:52 I'm one of them. I was just like, what and what in that review set I the one that I didn't care as much for I think said I wish they would do more focus on bourbon. And the thing is, is that you all are such brilliant bourbon distillers. I wonder why it is that there's such a fashion fascination for making malts work. Okay, 42:18 well, so the malls came out. And of course 10 years ago who was buying bottles of would reserve masters collection, bourbon drinkers. And bourbon drinkers don't drink scotch by and large. And so it didn't go over very well. And I can understand that they wanted bourbon. They wanted seasoned oak finish, they wanted to cinema cherish Chardonnay finish, they wanted sweet mash, and we forward Don't forget 401k. And we sort of let them down, which is the way it goes. But we learned a lot in terms of the process of making malt heavy whiskey. And in my bottom line, lonely was going back to our earlier conversation of taste, he's just sort of boring. He's just sort of boring. Hundred percent malt again, we don't have this smoky that PD characteristics of some of the European malt or Japanese malt. And we're not, we're not aging for 20 3040 years, and we don't have port pipes, cherry butts, it was all American oak. And they were sort of born. That doesn't mean that they didn't taste good, but they were sort of born. And that learning leads to our new release of last year, Kentucky straight malt whiskey, which is a permanent member of our family. It will be coming back this late spring, early summer. 43:42 And it's it's a member of the family. So Elizabeth, have you been doing well? 43:45 Oh, yeah. 43:47 Yeah, it's been doing really well. We released it last June. And 43:51 it all sold out right away. I mean, people were like, six months later, like, Can we are you making more like, what's the deal? And, you know, Chris, and I get approached like, well, how can we make this you know, get get to the shelves a little quicker? Can we adjust something with our process or our quality? You know, we're like, Nope, can't do that. But we humored them and we put it into a little bit in the last Oh, there's a lot of pressure for that because 44:16 what 1910 from old for sir, 44:18 there's a lot of pressure because people really like we put out good products at Brown Forman if you didn't know and people get excited about it. But you know, the job of a master distiller you know, is to say no, I mean Chris's name is on that bottle. So you know, at the end of the day, yep, it's when things go wrong. They're like Chris and that was you know, he's the one who has to talk about it. And so when with the mall, it was very popular we did a Kentucky straight malt whiskey and we fought for it to stay at the process where we released it that we released that and because the taste you even a year makes it mean that there's a time difference with agent you know, you've got to let it go to what it should be. I got a 45:06 question dinner up just because I'm clueless about Malton. And I assume you're making these malts are you doing them in the call a copper still or Chi Stiller. 45:16 Yeah, it's both and they both okay. It is a if we're going to produce something and put it under the distiller select Woodford Reserve distillers select bourbon rye malt wheat that's coming out soon is always going to be that that batches of column and pot still because that's 45:30 all I'm from Shively and then the pots from were for sale. 45:36 Yes, yes. Because because we were tasting some Kings County I was Tom and it's a 80% corn 20% malted barley and we thought we were tasting like young younger notes and their distiller said hey, that's not younger knows that's our our pot still. And it's creating like some different buttery for me kind of funky flavors. And so I 45:58 like stuff figuring it out. Yeah. 45:59 So I was curious to get your take on that. Like, you know, funk. 46:02 He's not one of our don't say 46:04 funky. Okay. No, I was just curious. But 46:07 no, I mean, I think that I wasn't around at the beginning of starting our pot stills. But from those that I've spoken to figuring out how to run your pot stills is a challenge. We have gotten to a point with Woodford Reserve we've got it figured out. done all the hard work over the years to figure it out. But the notes you get from a pot still are big, bold, oily notes. You see the grain come through more. I mean, Chris, if you wanted to add it, I mean, that's there's a distinct difference between the two types of dis focus 46:37 on we normally use them wrong. Yeah. 46:42 You know, you don't you don't use it very often whiskey. 46:45 Yeah. 46:46 But if you're gonna it's probably coming from a pot still. Yeah, no distillation level pots. 46:54 But here's here's a fun bit of our story. And Elizabeth will tell you about our recipe is one thing that I've drawn on from inspiration is the history and heritage of our industry in Kentucky and certainly brown Foreman's history and heritage and started research on malt multi malt whiskey in the history of Kentucky. And one thing, brown Forman has a tremendous archive again for the the oldest spirits company in America 140 849 ish years old right now. We've got a wonderful archive it which is housed at the Frazier History Museum. And we have a we have a complete set of the wine and spirits journals from from the 19th and early 20th century, much less our own documents. And we found that there were there were malt whiskies made in Kentucky before prohibition, brown Forman had a brand called marrow malt MAROW. And when you look at the old Sanborn Maps, which are diagrams, schematics of distilleries for insurance purposes, you'll see these at the University of Kentucky at the Phil center, University of Louisville. And of course, in our collection, we see that the original brown Forman distillery had a mult floor and a malt kiln. We were sort of we were a Scottish distillery in the 19th century. And that's incredible. And that in the history of our state, their first Malthouse, and remember, we don't have a malt house in Kentucky any longer. The first multi operation in Kentucky 1785. Before we were Kentucky, is in Woodford County. So I thought what better provenance than a brown Forman brand made in Woodford County to be what is now the only Kentucky straight malt whiskey on the market, or Woodford Reserve malt is the only one of it's a 48:56 miracle. 48:57 That may be true. But folks crave the bourbon. And as they 49:02 as they did back all goes back to birthday. 49:09 Hey, it's Kenny here. And I want to tell you about an event that's happening on Saturday, August 24. Because I want to see you in historic downtown Frankfort, Kentucky, at bourbon on the banks. It's the Commonwealth premier bourbon tasting and awards festival. There's live music and over 100 vendors of food, beer, wine, and of course, bourbon. But guess what even will be there in the bourbon pursuit booth. You can check out all the events including tastings with the master distillers that you've heard on the show before and the People's Choice Award for the Best bourbon out there. You can get your all inclusive ticket for $65. Plus, you can join on the free Friday night event. Go and check it out bourbon on the banks.org you've probably heard of finishing beer using whiskey barrels but Michigan distillery is doing the opposite. They're using barrels to finish their whiskey. New Holland spirits claims to be the first distillery to stout a whiskey. The folks at Rock house whiskey club heard that claim and had to visit the banks of Lake Michigan to check it out. It all began when New Holland brewing launched in 97. Their Dragon's milk beer is America's number one selling bourbon barrel aged out in 2005. They apply their expertise from brewing and began distilling beer barrel finished whiskey began production 2012 and rock house was the club is featuring it in their next box. The barrels come from Tennessee get filled a dragon's milk with your twice the mature bourbon is finished in those very same barrels. Rocco's whiskey club is a whiskey the Month Club on a mission to uncover the best flavors and stories from craft distillers across the US. Along with two bottles of hard to find whiskey rack houses boxes are full of cool merchandise that they ship out every two months to members in over 40 states go to rock house whiskey club com to check it out. And try a bottle of beer barrel bourbon and beer barrel rye use code pursuit for $25 off your first first box 51:03 that may be true but folks crave the bourbon and as they 51:08 as they did back all goes back to 51:11 bourbon you know I it's hard for me to sustain now 51:15 no no I agree with that. But so Woodford Reserve is the home of innovative whiskeys first and foremost that's the big thing for us is that we can we have the with what our distillery we have the ability to be flexible and to play with Greg sorry, 51:28 but hold on folks. Let's just have a moment for King King Kentucky. I am this is good. Yeah. So good. 51:37 As good as names on 51:41 those labels to 51:42 every every one of these is like man it's just like a trip down like great whiskey bro. Holy shit balls. 51:51 I'm glad I can bring that least you let me open it with some 51:53 goodbye. There's so there's so many complicated notes in this. I did I know even Yes. And this was one of my This was one of my top whiskies of the year last year. And you know, the craziest thing is I went into like a blind competition. This was like my front runner to win it but you know how blind tastings go you just you just never know how it's going to go but 52:16 it's so good. 52:19 It's so good. 52:20 Kenny I'm gonna get us back my buddies get us back on the rails here. Because you were kind of interrupted her because she was kind 52:27 of talking I'm sorry I apologize. 52:31 bourbon like it is 52:32 because she started she 52:34 started going I love Barbara What can I say? That wrong? 52:37 Yes, drinking a beer. So 52:38 what I'm saying is that we're the home of innovative whiskeys and so we do a lot of really fun things and I you know, with the with our malt whiskey, we are 51% malt 47% corn and just 2% right, so we're right close to that bourbon requirement. You know, 47% corn, you know, the way malt is a gateway mall. But the thing is, is that yes, it's a gateway market who really knows you know, what, what is American mall? At this point in time? We're still defining what that really means. It's not it 53:09 was the marrow balter. Do you know the recipe that 53:13 was on your corn book? 53:16 Pick up a glass slipper. 53:19 What is American mall? There's actually incredible debate about that. I think the greatest mall producer in this country is Lance winters from St. George he's been making American mall you know since the 90s. Or there abouts legally 53:36 but it's not a category I mean, like it's not a category it's not something that people are really seeking out so why why do we produce these things and bourbon is is Woodford big thing Why are we producing more Why are we introducing we were introducing what why are you introducing this makes no sense. We are flexing the muscle muscle in fact that Woodford Reserve is the home of innovative whiskeys and we can play in flavor. It's all flavor so you look at our Woodford Reserve distiller select product and it's balanced and complex you can find 212 flavors in a glass of Woodford Reserve bourbon buy them all 54:13 start with the eighth at the gold order go 54:16 within you get into 54:17 acid TO acid 54:22 within you look at him and everything is done with purpose. I told you earlier Chris Morris is a genius when it comes to bourbon and understanding it and when we're planning out Woodford Reserve it's not just all willy nilly like oh, wouldn't it be fun to do a mall? How cool nobody else is doing it? Let's do that. No, it is thought out because you look at we got our distiller slick bourbon which hits all five areas of flavor. Then you have our double oak which came out in 2012. It's sweet, aromatic forward, it hits that we want you to know we want you to taste sweet aromatics. Then we've got our rye which is spice forward trying to hit that area of flavor. Then you've got our malt which is this grain wood notes coming through and then with our wheat will complete it with our our fruit forward notes, but then also going back to 1939 when they establish the TTP establish what are the four types of American whiskey, bourbon rye, malt wheat we're hitting all those so not only are we covering flavor, but we're also looking at from a historical standpoint as well. 55:27 Yeah. And you're doing a lot of the experimentation that hopefully bourbon geeks are really trying to trying to harness and on because you do it, you do it you know the you have the standard, you've got your double load but then you also have your distiller select series, right? These these sort of one offs that people really kind of they gravitate towards because it's something you knew is something unique. What's been the the latest one that has come out that that sort of garnered some attention? 55:51 Well, the latest one is our good old favorite. 55:53 Double, double, double, double, double, 55:56 double. Okay, okay, I don't know how many doubles we're on now. 55:59 It's just double double it's it's double ups but ah words of the 12 months 24 months. But man, I mean, it's, it's a totally shifts the flavor profile completely from our double oak. And people are obsessed with this. 56:15 How many? How many when you start taking over how many doubles are going to be on this? 56:19 Well, I just want to interject here like there was I got my Christina the story. I my wisdom teeth taken out one year. And I like where this is I died after for like three months, I couldn't taste anything. The only thing that I can taste from like that I could assess was double oak, and double double oak. And it is what I think barrel finishing is the hardest thing to do in American whiskey right now to put out like a really good product because you can screw it up so easily. And what they you have done with double o n double a double double. 57:04 Double yeah. Oh, 57:05 yeah. As I say we're getting some data is so hard to do it. I know. I am sure you guys went through a lot of batches to get that flavor. Right. But my God, is it? Does it feel like a dessert on the palate? Oh, no. Does it feel like dessert? Well, 57:22 thank you, Fred. That now to Fred's point. Barrel finishing has been around for quite a long time. Give Dr. Bill Lumsden who I'm very familiar with at Glen Margie as the the modern father of barrel finishing back in the early 90s. But when all of us because we finished we finished with reserve, as you all know and our masters collection and cinema treasures Chardonnay barrels and Pino voir barrels. We didn't make those barrels. They were used before it's and I'm a good prayer. finishes are typically completed in barrels that came from somebody else and had been used before. So in the development of double oat, we have created the first and only whiskey in the world finished in a barrel made specifically for it. by it. Having our own brown Forman coupe bridge has allowed us to make a second barrel brand new charred on the inside to finish Woodford Reserve specifically and it took two years to develop. And we take full limiter, Woodford finish it in the second barrel for up to a year, as Elizabeth said, and we have double hooks, it's the only whiskey in the world scotch Irish, Japanese, you name it, the only whiskey in the world that has been in two barrels, the original in the finish barrel that were both new made for it by its own its own coop bridge that's unique. And as Elizabeth said, we're in that second barrel for approximately one year for the word preserved double o double double we go two years in the flavor changes, but it's the 59:14 same barrel for two years. Yes, you don't leave the barrel. It's that 59:18 I think there's a misconception that there's two barrels. 59:21 And then we Yes, we have gone three years we have gone for years. And is it triple double is a quadruple double what we're going to call it, but we have decided that that flavor profile gets a little too intense, a little too far afield from what we want. And we have decided that double double is as far as we go career. So we continue to experiment. You may have said this and I apologize if you did. I was 59:47 distracted because somebody had a question online and like I was like trying to get it over here. But somebody was asking, Is there two different type of char levels on each barrel? 59:56 Yes, yes. So 59:58 you didn't say it did you know? 1:00:01 Alright, sweet, so you're gonna hear it right now. 1:00:03 But that's also what makes it so great. And the fact that we have our own Cooper is so we can build our own barrels I always jokingly call it couture barreling because we're making barrels specifically for each brand. And so with the with the double ocean we started out we have our Woodford Reserve distiller select barrel which is going to be a nine month seasoning, we do a 10 minute toast and 25 second char on that barrel, then that's age five to seven years then we go into our double oak barrel. The double oak barrel has the nine months seasoning a 40 minute toast and a five to 10 second char. So we're flash charging as we like to call it. But what we're doing is a long toasting process which gets into the lignin layer of the wood, which is where a lot of the Van Halen lives. So when you knows double oak to get those they've only been what's been battling, battling. 1:00:51 Battling 1:00:52 Okay, sorry, nella Sorry, no, that's okay. 1:00:54 I'm an idiot. I just 1:00:56 that's why it's 1:00:58 so that that's kind of where you get all those really really sweet aromatic notes. And you're going to find that with WOQU you get the color too. So it's really getting 1:01:09 so Elizabeth you and Chris, this is going to be exciting conversation probably just for the two of us here on the on this will start one over here. 1:01:22 But you talked about how you're the only distillery that has their own Cooper HO of 1:01:27 our size if you want to go there 1:01:30 with no no I'm no I mean, Elizabeth on our side. 1:01:36 So that story starts in like the 1940s when there's a lot of these acquisitions going on from the larger parent companies of the time, national Shanley you know Sega drums a lot of these kind of companies, brown Forman, instead of those companies were out there acquiring distilleries that could not meet the mandate for making alcohol for the war effort. instead of chasing that carrot instead of chasing those distillers to buy independent distillers they were purchasing Cooper juice. And when they did that, they kind of got themselves a lump in hundred 1:02:20 and 50 years, 1:02:22 we're going on ground for me. It just it was like it was like one of these brilliant business moves in the 40s and 50s. And then they later acquired a little company called jack daniels. Yep. You know, I mean, so there's like, all this week. business acumen within brown Forman and I always like when I hear you all talk about like, we're the only distillery that has our own Cooper bridge. I think of the guy who was in a boardroom, who thought in the 1940s is like, Hey, why are we going after distilleries when we can get what everybody needs? And that's the Beryl. 1:03:00 You know, Fred, that's a good point. I've never really heard that story. And I don't know if Chris if anybody knows it, Chris would know that story of just because that's probably like the Woodford Reserve story when it the Bourbons giants like hey, we want to acquire we want to buy a bourbon distillery and start a new brand and people are like, Are you crazy? So I'm sure it's the same kind of thought with our with our Cooper's? 1:03:21 Well, Fred was that was certainly pointing in the right direction. So coming out of the Second World War, the big distilleries, the big companies I should say, who had many distilleries, Shin Lacey firms national Linh more, and others had their own Cooper, just all in local or the local region. And they were making their own barrels. And that men barrels were hard to come by there is a fierce demand and therefore a fierce competition for barrels. And small independent companies. Were having a difficult time. So as Les Brown, the first son of our founder, George Garvin Brown, decided, well, we need to have our own Cooper edge if we're going to survive. And that led to the purchase of a wood making plant in the Highland Park neighborhood of Lobel that had been making of all things, plywood for the war effort. And it made rifle stocks. It had been a furniture factory. And we purchased that wood making plant and converted it to a coop bridge. So we were just one of many distilleries at the time that had its own Cooper edge. So it wasn't abnormal. It wasn't a big deal. It was sort of norm but 1:04:45 it was a step. It was a step toward the direction that you all became in the 50s you acquired 1:04:52 jack daniels and then and then by and large, those big famous distilling companies went out of business. Their brands were broken up there, distillers were there distilleries were closed and consolidated and little brown Forman kept plugging along. And here we are now today, as the only major whiskey company in the world. There are some small companies that make their own barrels, but we're talking tiny, tiny companies, but we make all our own new barrels. And that has allowed us to expand and develop the range of jack daniels products. Old forester obviously Woodford Reserve the unique barrels that Elizabeth told us about king of Kentucky Cooper's craft. Again, it's amazing to think that we're not the biggest whiskey company in the world by any stretch of the imagination. We are the top five but only and only we make our own barrels. And then when those barrels are sold on the open market, because we use them only once for our products. And certainly what for barrels are in high demand double oak barrels are in super high demand on the open market, from brewers, wineries, tequila producers, rum producers and whiskey producers of any strike. That brown Forman supplies annually, half the US barrels to the world. Wow. So there's not a scotch whiskey, there's probably not a rum, tequila, etc. That doesn't have a little Woodford Reserve, brown Coleman flavor in it years from now as they age their products. So our flavor is, is very much in demand. 1:06:31 So that's a that's actually pretty awesome, because you got some history there. And I kind of want to even bring the history up just a little bit too today as we started kind of close this out. And Fred sort of jumped the gun a little bit because we are we poured some king of Kentucky and Fred and myself we are at the the media gathering for it, we got to be there with you, as you kind of gave us a breakdown of the history. And really what this means is brown form is coming out with a new product. So I kind of want you to talk a little bit about what is in and I guess just give it like a 32nd overview of like what is king of Kentucky most of the whiskey geeks out here already know what it is, but kind of talk about what the future of this product line is going to be as well. 1:07:10 Well, we want to be transparent about the king good tequila. And you guys remember we told we told everyone we're very proud of it this this new make began as early times it's it's 79% corn 11% raw 10% malt, early Tams yeast. If we bottled it at four years old, it would have been early times hold another 10 years, it becomes something completely different. And holding a barrel that long for us whether it's Woodford Reserve, early times old forester is extremely special because we heat cycle our warehouses. And you can virtually double the age when Liz was said we're making with reserve from 5678 year barrels batch together, that's 10 1214 year old barrels based on the maturation profile because heat Cycling is an aggressive maturation process that dates back to the 1870s. So can give Kentucky this 14 year old bottle as a 28 year age persona. But it's not 28 years of course, it's 14 years. So it is chemically made sure we analyze the King and I showed everyone the chemical signature which is the molecular flavor structure versus early times four year old one 100 proof bottle and bond is completely different. So again, transparent how it was made. This is a revitalization or return of an old label king of Kentucky which goes back into the 1880s Why did you choose this 1:09:01 label because you guys have a plethora of 1:09:07 fantastic labels in Kenya why not bring back marrow I kind of like that. That would be cool. You know? 1:09:16 Well there's there's several reasons and
John Cutler is a Product Evangelist for Amplitude, an analytic platform that helps companies better understand users behavior, helping to grow their businesses. John focuses on user experience and evidence-driven product development by mixing and matching various methodologies to help teams deliver lasting outcomes for their customers. As a former UX researcher at AppFolio, a product manager at Zendesk, Pendo.io, AdKeeper and RichFX, a startup founder, and a product team coach, John has a perspective that spans individual roles, domains, and products. In today’s episode, John and I discuss how productizing storytelling in analytics applications can be a powerful tool for moving analytics beyond vanity metrics. We also covered the importance of understanding customers’ jobs/tasks, involving cross-disciplinary teams when creating a product/service, and: John and Amplitude’s North Star strategy and the (3) measurements they care about when tracking their own customers’ success Why John loves the concept of analytics “notebooks” (also a particular feature of Amplitude’s product) vs. the standard dashboard method Understanding relationships between metrics through “weekly learning users” who share digestible content John’s opinions on involving domain experts and cross-discipline teams to enable products focused on outcomes over features Recognizing whether your product/app is about explanatory or exploratory analytics How Jazz relates to business – how you don’t know what you don’t know yet Resources and Links: Connect with John on LinkedIn Follow John on Twitter Keep up with John on Medium Amplitude Designing for Analytics Quotes from Today’s Episode “It’s like you know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. I think organizationally, there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. My advice is to fight for it because you know that that’s important and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem. There’s probably there’s a lot of surrounding information that you need to understand to be able to actually help the business.” – John “We definitely ‘dogfood’ our product and we also ‘dogfood’ the advice we give our customers.” – John “You know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. […] there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. I guess my advice is, fight for it, because you know that it is important, and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem.” – John “It’s very easy to create assets and create code and things that look like progress. They mask themselves as progress and improvement, and they may not actually return any business value or customer value explicitly. We have to consciously know what the outcomes are that we want.” – Brian “We got to get the right bodies in the room that know the right questions to ask. I can smell when the right questions aren’t being asked, and it’s so powerful” – Brian “Instead of thinking about what are all the right stats to consider, [I sometimes suggest teams] write in plain English, like in prose format, what would be the value that we could possibly show in the data.’ maybe it can’t even technically be achieved today. But expressing the analytics in words like, ‘you should change this knob to seven instead of nine because we found out X, Y, and Z happened. We also think blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and here is how we know that, and there’s your recommendation.’ This method is highly prescriptive, but it’s an exercise in thinking about the customer’s experience.” – Brian Transcript Brian: My guest today on Experiencing Data is John Cutler who is a product evangelist at Amplitude Software. I have been really enjoying John’s commentary on Twitter and some of his articles on medium about designing better decisions of work tools. If you’re in this space and you’re trying to figure out, “How do I get into the heads of what our customers need? What types of data is actually important to track?” Especially, if you’re looking at longer term outcomes that you want to be able to measure and provide insight on, I think you’re going to enjoy my conversation with John. Without further ado, here’s my chat with John Cutler. All right, we’re back to Experiencing Data, and today we’ve got the cutlefish as your Twitter handle is known, right is it cute-l-fish or cutlefish? John: We’re going to go with cutlefish, not cute-l. Brian: That’s what I thought. John Cutler is here from Amplitude Software, which is a product analytics company, and I wanted to have John on today, not because he is cute necessarily, but because I’ve really been enjoying what you’re espousing about customer experience, and particularly, product management. Which for some of our listeners that are not working in tech companies necessarily, there’s not really a product management kind of role explicitly by title. But I think some of the, as you will probably account to, the overlap between design, user experience, and product is sometimes a gray area. I think some of the things you’re talking about are in important in the context of building analytics tools. Welcome to the show, fill in, make corrections on what I just said about what you’re doing. You’re a product evangelist at Amplitude, so what does that mean and what are you up to over there? John: Well, we’re still trying to figure out the evangelist part because I don’t necessarily sell or evangelize our product, I think our product is great and I like to say it sort of sells itself. But what I’m really focusing on is helping up level teams, now that could be like our internal teams, our customers, but largely to just prospects and teams that have never even heard of Amplitude. What we’re really looking with this role is to do workshops, provide content, I do these coaching sessions with just random teams, so it’s like one hour coaching sessions. But generally trying to fill in the blanks, I think a lot of times people think, “Well, I’m just going to purchase this analytics tool or this product analytics tool,” and suddenly it’s going to answer all our questions and everything’s going to be fine. But what they don’t quite realize is that you really have to tweak a lot of things about how you work as a product development team to really make use of the great tools that are available. There are amazing tools available. I believe Amplitude is one of them, but there is so many good software as a service products to help product teams. But really at the end of the day, it’s about the team also being aligned and things like that. I really try to take a broad view of what it will take to help people make better products with this role. Brian: Yeah. Can you give an example? I think I know where you’re going with this, but give an example of where someone had to change their expectation? You need to change the way you’re working or let’s figure out what’s important to measure instead of just expecting. I think you’re alluding to like, “Oh, buy our tool, we know what the important analytics and measurement points are that you should care about and we will unveil them.” Instead it’s like, “Well, what’s important to track? Does time on the site matter? Does engagement in the application matter? Does sharing matter? What matters, right?” Can you talk about maybe where there was a learning experience? John: Oh, absolutely. I think maybe a good way to describe this as well is a lot of the learning, a lot of the questions begin way before the team is unwrapping the problem, unraveling the problem. I’m not sure this answers your question exactly but I think we could lead into something more specific. But imagine you’re a team and someone says, “It’s the second half of 2018, what’s going to be on your roadmap?” You think about it and you know what you know and you’ve heard customers tell you things, and the CEO of the company has subtly but not so subtly hinted he’d really like to see X or she’d really like to see X. You put together this roadmap, and at that point once you’ve got people thinking that those solutions are the right solutions, and you force that level of convergence, there’s not a lot of… measurement will not save you at that point, you’ve already committed at that point to deliver those things in that particular setting. One example of a practice that might change to further or amplify the use of measurement would just be not making… committing to missions, committing to move particular metrics that the company believes are associated with mid to long-term growth of the company, and commit to those things instead of committing to build features. An example, a real world example, maybe for someone’s effort, maybe what you’re shooting at before is do they shift from same time on site was important to something else? But for a lot of these teams, it’s shifting from build feature X to something like shortening the time it takes for a team to be able to complete a workflow. That’s the big shift for that. It’s nothing-to-something that makes sense, not necessarily even something-to-something. Brian: One of the things we talk about on the show is designing for outcomes instead of designing outputs. John: Yep. Brian: Because it’s very easy to create assets and create code and things that look like progress. They mask themselves as progress and improvement, and they may not actually return any business value or customer value explicitly. We have to consciously know what the outcomes are that we want let alone measure them. Do you run into the problem when you… If you’re coaching someone and getting them into this mindset of designing around an outcome and building your sprint or your next, maybe it’s even a strategy for the next six to 12 months around outcomes? That the important things to measure are not quantifiable in the tool? Do you work yourself out of a customer sometimes because the tool can’t actually measure what’s important? Does that ever happen? John: That’s a great question because I think that I do a fun exercise with people, which is called let’s predict the success of a relationship. We start with this activity and we just we forget about what we think is possible to measure and we just start mapping our beliefs. The team will say something like, “Well, I think that they shouldn’t have arguments.” Then someone will say, “Well, yeah, but it’s not just,” and maybe they’re talking about their own life like, “Well, we argue a lot, but we resolve our arguments pretty, we become stronger once we have the arguments.” Then the team will sit there and go, “Huh, okay.” It’s not just about the number of arguments, it’s ability to resolve your arguments. Brian: Resolve. John: We keep playing this game and we map our beliefs out to predicting these things, and some of these things we have more confidence about and some of these things we don’t have a lot of confidence about. Some of these things we strike and we get this big messy network of nodes and edges on the wall and that’s what we start working with. What’s really, really interesting is that we actually, as a company, there’s almost always some percentage of these things that we can contribute to in terms of what they can instrument in using our product. It’s not like…we would much rather our customers map the universe of things and acknowledge some things that might be difficult to measure or they’re just beliefs at the moment, they haven’t figured out how to measure them. Because really what Amplitude is very powerful at is doing behavioral analytics about these long standing customer journeys through products and those types of… Anyone who’s done a 15-table join and tried to communicate it to other people in your company and then tweak it and have people collaborate with it just knows how painful that is. That’s the type of pain that we solve. But back to the particular question, all the coaching really centers around mapping all the beliefs, and we’re usually confident that there are ways to measure some percentage of those things using our product, and that’s fine by us. Brian: There’s almost like a meta-question, right? John: I like, I’m meta, yeah, I got it. I’m there with you. Brian: You’re like analytics, you’re an analytics product and you talk to your clients about what’s important for them to measure. But then at some point, you have to know what’s important to measure to know that your customers are getting the value. John: Yeah. Brian: Is it directly…are you interested in what they’re setting up to measure and then that becomes your measurement? Do you piggyback off that or do you… How do you justify that the sprint or the epic we worked on last quarter provided business value? How do you…? John: Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah, we definitely dogfood our product and we also dogfood the advice we give people usually first. To give you an example like in 2018, we had this North Star Metric called “Weekly Querying Users”, WQUs. That seemed about right and we did some analysis and it looked like, “Well, for increasing WQUs, it’s probably going to mean this and this and it’s going to be some early indicator that our monthly recurring revenue is going to keep going up”, etc. But there were obvious problems with that and we saw that. And as 2018 went along, we started to look at it more, and for any SaaS company, there’s a point at which your expansion within existing accounts starts to be really, really important in terms of percentage of revenue that you’re in. We thought, “Well, is that metric, can you hand WQUs to any new team member and say move that or move something that you think moves that,” and then be 100% confident they’re going to make good decisions? It broke down after that. What we did is we shifted to weekly learning users. Now a weekly learning user is not just someone querying, because anyone who uses one of these tools knows you could just sit there and query all day and not get an answer. In fact, querying more might indicate that you are not getting an answer. Not like doing anything with it. A weekly learning user is actually someone who shares some piece of digestible content whether it’s notebook, whether it’s a dashboard, whether it’s a chart, and they share it. We actually have this North Star, which is weekly learning users, we believe these three inputs drive weekly learning users and those are activated accounts. They need to know what they’re doing, they’re broadcasted learnings, which is the ability for the user to attempt to broadcast some number of learnings, and then a metric that is a consumption of learning metric which is the broad consumption across the organization of that particular piece of learning. This is all sounds really heady, why would we go to all these lengths to do this, and Weekly Querying User sounded good. But to us this really encapsulates a strategy. I think that that’s an important thing that a lot of people from pure analytics backgrounds or who are used to sitting with a queue of questions and answering those questions are maybe not used to the idea of moving towards a cohesive strategy as expressed by a number of metrics and the relationships between those metrics. That’s something that we really encourage our customers to do, it’s not data snacking. It’s not like, “Oh, I got this itch today so I’m going to answer this question.” That took a lot of work to come up with that, and we’re confident about those relationships between those things. But more importantly, it helps any new team member like all you need to do is show a skilled product manager or a skilled designer or a developer even and say, “This is our current mental model as described by the relationship between these things. Where do you want to slot in? What do you have in mind?” That’s really, really powerful. I don’t know if that roundabout way of saying we take this really, really seriously. Brian: If I can sum this up, and I’ll need you to repeat part of it, but you have monthly querying users, so what I take that to be is I, the customer, using, paying for the Amplitude software, a querying user means I went in and I looked for content or I literally used a search interface to probably look up an analytic or some stat. You moved away from the number of people doing that and how often they’re doing it as a measurement of your company’s success to this three-stage kind of thing that I heard included sharing some knowledge. But can you repeat what those three grains were? John: Oh, yeah, sure. The North Star is what we call “Weekly Learning Users”, so WLUs. Those are users performing the behavior of interest, which is sharing, distributing some piece of content. Then we believe there are three inputs that explain that metric or three inputs that we really focus on. One is that the accounts are activated, which are meaning that does this account just have a minimum number of people doing that? The next one is broadcasted learnings, which is me, “is the initial attempt to broadcast the learning?” Then consumption is the actual long tail consumption of that particular learning. Let’s say it is a story like I sign up with Amplitude, no one’s really using it all because we haven’t really onboarded and we haven’t really instrumented, we haven’t done any of that stuff. Okay, well, then we get that done, so we get just that we’ve activated, we have at least a certain number of users learning, some amount. I’m in the tool, I’m in a notebook that is really interesting that I’m putting together that tells a story with data, very interesting about the mission that I’m working on. I attempt to invite people to that notebook or get them involved, that’s the broadcast. Then, finally, the consumption of learning would be the accumulated interactions with everyone with a notebook. If that sounds too complex… Brian: Got it. I don’t know, I- John: But the whole idea is for people listening and I think especially folks, designers and other folks is that their experience with analytics might be something very simple like “what percentage of people used feature?” Or something. What they’re not getting is the context, the relationships, and what I’m describing here, there’s amazing belief networks, there’s causal relationship diagrams, there’s just simple stickies and string on the wall, whatever you want to call them. But we’re describing our beliefs as it relates to the data, and I think that, that’s really important. For some background too, I’m not a data scientist, I’ve been a product manager and a UX researcher and that’s been my focus for a long time. It’s not like I’m a pro at this stuff, and even for me, though, it grounds me in what I’m working with and makes my analysis a lot easier. Brian: I imagine you may have some, not resistance, but when you’re working with quote data people or analytics people or data science people in your staff, in Amplitude, are there routine things that you wish they would hear that would sink in or problems that maybe they’re not aware of that you think they should be like, “We need to look at the problem differently.” Maybe you encapsulated that and that’s why you have this three stage thing as a reaction to the data snacking mentality, which is “What data do we provide? Great, they have it, now they can eat it.” Is that their reaction to that or are there other things that… I’m thinking of our listeners, we do have data scientists and analytics type people, and I’m wondering if you were to work with them, it’s like, “Here are the things that I want you to think about here to get our head a little bit out of the tech for a second and into the decision support mentality.” Anything, what would you espouse or advocate? John: That’s a great question. I think I can answer it a little bit with a story. I was the PM for search and relevance at Zendesk, like support software. My background is not in information retrieval or the guts of search but very, very early on working on a team with very, very talented people, data scientists, data engineers really, at the end of the day. One thing that I very much advocated for is we needed to be able to get everyone in the same room, we needed to get the people who were experts in what I would just call the actors, the support agents, or the support managers, or the the person trying to get help on their Uber app. There’s experts in that, there’s domain experts. There’s also people who are experts in the surface area, the surface, like the interface. There’s people who are really, really good at searching or finding information on mobile. There’s people who’s very good at finding information on, in our case, like the support agents view in their web browser. Then you had our people who are really smart and creating data as it related to search and they were great at data engineering, etc. The main thing that I noticed was that there’s just a silo-ing, and the people on my team were just craving, craving to be sitting next to someone who understood these other things really well. I think that for a lot of listeners it’s probably you know that, you know that from a first principles angle, you’re like, “Well, I know that there’s a bigger picture here.” I know that just in our case of searching like we knew that raising the mean reciprocal rank of a search term, we are searching it, where does the person click? Do they click on the second item, the fifth item. In theory, raising that would make a difference but when we look more broadly, it really didn’t relate to deflection of tickets and things like that. Our traditional metrics, the way we were measuring success is locally related to search. If we broadened our horizon to what makes a difference for the human beings out there who need their support tickets resolved or the support agents or things, that perspective was so helpful. What I would say to the folks on listening, it’s like you know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. I think, organizationally, there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. I guess my advice is fight for it because you know that that’s important and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem. There’s probably there’s a lot of surrounding information that you need to understand to be able to actually help the business. Brian: Sure, and you’re echoing sentiment I had a Data Center from the Broad Institute on, he was mentioning how much he’s like, “My work is so much more powerful when I have a great domain expert with me who really knows the space.” We met over music, I’m a musician as well and he was trying to explore creativity in the context of jazz. He’s a enthusiast in terms of music, he’s not a musician, but he’s an enthusiast so he understood some of it but he didn’t have the lingo. It’s just interesting when you look at someone working in that space trying to answer a question about like, “How does creativity work in jazz?” They don’t have all that domain lingo. Being on for a change, being the domain expert, it was fascinating for me to be on the other side because usually I’m the hymn advocate, even though I’m not a data scientist, as a designer and a consultant, we deal with this all the time. It’s like, we got to get the right bodies in the room that know the right questions to ask. I can smell when the right questions aren’t being asked and it’s so powerful so I totally agree with you on the need to provide that bigger context sometimes so you don’t just- John: Jazz is just a mistake played more than once, right? Brian: Yeah. Oh, there’s tons of them, there’s no wrong notes, just bad choices. John: It’s very easy for them to create the model for that. You’re just making a mistake and play it more than once. Brian: Exactly. John: Then you go back to the top. Brian: Exactly. Well, even that, like play the head again. Well, what’s a head? Oh, okay. Well, it’s just one form of the tune and they cycle through it and play chorus. Well, what’s a chorus? Okay, shit. But even having that, you can imagine that on the business client, this was like a fun side project he was working on. But you can imagine that in a business context where you don’t even know what you don’t know yet about it yet. I hear this as happening, they’re still in the, especially, in the non-tech company space, the more traditional companies that are, “Oh, we have 100 years of data and let’s go, we need to go buy some data scientists and throw them at this pile of data and then magic will come out the other end.” John: Oh, I think that that happens in tech companies, too, though. I think that that’s the number of data scientist friends who’ve been hired in is like some large effort. Then, one, they’re like, “Yeah, and data engineering was the actual problem.” Okay, we spent our first year there just going around in circles on solving that problem, and then, yeah, the number of friends I have who’ve been frustrated by that dynamic, even in tech companies, I think it’s a pretty common, more common everywhere than we would think. Brian: Tell me a little bit about, so we’ve been talking about the analytical part of all this, the quantifiable parts largely but you have a UX research background as well. We talk, on this show, we talk about empathy, we talk about the needs to go talk to people to ask good questions, to ladder up, get into all that. How does that fit in? When you’re working on an analytics tool, can you fill us in on your approach to qualitative research and more the soft, mushy stuff that UX people deal with? John: Yeah, and it’s interesting. For context, I’m not a UX researcher at Amplitude but I’ve done that in prior environments that required the chops. But in talking to teams and doing it, I think so many of the basics apply in the sense that you’re really… Not to overuse the jobs-to-be-done stuff, you’re really, really trying to understand what decision this person is hoping to make. You’re really trying and then what impact that decision has on the rest of the organization and who is involved in it. I think anyone who’s done this knows that even as a UX researcher, if I do like a co-design activity with customers related to anything analytics oriented, it’s just, “Oh, we’re going to do an Excel mock up or you know.” Anytime you get customers involved with that, it’s so easy. If either side, and I’ve been on both sides of this, it’s so easy to forget what you were trying to do. I think that has a lot to do with the exploratory aspect of data in general that we have a gut instinct that if we just saw this stuff organized like this, then it would somehow be valuable for something we have to do. I think that for, and I don’t know if it answers the question, but I think it requires the same chops but also understanding that people just have a hard time, users have a hard time talking about what they are looking at and what they’re hoping to get out of the data when they’re looking at it over and over and over. I think that really, it really you have to use all the tools in the tool shed. To give you an example, there was… I don’t know if you’ve done these things too, I’ll do these exercises where it’s like, “Okay, we’re revamping the app, it’s just going to be this mobile browser with three numbers on it.” That’s it, that we’re not going to have all these fancy charts, we’re not going to have all this stuff. And three numbers and then one piece of narrative advice, like “Consider this or do this.” I love activities like that from a UX researcher standpoint when I’m working with people because it really, really forces them to just get out of their own head to think about it. That’s like a common trick and you probably have a lot more. But, yeah, I don’t know if I answered the question but it’s a lot of the same tools. But I think also you have to really… It’s a job environment, they’re making decisions, they’re hiring these analytics to do a job. But then with this added layer that I think that people are just incredibly, they find it incredibly difficult to talk about the numbers that they’re looking for. Brian: When you say it’s difficult for them to talk about it, are you talking about their digestion of what’s on the screen or their expression of what’s important to them to actually find out? What do I actually want to learn about? Is it… John: Both really, and that’s the thing that I think just makes it doubly as hard. It means that if you show them something, and I think that we can all relate to it too, like any of us who have been shown some mock or some prototype of information on the screen, you can see your gears turning. You’re having to process it and where did this come from? Can I trust it? What is it? We see that all the time just in Amplitude, it’s people… Our understanding of how people experience some of these querying screens that we have, when you actually ask them to just talk through what they’re thinking about as they move through it, it’s just it’s so complex. Data trust, where is this stuff coming from, data over time, their challenges with certain visualization techniques, even if it’s “the right technique” like, “Well, I just need a radar chart.” Just like no you don’t really. But that’s how they’ve been anchored or whatever. It’s just complex. I don’t have a fancy answer, it’s just complex. Brian: What you just told me reminds me of you had mentioned you do this exercise, and I’m wondering if it’s the same exercise that I’ve done as well with analytics tools, especially, in the context of monitoring applications. There’s some system that’s monitoring stuff and it’s supposed to advise you on what should I do next or what happens with something like this? It’s like “instead of thinking about what are all the right stats to do”, it’s “write in plain English like a prose format what would be the value that we could possibly show”, and maybe we can’t even technically do it today. But it’s “express the analytics and words like you should change this knob to seven instead of nine because we found out X, Y, and Z happened. We also think blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and this is how we know that, and there’s your recommendation.” It’s highly prescriptive but it’s an exercise in thinking about the customer’s experience. How close to that can we get to it, where I don’t have to infer from charts or whatever the date of this format is, how close could we get to something that prescriptive and then try to work backwards from that. We probably can’t get right to that full prose. Is it something like that where you jump to this conclusion, like value conclusion or something like that? John: Yeah, and I do a couple of these like that, one is if I have an Alexa or if I have a tube of crackers or whatever I’m like, “This is the interface now.” You can ask Alexa, that’s your interface. This is a beautiful future world where you just have your smart person, your smart assistant to do these things. Yeah, similar type of, I think, what it does is it creates just enough dissonance to snap people out of just immediately trying to unravel the visualization, which can be I think all of us do that. I think that that’s our instinct whenever we look at something like that. Brian: The default next question is how should we visualize this data that we’ve captured? That’s the itch that we may not be the one to scratch? John: Yeah, but I think that’s also what we can test with, that point, when we’ve got that need to fill, that’s when we can try multiple approaches, I think to see that. That’s my experience, there is that point at which you need to you go back to the drawing board. Although, I would say that depending on the subject, the user in that case or the person you’re working with, some people are really, really good at just the co-design aspect. I don’t know your experience with that, but it seems to have a lot to do with what the people do each day and how they think about visualization and stuff. But I’ve done co-design sessions with people who the next step was, “Well, let’s start thinking about, let’s start drawing, let’s start doing some other things to do it.” I think that depends a lot on the background of the people that you’re working with. Brian: If you were starting over today with Amplitude, is there either a… Not necessarily a feature you would change but is there something that you would approach differently? If someone says, “Hey, we have this JavaScript widget, you paste it in your, all your app or whatever, and we can track almost anything, any activity, whatever. What should we show?” Is there something you would change about maybe how you guys went, the process you went about arriving at the current product that you have? John: That’s interesting. I wish Spencer and Jeffrey were here to answer because they’re the founders of the company. But I think that it’s funny how products have their history about them, so Amplitude, for example, it was a Y Combinator. The founders didn’t go to Y Combinator, they had this fancy voice app or something that they were working on, and this was actually just their effort. They were like, “Well, we kind of had this app,” and they surveyed what was available and then just said, “We really need, there’s a thing, it’s a little different. It’s like an event based measurement thing. We really want to instrument this app and know whether people are using it or not.” That was the founding story, it wasn’t their key thing. A lot of the early customers were folks from Zynga or Facebook or other places that had moved on to other startups and then they wanted something that helped with the 90% of product questions that they had around retention and engagement and complex behavior patterns. Does this behavior predict this or is there a relationship between these things? That’s the founding story, these discerning teams that had a fair amount of autonomy and were tasked with working in these environments and that they wanted a product that they could do that with. When I’m thinking about what I would change as the newcomer to the company, now maybe five years on, was it, yeah, or six years or seven years on, I think it’s what they’re starting to do now, which is interesting. This notebooks feature to me is just so, so, so good and it gets away from a traditional dashboard. But with a notebook, it’s very similar to a data science notebook, you can weave this story and this narrative and you can make the charts live and you can communicate it and you can do those things. As a product manager, that is pure gold to me, and it’s just we’ve started to do those things. I think that the answer would be more of what they’re really digging into now, which is around this learning user concept and how do you create stories with the data to motivate your team and keep everyone aligned and things. I think if it hadn’t existed and I joined a year ago, I would have been like, “Oh, you’re missing this little element like the actual part that integrates it into day to day product development.” But they’ve just started doing that now, so they stole my answer. Brian: Nice, and just for people that don’t know, tell me if I got this right, but the notebooks for people that aren’t data scientist, it’s effectively a collection of both quant data like maybe charts or tables, stats, data collection that you guys have put into some visualized widgets or whatever it may be insights plus qualitative stuff like my commentary on it. Like “Why do we care about this? Well, design is currently tracking these metrics because we’re running a study on dah, dah, dah, and we think we can move this up” and that’s a proxy for this other thing. You can provide all this context in that storytelling mentality so that when someone new comes in, they’re like, “Why do I care about time on site or whatever the metric?” John: Exactly, and that’s the huge thing. One thing that we learned, we’re in this business of teams getting going and it’s like it’s so easy to get to the point where you’ve instrumented your products and any new person joining your company can’t make heads or tails of anything. It’s like you’ve got all these events, are these duplicate events? We’ve invested a lot of time in this taxonomy feature, which helps manage your taxo- It’s way, way, when people try to build this stuff in-house, they just forget about all that stuff. Like, “Oh, it’s just events, it’s semi-structured information, we’re going to put it here and then we’re just going to run queries on it.” But all that’s really, really important, so back to the notebooks thing, one of the biggest use cases we’ve seen in notebooks is people using them to onboard people and orient them with all the available analytics that and metrics and things that are being recorded. That’s actually a really good testament to show that need. Brian: They use it to actually show how they use Amplitude at the- John: Right, it’s pretty meta. Brian: Wow, that’s awesome. John: Yeah, we see them do that or even some of them use it for training like, “Okay, let’s start with this idea that we’ve got this whole universe of users. Well, how would we segment those? Well, here are the key ways that we segment.” Okay, that we’ve gone down one layer, and so I think that that’s kind of cool. But, yeah, for people who don’t know about these data science notebooks, it is a mix of qualitative, quantitative, you can embed charts that are live or you could embed point-in-time charts, you can make comments, and you can do various things. I think for a lot of people who don’t do this for a living, they get intimidated and it’s not, a lot of the stuff is not rocket science, but it’s just annoying to have to go to someone in your company and say, “Hey, can you spend like three or four hours just explaining our information to us.” That’s really hard to do, so these notebooks help with that particular thing. I think that type of stuff is really the future of moving away from just very, very stayed dashboards and things like that. Brian: Right. I don’t know if there’s much in terms of predictive or prescriptive intelligence in the tool, does the tool provide that as well or is it mostly rear view mirror analytics? John: It’s interesting you say that, so we have this new feature called Impact Analysis, and so in Impact Analysis you are able to go from day zero of a particular use of a particular feature and then see the impact that it has on another set of things. We give some statistics and we give some other values in there. So we’re middle of the road moving to more and more complex questions. But one thing that our team realizes that anything… To prevent people from making bad decisions or making poor statements, you need to be so, so, so careful about presenting what you’re actually showing if there’s a correlation between something or even implying that there’s causation without doing the background on it. We’re not completely rear view and we’re in this middle ground, but we’re also going to go on record and say we’re predicting what this value’s going to be in six months. Brian: Right, and the reason, and not just the hype of machine learning, blah, blah, blah, that’s not my main reason for asking was going to lead into my next question, which was do you struggle at all with the expression in the tool of the evidence that backs up any types of conclusions that you’re showing? Do your customers care? Well, how did you guys arrive at this? John: They absolutely care, and so like one of the… We spent a lot of time in the ability, in Amplitude, any data point that you see, usually, if you hover over it, there’s a message it says, “Click to inspect,” or you can create a cohort off of that or you can see the paths to that particular thing. What we really made this effort to do is exactly right, is that people… Working at two analytics companies now, Pendo and now Amplitude, data trust and people being able to unravel what that number means in a way that makes sense to them seems like one of the massive limiters. It’s just that thing that it’s best laid plans start, that’s the entropy that exists with these tools as people use them more and more. There’s just it gets messier, a bunch of hands, a bunch of people are playing around. At least with Amplitude, they try to make a really big effort to like if you want to understand why that number is there and what is behind it, we try to make that really easy. John: But we could always do better because in my mind this is the number one difference between the more data snacking approach like “it kind of looks interesting, that number,” something that you can really pin your business on, which I think is what people… That’s the dream of all this, but then once people start to ask good questions really, it really challenges the tool. Brian: John, this has been fantastic chatting with you, I really appreciate you sharing this with our listeners. Do you have any parting wisdom or anything you’d like to share with people that are maybe working more on the tech side or the data side of the thing and the vents and they’re trying to, “I want to produce more use, whether it’s reports or actually software applications. But we’re trying to provide better stuff, more engaging, more useful…” Any closing advice you might give to someone like that? John: I’m going back to what we were talking about from the UX research angle is that I think that in this area, there’s so much temptation to any one of us who’ve done this is that there’s this constant push and pull between customizability and then this promise of preemptive insights like smart system, it’s intelligent, it’s doing these things. Then so how prescriptive are you? Is what you’re presenting and actually helping someone to do their job. I think that it’s probably reflective of my learning at Amplitude is that really going to human centered design, like really thinking about if the person is able to effectively do their job and really able to answer the questions that they’re answering. I think that what happens is all of us want that, but then we hit this wall and we start to get really some conflating information from users and we start to… Then we’re like, “Well, okay, we’re just going to let them find what they want to find. I think that, that exploratory type of research should be something that’s possible in these tools. In fact, I think that leads to asking some of the best questions when users can do that. But I would really hope that people don’t abandon the idea of being really patient and seeing if before they just throw their hands up in the air and will say, “Well, we’ll just make a query builder and that’s it, that’s it.” Like really seeing if that thing can solve the problem. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I think it’s something that’s really been on my mind a lot lately. Brian: Yeah, I talk about sometimes like with clients and people in this space about knowing whether or not you’re producing an explanatory product or an exploratory product. It doesn’t mean you can’t necessarily have some of both but there’s a big difference between the value, like in your case, I’m guessing a lot of these people really want some explanations when they tell us about what we can do to make our software better. They’re not there for fun, but they might run across some things they didn’t know were possible which begins the questioning. But if you put all the effort on them, you’re just shifting the tool effort over to the customer. You’re making it much harder for them to get the value out at which point they may abandon or quit. It’s not just knowing are we explanatory or exploratory or at least there’s this feature or there’s this outcome that this goal that we’re working on, the sprint. But just being aware of that I think is part of the challenge. Like should they be able to walk away with… I should be in the six to 19 apple’s range, whatever that means, like, should I be able to walk away with that level of clarity or not? I don’t know. John: I think that it’s also something like, that’s interesting you said that, because a lot of features that we’re experimenting with, one thing that Amplitude does is anytime you… We built an undo feature, so we try to make it really easy to go really deep and then just back out really gracefully. It’s like infinite, every version of the chart as you work on one is saved. You can back out of it. There’s a lot of features like Save As or you’re built like you could go to someone else’s chart, and if you have some idea of where you want to take it, you could edit it. But you’re not editing their chart, you’re editing a copy and you can think about it. But back to that point is I think that there’s many things that you can do to encourage, that you can juggle those needs concurrently for having definitive things and then also encouraging exploration. We’ve found that with our product as we experiment more. One, I just told you about it, like the ability to telescope into a metric and then do more exploration around it. That didn’t exist before and then we were like, “Oh, well, how about when you hover over any data point and you allow them to inspect that or explore that?” I would say that there are ways to accommodate both at least from our perspective and what we’ve learned. Brian: Right, and I think there’s always some of both of that, and I don’t think most people are going to take everything on its face value. But I hear what you’re saying. One of the things I’ve been recently working on is a UX framework for this called the CED framework, just conclusion, evidence, and data. It’s not necessarily a literal expression of “Where should the screens go? What goes on every screen?” But the concept that when possible, if the tool can provide conclusions with the second tier of being the evidence by which the tool or application arrived at this conclusion. Level three might be really getting into the raw data like, “What are the queries? What was the sequel that actually ran?” Or whatever the heck it may be, there’s times when maybe that data is necessary early on a customer journey. It may just be, “We need to build trust around this stuff.” We can’t be totally black box, but we don’t actually expect people to spend a lot of time at the D-level. We really want them to work in the C level, but it’ll take time and evidence is required sometimes if you’re going… Especially, I got to go to the boss, I can’t just tell him it’s 18, we should be at 18, not 12. It’s like, “Well, how did you arrive at that?” John: We find a lot is the instrumentation rigor is like that’s one of our big problems to solve really is there are these products on the market that do just try to record everything for it. There’s a lot of entropy there and there’s a lot of issues. They’re very fragile, in some ways, so we as a company definitely believe in explicitly instrumenting these events. But at the same time, you’d be amazed how many product teams… There’s this thing called a user story, you write a user story that’s from the user’s perspective, what are you trying to do? Now you would think that like, “Okay, well, we’ll tack on to the acceptance criteria for any story that you’ll use a noun and a verb, and you’ll get these properties and you’ll get these things. Integrating instrumentation on the product level, not necessarily like, “Okay, we’re instrumenting how our servers are working or anything,” but just, “What did the user do?” That’s still relatively new. People who’ve worked in environments that just do that as second nature that, okay, they’re in another thing, but we find that companies even need to change that approach. You’ve mentioned your CED thing like what’s interesting is that extends to the UX of instrumenting. It’s pretty interesting from that, it’s you’re the user trying to draw some conclusion, you’re doing these things. But it’s almost like service design, in some sense, because you need to design the approach to even instrumenting this stuff. It makes your head hurt sometimes. Brian: Yeah, all this stuff makes my head hurt. But that’s why we have conversations, hopefully, we’re knowledge sharing and it’s like giant aspirin conversations or something, I don’t know. But I found this super useful, thanks for coming on the show. Where can people follow you? I know I found you on Twitter. I forget how but what’s your [crosstalk 00:47:23]- John: Twitter is good, I’ve installed a Stay Focused app to prevent more than 20 minutes a day on Twitter. But you will find me eventually there. I write a fair amount on Medium and it’s pretty easy to find me there. Brian: Okay. John: If you just type in “John Cutler product”, I have about 400+ posts on Medium. Some are better than others but- Brian: Awesome. John: … yeah, that’s the best way for right now. Brian: Awesome. Well, I will definitely link both of those, your Medium page and your Twitter up in the show links. Man, John, it has been really fun to chat with you here. Thanks for coming on the show. John: Cool. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, awesome. Brian: Yeah, super. All right, well, cheers. John: Cheers, bye-bye.
Paul Mattal is the Director of Network Systems at Akamai, one of the largest content delivery networks in the U.S. Akamai is a major part of the backbone of the internet and on today’s episode, Paul is going to talk about the massive amount of telemetry that comes into Akamai and the various decision support tools his group is in charge of providing to internal customers. On top of the analytics aspect of our chat, we also discussed how Paul is approaching his team’s work being relatively new at Akamai. Additionally, we covered: How does Paul access and use internal customer knowledge to improve the quality of applications they make? When to build a custom decision support tool vs. using a BI tool like Tableau? How does Akamai measure if their analytics are creating customer value? The process Paul uses with the customer to design a new data product MVP How Paul decides which of the many analytics applications and services “get love” when resources are constrained Paul’s closing advice about taking the time to design and plan before you code Resources and Links: Akamai Twitter @pjmattal Paul Mattal on LinkedIn Paul Mattal on Facebook Quotes from Today’s Episode “I would say we have a lot of engagement with [customers] here. People jump to answering questions with data and they’re quick. They know how to do that and they have very good ideas about how to make sure that the approaches they take are backed by data and backed by evidence.” — Paul Mattal “There’s actually a very mature culture here at Akamai of helping each other. Not necessarily taking on an enormous project if you don’t have the time for it, but opening your door and helping somebody solve a problem, if you have expertise that can help them.” — Paul Mattal “I’m always curious about feedback cycles because there’s a lot of places that they start with telemetry and data, then they put technology on top of it, they build a bunch of software, and look at releases and outputs as the final part. It’s actually not. It’s the outcomes that come from the stuff we built that matter. If you don’t know what outcomes those look like, then you don’t know if you actually created anything meaningful.” — Brian O’Neill “We’ve talked a little bit about the MVP approach, which is about doing that minimal amount of work, which may or may not be working code, but you did a minimum amount of stuff to figure out whether or not it’s meeting a need that your customer has. You’re going through some type of observation process to fuel the first thing, asset or output that you create. It’s fueled by some kind of observation or research upfront so that when you go up to bat and take a swing with something real, there’s a better chance of at least a base hit.” — Brian O’Neill “Pretend to be the new guy for as long as you can. Go ask [about their needs/challenges] again and get to really understand what that person [customer] is experiencing, because I know you’re going to able to meet the need much better.” — Paul Mattal Episode Transcript Brian: Hi. We’re back with Experiencing Data here and I have Paul Mattal on the line who is currently the Director of Network Systems at Akamai. How’s going, Paul? Paul: It’s going great. Thanks, Brian. Brian: I’m glad to have you on the show and you’re working at one of these companies that I think of as kind of like oxygen in the internet. It’s everywhere but you don’t really see it because it’s all invisible and that’s actually this big thing behind the scenes. You’re swimming around the internet as all these data and Akamai’s in the middle of all of a lot of that, largely responsible for making sure it’s moving quickly and is available at the right time and in the right places. As I understand it, you’re in a new position, you’ve changed domains, previously you were working in the space of legal patent work, digital forensics, and you built some tools that your previous company makes. You can tell us a little bit about those. Now, you’re moving more into the bits and bytes of the internet and you’re responsible for creating data products like decision support tools for people that keep the Akamai network going and running smoothly and anticipating demand? Did I get all that right? Paul: That’s exactly right. At Akamai, we like to think of it as we’re the ones that make the internet work. There’s a notion that the way things work on the internet is you just simply put your content up on a server and the rest is history. But these days, there’s a lot of complexity. There are many, many users who want access to the same content at the same time. Akamai makes that content all available to everyone when they need it and how they need it. In my past job, as you mentioned, was quite a bit different, although it had some similar qualities. I was helping to develop systems and tools for lawyers and for consultants for lawyers, in some cases to analyze patents, to help them better understand their subject matter of patents, so we’ve created some applications there. Here at Akamai, I’m also creating applications and tools to be used by the members of the network’s team who are responsible for deploying and maintaining the whole Akamai network. That breaks down roughly into tools that help us manage our work, tools that helps us with analytics and planning, and also tools that help us visualize data. It is somewhat of a shift. A lot of the domain knowledge is different, but it’s interesting that so many of the problems end up being similar. Brian: Tell us a bit about who the end-customer is. How many internal customers do you have? Do they break up into personas or segments? Like you have network administrators and you have whatever people. Tell us a bit about who those people are that you’re designing these tools for or you’re helping deploy these tools for. Paul: There are a couple of groups. The infrastructure group which is responsible for really deploying all of the servers and maintaining all of the servers. That’s a set of one class of user who is mostly using our tools in a logistical fashion to coordinate and organize their work. There’s a planning team who is thinking about the capacity of our network: Do we have enough for what’s coming down the pike? Do we have the right capacity in the right places? We also have users who are thinking about the architecture of the network and thinking about how we build and optimize our hardware and our network, to continue to be cutting edge and to continue to meet the needs of our customers. So, different people looking at different tools and different data for different purposes. Brian: Cool. Just a little fun question here. This is probably because I don’t know the domain very well. When there’s a big event coming on the internet, let’s take something like the Super Bowl, or the World Cup, or the new Game of Thrones, or whatever, are there literally changes that you guys go and make to facilitate a major event? Or are those actually more like a blip in terms of internet traffic and all of that? Paul: It depends. Certainly, some of those events have been some of the largest data traffic we’ve seen move across our network. Often, there are considerations especially depending on where exactly we expect the viewers to be for those events. We may deploy additional capacity in one geographic area or another. Brian: Going back to the people that are the end of these tools—again, these are decision support tools—how do you know if your team is doing a good job? How do you measure that the end-customers are getting the right information and they believe it, that they’re willing to take action on it? Do you a regular feedback cycle or interaction with these different personas that you talked about? Paul: Yes, That’s one of the most important aspects of what we do is trying to figure out how to measure, how exactly to measure how we’re doing, especially in the analytics space, right in the productivity tool space is a little simpler. We can tell pretty much where the pain points are. People come to us and say, “This interface isn’t working for me or these five things are in five different places,” and they’re going to use them as one. Those are a little bit more straightforward kinds of feedback. With analytics, we find it goes a lot to how successful were we predicting, how much excess capacity did we end up within a place we didn’t need it, for example, and all those kinds of questions. We meet with our customers pretty regularly and we also have some metrics that we compute to give us an idea of how we’re doing. Brian: Are those quantitative then? Those are all quantitative metrics or do you have any type of qualitative conversations that go deeper than like, “I wish there was a filter for the date on this chart,” or stuff like that. Those things do matter and it’s the sum of all those little, tiny details that add up into good experiences typically, but I’m curious if you have any deeper qualitative type of interaction with these end-users. Paul: A lot of what we’re discussing these days, for example, is there’s a tremendous amount of telemetry available that comes off the platform. Numbers about what’s going on in the network that could measure and we could capture. In many cases, a lot of the conversations are about, “Hey, can we capture more of this data? Is there’s somewhere we can get sample more frequently?” or, “Can we get access to this kind of data that we don’t have right now, so that we could be able to optimize more effectively on the things that actually matter, where the actual bottlenecks are in the network,” versus more simplified models based on less data. We’re finding that’s one of the very common kinds of feedback we’re getting is for more data and differently sampled data. Brian: We talked about this a little bit when we did our pre-call on whatever about topics and you mentioned that you have different classes of users in terms of who’s capable of designing an effective tool for themselves. I think you said you’ve got a mix of tools that are custom-built which might have two-way interaction, where data’s being put back in through forms or whatever in the tool. Then you have Tableau and some kind of rear-view mirror type historical reporting interfaces which, as I understand it, those start with the user a blank slate? Is that correct? Then they put together the views that they want and the reporting that they want? Kind of curious just for you to talk about how many people are using custom tools that you built versus the ones that they designed for themselves. Are people doing a good job creating the tools they need for themselves? Do you have a sense of that feedback that they’re looking at the right data, that they know how to interpret it, they know how to visualize it? Can you talk a little bit about that? Paul: Sure. Our organization has hundreds of people in it and I would say at least probably 50%–75% of those users are highly technical, which is very helpful, actually. They often come to us with a better idea of what they need. In some cases, we can give them good interfaces to go build their own tools. The historic approach to that here has been to give them pretty decent access to the data in our databases and even the engines themselves. Many of them are comfortable writing their own queries. But we also have a very mature ecosystem of query exchange. We have this tool that allows people to write their own queries and share them with others, and then others can manipulate those queries further and customize them to their own needs. They’re very familiar with that. The piece we’re bringing in next is this idea of really making visualization also of a self-serve kind of area where, with a tool like Tableau, you can point Tableau at the same data that might be the out part of these queries but then have powerful visualizations on top of that. The other piece of this is how much of it do we do and how much of it do customers create from old cloth. It’s kind of a balance. Some people come to us and say, “Here’s what I need but I don’t know how to do it,” and then they ask us to do it. Sometimes a customer actually originate it and will say, “Here’s the report or this query that I think is interesting,” and we’ll say, “Oh yeah, that’s interesting. Why don’t we bake that into something more sophisticated?” It’s kind of a mixed bag but I would say most people come in to us, there’s usually something that we already have that they can use as a basis and then they can usually modify that further. That’s been a pretty successful model for us because it really lets people get what they want, get the very detailed, precise view that meets their needs, but benefit from all of the other work that we’ve put into to making those views and those approaches effective and mature over many years. Brian: It sounds like you don’t struggle as much with engagement with the analytics. You actually have plenty of that? Or would you say that’s not necessarily entirely true? Paul: Yes. I would say we have a lot of engagement with that here. People jump to answering questions with data and they’re quick. They know how to do that and they have very good ideas about how to make sure that the approaches they take are backed by data and backed by evidence. Very mature in that sense people. Brian: Since you have this mix of these custom tools that you guys are building and how slick, how do you decide which wheel is going to get the most oil? You’ve got these custom tools, you’ve got some Tableau stuff, you’ve got people coming in, maybe they are using Tableau, but they don’t know how to build the reporting they need. Is it based on a business driver? If we get problem X wrong, this cost a lot of money, so we’re going to put our team on this problem and sorry, Jane, you’re going to have to take that Tableau tutorial and figure it out yourself. How do you resource like that? Paul: As with any place, there’s certainly scarcity. Everybody wishes they had choice in people they had and twice them. Maybe even the computing resources and everything else that they wished they had. At a high level, a lot of it is driven by a strategic plan, by an idea for what we as an organization are trying to accomplish. That determines which things get the most people and the most priority. There’s actually a very mature culture here at Akamai of helping each other. Not necessarily taking on an enormous project if you don’t have the time for it, but opening your door and helping somebody solve a problem if you have expertise that can help them. We find that it’s a balance of those things. We work on major roadmaps, large projects or tools for strategic and efficiency. Particularly efficiency reasons that we’re wishing to achieve as an organization. We spend a lot of us of the time helping the folks who need it, to get where they need to get. Brian: That makes sense to me. Is the feedback loop in place such that there’s some point in the future which you look backwards on these projects, or products, or tools that you’ve built and say, “Did we make a dent? What were the success criteria for those? What’s that three month or six month rear-view look like?” Do you guys talk about what that is, so you know whether or not you hit your objectives? “And since project X got four times the resourcing, did we get four times the value or whatever the value was that was determined?” I’m always curious about these feedback cycles because there’s a lot of places that they start with this telemetry and data, then they put technology on top of it, they build a bunch of software, and a lot of times the releases and the platforms are looked at as the outputs and the final part of this and it’s actually not. It’s the outcomes that come from the stuff we built that matter. If you don’t know what outcomes those look like, then you don’t know if you actually created anything meaningful. So, I’m curious, that feedback cycle, does your business know? Like, “We have to see. We can’t get predictions wrong or we don’t want to have a little more than 12% server waste from the wrong prediction, whatever.” I don’t know what those metrics are. Can you talk about that feedback loop from a business and a value perspective? Paul: Sure. Some of the things we’re doing are very tied to specific business goals for certain kinds of […]. These are targets for dollars saved in terms of operating the network at a lower cost. In those areas, we are very acutely being measured pretty much on a yearly basis along those lines. We’re working towards getting better at what happens in between and the rest of the year. You can often go off-track a little bit somewhere in one month and that can cost you down the road. We’ve been focused on trying to get to more of a monthly evaluation where we can break things down, try to deliver a value on a monthly basis, then get feedback from customers, and also to see how they’re affecting the numbers in real world application of this data to actually optimize. They never to learn. Are we consistently on track? Or are we moving in the right direction? I say that it’s definitely an element of what we do. Right now, we’re doing it more like every six months or a year. At a granular level, we’d like to move that to be a much shorter term and focus on constantly delivering smaller chunks of value. Brian: That’s good to hear. My understanding from when we talked to that you be almost what I would call a product manager, even though you’re not developing commercial products but you’re overseeing the creation of these different tools. I’m curious. Do you have the equivalent of a product manager role where one person’s job is to make sure that whatever analytics and/or custom tools you guys build for the network operations team or the team that deploys the servers, they live and breathe that world and they’re totally responsible to service those staff that work on those technical problems? Is that how it’s shaped or is everyone’s touching all of the different parts of Akamai? I’m just wondering how you get into that world. What’s it like to be the server administrator and predicting where to deploy servers? How is that structured? Maybe you don’t have enough staff to break it down that way and I’m asking a leading question, but I’m curious if you could talk about that a little bit. Paul: We actually do have four teams within our group and they are divided up with focus on the different stakeholder groups within the network’s organization. There is definitely some division. There’s also some who sort of cross responsibility but there are definitely folks who know specific subject matter areas very well and who are critical in those areas to anything more than the simple bug fix in an area is going to involve somebody managing that area. Now, for our largest projects of all, we do have product managers as well as project managers involved in the creation of the larger ones. I’d say about two or three are major systems and the other several hundred tools or various pieces that we manage, care and feeding over the years. That stuff is either being taken cared of by one of these SME areas or it’s sort of rolling out to me especially if it’s something new. A large part of my role is helping to at the outset to say, “Let’s define what this tool looks like. What it’s doing? Who is going to use it? What those people need? What are the processes at play here at Akamai that this is a part of? Do we understand those processes? Have we optimized those processes?” That’s a lot of what I end up doing with the rest of my team, to define those new products so that they’ll be the most successful as we build them and get off in the right direction. Brian: That sounds awfully like design to me. Paul: It is. Brian: Is that traditionally how things have been done in this group or is this something that’s new? How’s that being received? Are you getting like, “Just give us the data and we’ll put it together,” and you’re like, “No. Help me understand what are you going to do with it at the end.” It’s just like, “Well, I’ll know when I see it.” Is it that kind of thing or are they like, “Great, let’s get it right.” What’s that process like? Paul: The history of our group is that we have probably not put enough focus on planning and design, but I think it’s an area where people realize that we need to spend more. They really are now focused on that as a goal and understanding that it’s important in many context. That’s not to say that there aren’t sometimes when people will say, “Here’s what I need and I need it tomorrow,” and you know that comes up. It’s a balancing act that is always a challenge, but I think there is an increasing sense and increasing support across the network’s organization and maybe beyond that using some sort of platform organization, other parts of engineering at Akamai. It’s really a much better result if you make a plan upfront, you understand the context into which you’re creating this new thing, and you understand how it’s going to impact processes and flow that occur once you’ve built it. Brian: Maybe you haven’t been there because I know you’re somewhat new in this position but if you’ve been there long enough to go through a full cycle with that where you’ve taken someone through like, “Let’s hold on. Let’s figure out what’s actually needed. What the real problem’s face is like,” and then you’ve gone all the way through maybe building a product or a prototype or something. Have you gone through a full cycle yet? Or are you still in the design phase on some of these? Paul: For a couple of smaller projects, we’ve definitely done that. It’s been posted where people have come and said, “Hey, could you do X?” and we’ve said, “Well, we could do X but that actually requires more code and more effort. We have this other thing over here that actually can accomplish that and then it puts you more in the driver’s seat because you can help maintain it later. How’s that?” Often, the results are very positive. If we can actually get things implemented faster, people are happier in the end, it’s less maintenance for us overall in the long-haul. So, yes on the small things. On the bigger things, those are in progress and we’re excited about those design phases that’s going on now. They’re larger and more productive than they’ve been in the past. We’re excited to see probably by the middle of this year or later in the year that there is also an output of that. Brian: Can you tell us about what some of those activities are? I think some of the people listening to this are not coming from digital-native companies. The whole product design process is maybe foreign to them. Can you tell us about like, “What are you doing during this time? Why aren’t you writing code? You have the data. Put Tableau there and build some reports.” What are you doing that’s not that during this phase? Paul: Usually, the first thing we’re doing is trying to find out who are all the people that interact with this data, or these kinds of systems, or these particular business objects, or aspects of Akamai’s network. Often at the start, we find there’s common problems. There’s people and other parts of the organizations who may already have a tool that allows them to do this. Now we also want to go and observe those users. We want to go find out are they satisfied with the tool and is the tool meeting their needs, which are actually two different questions. Really seeing whether what they’re doing is a process that’s optimal and seeing whether we can create a solution to this new problem or borrow a solution to this new problem and change it in some way that helps everybody. That’s one of the interesting aspects of design here is that there are many groups that interact with the same data in so many different ways. I think a lot of that design phase is about, “Hey, one of the tools out there, how do we integrate them so that they’re the least work for us? How do we make sure that we’re choosing a good solution and we’re actually meeting the user’s needs?” Probably the last part of that, especially in our group is, and not getting stuck on not meeting 100% of any single tool, because in some cases, you’ll get 80% of the use cases for five groups and you have to say, “Okay, that’s fine. For this other case, they’ll do it this way.” That’s a lot what goes into the design process. Really just understanding what the users are looking for, how does that match up with stuff we already have, and then how do we integrate that use case into what we maintain, in a way that is streamlined and effective for them and also streamlined and effective for us. Brian: When you talk about getting to know what they’re going to do with this information and how they want to use it, is that through them self-reporting through, like talking to you in a meeting? Is it through you observing them doing what they’re doing now without the tool? Is this largely like, “Right now I can’t do any of this. I need this tool so I can enable this new thing that I currently don’t do,” or is it more like, “I have this long, convoluted process I have to do in order to achieve X. Can you help me build the tools so I can do it in less time?” One of those there is like a recipe for something already and you’re trying to optimize it and the other one is more like, “This is a new thing I’ve never been able to do but maybe I could with your help.” Do you put it into those buckets and then if it’s the former, how do you figure it out? Is it observation or just them talking to you about how they’re going to use it? How do you figure that out? Paul: There definitely are both of those scenarios come up. We often get requests about processes that already exist. At some point, there’s some tool in there already, sometimes it’s a highly manual process. In that scenario, one of the great assets of this particular group is that we have whole standards, documentation, and work co-optimization group here within network, which is a true treader to have. Usually, when that kind of problem comes up, the first thing we do is say, “Okay, let’s work with the [worker?]group and let’s get a really good map of what this process looks like end-to-end and let’s look at what the steps are, what tools are now, where the pain points are, and then once we have drawn this out so that we understand the context, let’s actually first look and see whether there’s any way we can optimize the process, because the last thing we want to do is to spend a lot of time implementing automation steps for a process that shouldn’t be that way in the first place.” We look at that process and we say, “Okay, how do we simplify it? How can we bring automation to bear, to make the process more straightforward, take less time, take less human effort.” Then, we usually at that point, sit down and actually design the automation solution around that. That’s one kind of problem and that process of workflow [analysis…] does involve what we call business process performers in each step. These are not the people who manage those areas. These are the people who are actually doing the work. We want to know what are they actually doing, we talk to them whenever we can, and we actually go [observe.] them because we can learn at least this much and probably more by watching what they’re doing and what they’re struggling with. That’s one side of it. The less well-described problems, those are the ones where nobody knows yet. This is something brand new. There, I think we tend to sit down and try to understand what these users are trying to accomplish, what problems they had in the past that this addresses, because so often, something that’s new is really some way connected to something old. We did this before. It didn’t really work or we have a gap here, there’s something that we’re not doing as well as we should or we’re not doing at all, and how do we get that better? A lot of it is about understanding what they’re looking for and I think the big element of that that’s key is breaking it down into manageable phases so we can deliver quickly and iterate quickly. The last thing you want to do is sit down and say, “Okay, we think we understand exactly what you need. Now, we’re going to go off for a year-and-a-half and build it.” That’s always a recipe for disaster. So, what we want to do is sit down and say, “Let’s take the most important crux of what you’re trying to get at here. Let’s implement something in a few weeks or a month. Then, let’s sit down and get it in your hands, get your feet back on it, and then figure out the next piece.” This doesn’t mean we can’t have a plan for like, “Here’s really roughly what we think the phases are going to be and how they’re going to be laid out. But let’s have these checkpoints along the way and let’s iterate based on what we actually are able to learn, what we actually to benefit from.” That’s what we found is the key to those kinds of new projects is the fast iteration cycle. Brian: We’ve talked a little bit about the MVP approach, which is about doing that minimal amount of work, which may or may not be working code, but you did a minimum amount of stuff to figure out whether or not it’s meeting a need that your customer has. You’re going through some type of observation process to fuel the first thing, the first asset or output that you create. It’s fueled by some kind of observation or research upfront so that when you go up to bat and take the swing, there’s a better chance of at least to base hit and not a strikeout or something. I fully support that type of effort instead of me going off, “We all have the data. We’ll send you back a kit and then you can put it together yourself. It will take a year, you’re going to dump everything into the data warehouse, and then you fall into the Gartner 85% of ‘Big Data Projects That Failed’ category, which nobody wants to be in that whole thing. I think that that’s really great you’re doing some of that. Earlier, you said you have a lot of different products and you said two to three of them are large. I’m just curious. Large by number of users? What justifies putting a dedicated product manager on it and what’s the extra love that is received because you’re one of those two or three? Is it they have a dedicated designer and dedicated engineers? It is more research time? Tell us about your big ones. Paul: I would say that the largest projects usually have someone who’s effectively an architect for the project, who may also be part of the development team. They usually have a development team. It’s usually several people. At least in an ideal world, three or four is probably typical for larger projects. Then there’s a project manager who is managing the project and also how that reports up into our overall program of initiatives for that organization. Usually, those projects, to get substantial research, are going to be priorities for the organization at some higher level. The last [piece] probably the most important piece is that there’s a product owner, who may or may not be the architect, in some cases the architect plus feedback from the stakeholders is enough to make it work, but most of the time, it’s usually somebody who is also the project owner or the product manager who’s really responsible for shaping the design of that product. For example, one of the big tools we’re working on has to do with increased virtualization that we’re rolling out within the Akamai network. This is a big project because it’s a company-wide initiative. We have somebody working on designing the interface and working to figure out how the interface to provisioning works within the context of all the processes we have here at Akamai. Another example, one of our key analysis or databases for analytics and for planning. There, the ownership is essentially a data team who is responsible for this database, the universe of this data, and roughly how it’s visualized. That team has responsibility for that database for its schema, how we got that data, where it comes from, its cleanliness, but also for the visualization aspect of it, and then it’s now also inheriting this ‘how do we use Tableau as part of that ecosystem?’ Just to give you some idea how these projects are organized and then what the roles are. Brian: Got it. Your large projects fall both into maybe a database that’s sitting behind Tableau as the interface and then you have another one, the server provisioning one, which sounds like a custom web-based application or something? Paul: That’s right. Brian: So then, for that one, to me that’s the decision support. The provisioning action would be the decision the human takes theoretically, upon some analytics or insight, that made them decide, “I need to push the button to deploy X servers in Y region or whatever it may be.” Is that decision support part of that custom product as well? Or is this a balance between two or three different Tableau instances that are behind different databases, and then you co-authored the provisioning tool and just do the action, you make the decision in that tool, but the insight about when and how and where to make the decision is not part of the tool? Or is that actually in that tool as well, where it’s like, “Hey we predict that you should do this,” or “Here are the stats. You come and make the decision on provisioning based on what’s in this tool.” How much is that wrapped together versus a series of different URLs you’re going to bounce through and piece together yourself with eyeball analysis? Paul: There’s some separation of systems and we’re actually moving into a more integrated direction. For example, a lot of us begin with a customer demand. Either we determine or the customer gives this information that helps us determine that they need capacity in a certain area. That drives the process but that also factors in to a lot of decision-making that goes on, right about exactly what gets deployed, where, and when. There’s elements of this that are integrated in a sense that the deployments that we’re planning to make to expand a network or to choose a network in some way, are inputs into this great big optimization model where you say, “Here’s what we know we think is coming, here’s what we know we think is going to happen, here’s the moves we’re planning to make when and where we will run out of capacity. I think we’re moving towards a more integrated feedback model for that where less of the work has to be sort of connect the dots by a human being and more to saying, “Okay, all the systems have this data and if they can exchange it with each other, then we have all the data in the places we need it.” Brian: You’re talking about this feedback cycle annually, then you might look back and say, “How well did we arrange for these optimizations? We planned for these predictive resource allocation or whatever it may be,” you look back and see how accurate that was by looking at the utilization rates or something? Paul: Exactly. Is there a customer demand we failed to meet? On the flip side, were there servers sitting around underutilized? Brian: Got it. When we talk about Akamai going out and deploying servers, are you talking about deploying physical hardware in a datacenter or are you just talking about provisioning up virtual servers on the cloud somewhere? I’m just curious because you guys are a network that sits on top of the internet. Does this involve lots of humans and you’re rolling out hardware and all that or are we really talking about virtual deployments? Paul: Some of each, but one of Akamai’s hallmarks, actually, is the breadth of the network. We have some servers in pretty remote locations. These are physical servers. These are places in some cases where there isn’t a lot of good cloud providers or anything like that. Brian: Johnny’s going to the Arctic to install some Dell servers. Paul: That’s right. I’ll tell you there’s a datacenter in Antarctica and it’s possible we have a server there. Brian: Someone’s got to go rewire it once in a while. Oh, we’re out of a storage. There’s still disk drives in that cloud up there. They might be flash, but they’re still a piece of hardware. Paul: One of the things that really differentiates Akamai is that we have this extensive edge network which really is pretty unparalleled to the industry. Brian: When there’s a report back then, do they look at the travel cost for Johnny going to the Arctic on an ice clipper or whatever it’s called, and then was it worth going there to deploy these servers? Paul: Sure. Increasingly, that is the kind of analysis that we’re doing. [and] we manage the network according to some of that. When there’s servers that are sitting somewhere and just not getting used or they’re there but they were extremely expensive to put there, then maybe that’s not a place to cover in the future. But in some cases, it makes sense to keep our coverage really good even if in one area where we’re sacrificing a little bit of cost to keep the coverage up over all and that might be worth it. Brian: Right. I’m curious. Now that you’ve been here awhile and through all these, do you have any stories or anecdotes about a particular user experience, a customer/internal user that found an approach that’s useful, or you’ve got some feedback or maybe it was negative, but you learned something not to do it again, or any type of anecdotes that you can think about that were insightful for you? Paul: Yes. We had a number of tools that we use for manipulating all the business data around what’s deployed in our network. I would say that I guess the best [anchor??] I had about them is that we’ve found there are tools that are very commonly used because of their flexibility. But if you actually look at the tool itself and you look at the complexity of the tool, it’s not that complex. It’s the default way of using things and people have used it continually because it has always been the way of using it, when in fact, there’s nothing particularly special about it. We’ve seen in certain circumstances where you give somebody a new tool that just works faster, it provides very similar interface, or you found some tweak to that workflow that really can save them tons and tons of time, and you just watch their eye pop out. They realized that you just probably saved them two hours a day. It’s interesting that that can happen in pockets and corners. There are many tools that have been built already to help with that but there are still plenty of opportunity for it. Brian: That’s great. That’s one of the things I think I love about being a designer. A lot of times, the big picture rewards like, “Was this product valuable or profitable?” There’s these lagging indicators which take a while and they don’t have the same hit as those small wins which were like, “I just saved this guy two hours a day doing a task that has nothing to do with his skill set. It’s just labor. He’s not using his brain. He just has to download these logs, put them in Excel, run a lookup, and then blah-blah-blah. And now it’s just bam.” I love that and that’s part of it for me, at least the joy of doing design work and stuff. I totally relate to the way you’re saying about helping someone. It is so much about helping people and you also feel like, “Man, I’m also helping the company because I’m helping this person use his brain to do much more important things than maybe he was doing with tool time, like downloading crap and uploading into a tool, sorting it, changing this, and blah-blah-blah.” Most of that is tool time. That’s not the, “Should we put more servers in Antarctica?” It’s not the thinking time and the valuable business time. Paul: It’s one of the very fulfilling aspects of the job like this where you’re building tools for internal stakeholders. In many software industries, you build product but your users might not be accessible for you or hardly at all. “I see that they’re right down the hall.” It’s a great fulfillment I think in building something that meets a person’s need and having that feedback and knowing that [did.] and having the satisfaction of that. Brian: Yeah, that’s awesome. This has been great. I’m curious. Do you have any closing advice for other product owners or data product leaders, analytics practitioners in your space, maybe about changing domain, you’re in a new domain? Any kind of insights looking back in this six months or however long that’s been that you’ve been there? Paul: I would say above all, my advice would be take the time to plan. Nobody ever thinks they have the time to design or to plan. To some extent, you just have to say, “If we don’t do this, [you know] the thing we build is not going to be worth nearly a much as the thing we could build.” You’re much better off figuring out the right design for something before you build it. Even when you think you don’t have the time, ask your managers and then your management chain for that space you need to get that pipeline started the right way because once you actually design things, you’re going to find that the number of people you’re helping and the degree at which you’re helping them is much greater. Brian: I can totally get behind that. That closing statement, I agree. First of all, you’re putting that anchor in place to do good things down the road. You’re probably reducing you’re technical debt and you’re maximizing your ability to change, especially when you’re doing small deployments. You’re probably going to need to change stuff, so a little bit of designing and planning upfront can do a lot for both the engineering part of it but also most importantly the customer experience getting that right. So, amen to that. Paul: Maybe the last part of that, just to add, is sometimes we take for granted the job we’ve been at for a long time. We actually take for granted that we think we know what everybody needs already. Sometimes, actually, it’s a blessing when you come to something brand new, because you’re not to assume you already know what that person across the hall really needs. You say, “I’m going to ask that person because I have no idea.” I would say these problems are the same everywhere. Whether you’re in a place, in a domain you’ve been for a while, there’s still going to be some aspect to that problem and you don’t understand what that person is living with. Pretend being the new guy for as long as you can. Go ask again and get to really understand what that person is experiencing because I know you’re going to able to meet the need much better. Brian: Yeah, I think that’s great advice. You don’t have that bias from your own knowledge about the domain or your assumptions there and that’s just a good design technique in general is being able to compartmentalize. We all come to the table with bias but if you can try to put that aside. For me, a lot of times it’s like leaving with new stuff with clients. It’s explain it to me like a five year old and I tell my clients sometimes this like, “What does it mean to deploy a server? What is he literally going to do and how does he know when to push the button to go do that,” and sometimes they look at you like, “What do you mean? You don’t know what a server is?” It’s like, “Well, I know what a server is, but literally I want to see every step it takes to know to go put one there. Is the guy going to walk out there with a box and rack it up? Or is this a virtual thing? Literally tell me what that’s like, that whole process.” Even though I know something about how that works, you’re going with that clean slate because you want to be open to those things you don’t know to ask about, and that the more you can come in with removing as much of that bias is possible, you might find those nuggets and stuff that just pop out to you that the customer doesn’t know to tell you about, but that they’re just going through their process. They’ll often ping you. You have these moments where you’ll learned something you didn’t go in there to ask about and sometimes it can be a really big thing like, “Wow. That’s really what the gap here is. It’s not this. It’s this another thing.” Having that really childlike innocence about the way you inquire can help enable that. Paul: Absolutely. Brian: Where can people find out about you? LinkedIn? Twitter? Are you out there in the internet? Paul: I’m on LinkedIn, for sure. I’m on Twitter. I’m on Facebook. Brian: Where are you on LinkedIn? What’s your Twitter handle? I’ll put the links in the notes, too. Paul: I think I’m @pjmattal everywhere. Brian: @pjmattal on Twitter. Okay, great. I’ll put your information up there. Thanks for coming on the show. It’s been great to hear about what you’re doing in Akamai and good luck as you guys charge forward. Paul: All right. Thanks.
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.
My guest today is Carl Hoffman, the CEO of Basis Technology, and a specialist in text analytics. Carl founded Basis Technology in 1995, and in 1999, the company shipped its first products for website internationalization, enabling Lycos and Google to become the first search engines capable of cataloging the web in both Asian and European languages. In 2003, the company shipped its first Arabic analyzer and began development of a comprehensive text analytics platform. Today, Basis Technology is recognized as the leading provider of components for information retrieval, entity extraction, and entity resolution in many languages. Carl has been directly involved with the company’s activities in support of U.S. national security missions and works closely with analysts in the U.S. intelligence community. Many of you work all day in the world of analytics: numbers, charts, metrics, data visualization, etc. But, today we’re going to talk about one of the other ingredients in designing good data products: text! As an amateur polyglot myself (I speak decent Portuguese, Spanish, and am attempting to learn Polish), I really enjoyed this discussion with Carl. If you are interested in languages, text analytics, search interfaces, entity resolution, and are curious to learn what any of this has to do with offline events such as the Boston Marathon Bombing, you’re going to enjoy my chat with Carl. We covered: How text analytics software is used by Border patrol agencies and its limitations. The role of humans in the loop, even with good text analytics in play What actually happened in the case of the Boston Marathon Bombing? Carl’s article“Exact Match” Isn’t Just Stupid. It’s Deadly. The 2 lessons Carl has learned regarding working with native tongue source material. Why Carl encourages Unicode Compliance when working with text, why having a global perspective is important, and how Carl actually implements this at his company Carl’s parting words on why hybrid architectures are a core foundation to building better data products involving text analytics Resources and Links: Basis Technology Carl’s article: “Exact Match” isn’t Just Stupid. It’s Deadly. Carl Hoffman on LinkedIn Quotes from Today’s Episode “One of the practices that I’ve always liked is actually getting people that aren’t like you, that don’t think like you, in order to intentionally tease out what you don’t know. You know that you’re not going to look at the problem the same way they do…” — Brian O’Neill “Bias is incredibly important in any system that tries to respond to human behavior. We have our own innate cultural biases that we’re sometimes not even aware of. As you [Brian] point out, it’s impossible to separate human language from the underlying culture and, in some cases, geography and the lifestyle of the people who speak that language…” — Carl Hoffman “What I can tell you is that context and nuance are equally important in both spoken and written human communication…Capturing all of the context means that you can do a much better job of the analytics.” — Carl Hoffman “It’s sad when you have these gaps like what happened in this border crossing case where a name spelling is responsible for not flagging down [the right] people. I mean, we put people on the moon and we get something like a name spelling [entity resolution] wrong. It’s shocking in a way.” — Brian O’Neill “We live in a world which is constantly shades of gray and the challenge is getting as close to yes or no as we can.”– Carl Hoffman Episode Transcript Brian: Hey everyone, it’s Brian here and we have a special edition of Experiencing Data today. Today, we are going to be talking to Carl Hoffman who’s the CEO of Basis Technology. Carl is not necessarily a traditional what I would call Data Product Manager or someone working in the field of creating custom decision support tools. He is an expert in text analytics and specifically Basis Technology focuses on entity resolution and resolving entities across different languages. If your product, or service, or your software tool that you’re using is going to be dealing with inputs and outputs or search with multiple languages, I think your going to find my chat with Carl really informative. Without further ado here’s my chat Mr. Carl Hoffman. All right. Welcome back to Experiencing Data. Today, I’m happy to have Carl Hoffman on the line, the CEO of Basis Technology, based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. How’s it going, Carl? Carl: Great. Good to talk to you, Brian. Brian: Yeah, me too. I’m excited. This episode’s a little but different. Basis Tech primarily focuses on providing text analytics more as a service as opposed to a data product. There are obviously some user experience ramifications on the downstream side of companies, software, and services that are leveraging some of your technology. Can you tell people a little bit about the technology of Basis and what you guys do? Carl: There are many companies who are in the business of extracting actionable information from large amounts of dirty, unstructured data and we are one of them. But what makes us unique is our ability to extract what we believe is one of the most difficult forms of big data, which is text in many different languages from a wide range of sources. You mentioned text analytics as a service, which is a big part of our business, but we actually provide text analytics in almost every conceivable form. As a service, as an on-prem cloud offering, as a conventional enterprise software, and also as the data fuel to power your in-house text analytics. There’s another half of our business as well which is focused specifically on one of the most important sources of data, which is what we call digital forensics or cyber forensics. That’s the challenge of getting data off of digital media that maybe either still in use or dead. Brian: Talk to me about dead. Can you go unpack that a little bit? Carl: Yes. Dead basically means powered off or disabled. The primary application there is for corporate investigators or for law enforcement who are investigating captured devices or digital media. Brian: Got it. Just to help people understand some of the use cases that someone would be leveraging some of the capabilities of your platforms, especially the stuff around entity resolution, can you talk a little bit about like my understanding, for example, one use case for your software is obviously border crossings, where your information, your name is going to be looked up to make sure that you should be crossing whatever particular border that you’re at. Can you talk to us a little bit about what’s happening there and what’s going on behind the scenes with your software? Like what is that agent doing and what’s happening behind the scenes? What kind of value are you providing to the government at that instance? Carl: Border crossings or the software used by border control authorities is a very important application of our software. From a data representational challenge, it’s actually not that difficult because for the most part, border authorities work with linear databases of known individuals or partially known individuals and queries. Queries may be the form manually typed by an officer or maybe scan of a passport. The complexity comes in when a match must be scored, where a decision must be rendered as to whether a particular query or a particular passport scan matches any of the names present on a watch list. Those watch list can be in many different formats. They can come from many different sources. Our software excels at performing that match at very high accuracy, regardless of the nature of the query and regardless of the source of the underlying watch list. Brian: I assume those watch lists may vary in the level of detail around for example, aliases, spelling, which alphabet they were being printed in. Part of the value of what your services is doing is helping to say, “At the end of the day, entity number seven on the list is one human being who may have many ways of being represented with words on a page or a screen,” so the goal obviously is to make sure that you have the full story of that one individual. Am I correct that you may get that in various formats and different levels of detail? And part of what your system is doing is actually trying to match up that person or give it what you say a non-binary response but a match score or something that’s more of a gray response that says, “This person may also be this person.” Can you compact that a little bit for us? Carl: Your remarks are exactly correct. First, what you said about gray is very important. These decisions are rarely 100% yes or no. We live in a world which is constantly shades of gray and the challenge is getting us close to yes or no as we can. But the quality of the data in watch lists can vary pretty wildly, based on the prominence and the number of sources. The US border authorities must compile information from many different sources, from UN, from Treasury Department, from National Counterterrorism Center, from various states, and so on. The amount of detail and the degree of our certainty regarding that data can vary from name to name. Brian: We talked about this when we first were chatting about this episode. Am I correct when I think about one of the overall values you’re doing is obviously we’re offloading some of the labor of doing this kind of entity resolution or analysis onto software and then picking up the last mile with human, to say, “Hey, are these recommendations correct? Maybe I’ll go in and do some manual labor.” Is that how you see it, that we do some of the initial grunt work and you present an almost finished story, and then the human comes in and needs to really provide that final decision at the endpoint? Are we doing enough of the help with the software? At what point should we say, “That’s no longer a software job to give you a better score about this person. We think that really requires a human analysis at this point.” Is there a way to evaluate or is that what you think about like, “Hey, we don’t want to go past up that point. We want to stop here because the technology is not good enough or the data coming in will never be accurate enough and we don’t want to go past that point.” I don’t know if that makes sense. Carl: It does makes sense. I can’t speak for all countries but I can say that in the US, the decision to deny an individual entry or certainly the decision to apprehend an individual is always made by a human. We designed our software to assume a human in the loop for the most critical decisions. Our software is designed to maximize the value of the information that is presented to the human so that nothing is overlooked. Really, the two biggest threats to our national security are one, having very valuable information overlooked, which is exactly what happened in the case of the Boston Marathon bombing. We had a great deal of information about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, yet that information was overlooked because the search engines failed to surface it in response to queries by a number of officials. And secondly, detaining or apprehending innocent individuals, which hurts our security as much as allowing dangerous individuals to pass. Brian: This has been in the news somewhat but talk about the “glitch” and what happened in that Boston Marathon bombing in terms of maybe some of these tools and what might have happened or not what might have happened, but what you understand was going on there such that there was a gap in this information. Carl: I am always very suspicious when anyone uses the word ‘glitch’ with regard to any type of digital equipment because if that equipment is executing its algorithm as it has been programmed to do, then you will get identical results for identical inputs. In this case, the software that was in use at the time by US Customs and Border Protection was executing a very naive name-matching algorithm, which failed to match two different variant spellings of the name Tsarnaev. If you look at the two variations for any human, it would seem almost obvious that the two variations are related and are in fact connected to the same name that’s natively written in Cyrillic. What really happened was a failure on the part of the architects of that name mentioning system to innovate by employing the latest technology in name-matching, which is what my company provides. In the aftermath of that disaster, our software was integrated into the border control workflow, first with the goal of redacting false-positives, and then later with the secondary goal of identifying false negatives. We’ve been very successful on both of those challenges. Brian: What were the two variants? Are you talking about the fact that one was spelled in Cyrillic and one was spelled in a Latin alphabet? They didn’t bring back data point A and B because they look like separate individuals? What was it, a transliteration? Carl: They were two different transliterations of the name Tsarnaev. In one instance, the final letters in the names are spelled -naev and the second instance it’s spelled -nayev. The presence or absence of that letter y was the only difference between the two. That’s a relatively simple case but there are many similar stories for more complex names. For instance, the 2009 Christmas bomber who successfully boarded a Northwest Delta flight with a bomb in his underwear, again because of a failure to match two different transliterations of his name. But in his case, his name is Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. There was much more opportunity for divergent transliterations. Brian: On this kind of topic, you wrote an interesting article called “Exact Match” Isn’t Just Stupid. It’s Deadly. You’ve talked a little bit about this particular example with the Boston Marathon bombing. You mentioned that they’re thinking globally about building a product out. Can you talk to us a little about what it means to think globally? Carl: Sure. Thinking globally is really a mindset and an architectural philosophy in which systems are built to accommodate multiple languages and cultures. This is an issue not just with the spelling of names but with support for multiple writing systems, different ways of rendering and formatting personal names, different ways of rendering, formatting, and parsing postal addresses, telephone numbers, dates, times, and so on. The format of a questionnaire in Japanese is quite different from the format of a questionnaire in English. If you will get any complex global software product, there’s a great deal of work that must be done to accommodate the needs of a worldwide user base. Brian: Sure and you’re a big fan of Unicode-compliant software, am I correct? Carl: Yes. Building Unicode compliance is equivalent to building a solid stable foundation for an office tower. It only gets you to the ground floor, but without it, the rest of the tower starts to lean like the one that’s happening in San Francisco right now. Brian: I haven’t heard about that. Carl: There’s a whole tower that’s tipping over. You should read it. It’s a great story. Brian: Foundation’s not so solid. Carl: Big lawsuit’s going on right now. Brian: Not the place you want to have a sagging tower either. Carl: Not the place but frankly, it’s really quite comparable because I’ve seen some large systems that will go unnamed, where there’s legacy technology and people are unaware perhaps why it’s so important to move from Python version 2 to Python version 3. One of the key differences is Unicode compliance. So if I hear about a large-scale enterprise system that’s based on Python version 2, I’m immediately suspicious that it’s going to be suitable for a global audience. Brian: I think about, from an experience standpoint, inputs, when you’re providing inputs into forms and understanding what people are typing in. If it’s a query form, obviously giving people back what they wanted and not necessarily what they typed in. We all take for granted things like this spelling correction, and not just the spelling correction, but in Google when you type in something, it sometimes give you something that’s beyond a spelling thing, “Did you mean X, Y, and Z?” I would think that being in the form about what people are typing into your form fields and mining your query logs, this is something I do sometimes with clients when they’re trying to learn something. I actually just read an article today about dell.com and the top query term on dell.com is ‘Google,’ which is a very interesting thing. I would be curious to know why people are typing that in. Is it really like people are actually trying to access Google or are they trying to get some information? But the point is to understand the input side and to try to return some kind of logical output. Whether it’s text analytics that’s providing that or it’s name-matching, it’s being aware of that and it’s sad when you have these gaps like what happened in this border crossing case where a name spelling is responsible for not flagging down these people. I mean, we put people on the moon and we get something like a name spelling wrong. It’s shocking in a way. I guess for those who are working in tech, we can understand how it might happen, but it’s scary that that’s still going on today. You’ve probably seen many other. Are you able to talk about it? Obviously, you have some in the intelligence field and probably government where you can’t talk about some of your clients, but are there other examples of learning that’s happened that, even if it’s not necessarily entity resolution where you’ve put dots together with some of your platform? Carl: I’ll say the biggest lesson that I’ve learned from nearly two decades of working on government applications involving multi-lingual data is the importance of retaining as much of the information in its native form as possible. For example, there is a very large division of the CIA which is focused on collecting open source intelligence in the form of newspapers, magazines, the digital equivalent of those, radio broadcast, TV broadcasts and so one. It’s a unit which used to be known as the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, going back to Word War II time, and today it’s called the Open Source Enterprise. They have a very large collection apparatus and they produce some extremely high quality products which are summaries and translations from sources in other languages. In their workflow, previously they would collect information, say in Chinese or in Russian, and then do a translation or summary into English, but then would discard the original or the original would be hidden from their enterprise architecture for query purposes. I believe that is no longer the case, but retaining the pre-translation original, whether it’s open source, closed source, commercial, enterprise information, government-related information, is really very important. That’s one lesson. The other lesson is appreciating the limits of machine translation. We’re increasingly seeing machine translation integrated into all kinds of information systems, but there needs to be a very sober appreciation of what is and what is not achievable and scalable by employing machine translation in your architecture. Brian: Can you talk at all about the translation? We have so much power now with NLP and what’s possible with the technology today. As I understand it, when we talk about translation, we’re talking about documents and things that are in written word that are being translated from one language to another. But in terms of spoken word, and we’re communicating right now, I’m going to ask you two questions. What do you know about NLP and what do you know about NLP? The first one I had a little bit of attitude which assumes that you don’t know too much about it, and the second one, I was treating you as an expert. When this gets translated into text, it loses that context. Where are we with that ability to look at the context, the tone, the sentiment that’s behind that? I would imagine that’s partly why you’re talking about saving the original source. It might provide some context like, “What are the headlines were in the paper?” and, “Which paper wrote it?” and, “Is there a bias with that paper?” whatever, having some context of the full article that that report came from can provide additional context. Humans are probably better at doing some of that initial eyeball analysis or having some idea of historically where this article’s coming from such that they can put it in some context as opposed to just seeing the words in a native language on a computer screen. Can you talk a little bit about that or where we are with that? And am I incorrect that we’re not able to look at that sentiment? I don’t even know how that would translate necessarily unless you had a playing back of a recording of someone saying the words. You have translation on top of the sentiment. Now you’ve got two factors of difficulty right there and getting it accurate. Carl: My knowledge of voice and speech analysis is very naive. I do know there’s an area of huge investment and the technology is progressing very rapidly. I suspect that voice models are already being built that can distinguish between the two different intonations you used in asking that question and are able to match those against knowledge bases separately. What I can tell you is that context and nuance are equally important in both spoken and written human communication. My knowledge is stronger when it comes to its written form. Capturing all of the context means that you can do a much better job of the analytics. That’s why, say, when we’re analyzing a document, we’re looking not only the individual word but the sentence, the paragraph, where does the text appear? Is it in the body? Is it in a heading? Is it in a caption? Is it in a footnote? Or if we’re looking at, say, human-typed input—I think this is where your audience would care if you’re designing forms or search boxes—there’s a lot that can be determined in terms of how the input is typed. Again, especially when you’re thinking globally. We’re familiar with typing English and typing queries or completing forms with the letters A through Z and the numbers 0 through 9, but the fastest-growing new orthography today is emoticons and emoji offer a lot of very valuable information about the mindset of the author. Say that we look at Chinese or Japanese, which are basically written with thousand-year-old emoji, where an individual must type a sequence of keys in order to create each of the Kanji or Hanzu that appears. There’s a great deal of information we can capture. For instance, if I’m typing a form in Japanese, saying I’m filling out my last name, and then my last name is Tanaka. Well, I’m going to type phonetically some characters that represent Tanaka, either in Latin letters or one of the Japanese phonetic writing systems, then I’m going to pick from a menu or the system is going to automatically pick for me the Japanese characters that represent Tanaka. But any really capable input system is going to keep both whatever I typed phonetically and the Kanji that I selected because both of those have value and the association between the two is not always obvious. There are similar ways of capturing context and meaning in other writing systems. For instance, let’s say I’m typing Arabic not in Arabic script but I’m typing with Roman letters. How I translate from those Roman letters into the Arabic alphabet may vary, depending upon if I’m using Gulf Arabic, or Levantine Arabic, or Cairene Arabic, and say the IP address of the person doing the typing may factor into how I do that transformation and how I interpret those letters. There’s examples for many other writing systems other than the Latin alphabet. Brian: I meant to ask you. Do you speak any other languages or do you study any other languages? Carl: I studied Japanese for a few years in high school. That’s really what got me into using computers to facilitate language understanding. I just never had the ability to really quickly memorize all of the Japanese characters, the radical components, and the variant pronunciations. After spending countless hours combing through paper dictionaries, I got very interested in building electronic dictionaries. My interest in electronic dictionaries eventually led to search engines and to lexicons, algorithms powered by lexicons, and then ultimately to machine learning and deep learning. Brian: I’m curious. I assume you need to employ either a linguist or at least people that speak multiple languages. One concern with advanced analytics right now and especially anything with prediction, is bias. I speak a couple of different languages and I think one of the coolest things about learning another language is seeing the world through another context. Right now, I’m learning Polish and there’s the concept of case and it doesn’t just come down to learning the prefixes and suffixes that are added to words. Effectively, that’s what the output is but it’s even understanding the nuance of when you would use that and what you’re trying to convey, and then when you relay it back to your own language, we don’t even have an equivalent between this. We would never divide this verb into two different sentiments. So you start to learn what you don’t even know to think about. I guess what I’m asking here is how do you capture those things? Say, in our case where I assume you’re an American and I am to, so we have our English that we grew up with and our context for that. How do you avoid bias? Do you think about bias? How do you build these systems in terms of approaching it from a single language? Ultimately, this code is probably written in English, I assume. Not to say that the code would be written in a different language but just the approach when you’re thinking about all these systems that have to do with language, where does that come in having integrating other people that speaks other languages? Can you talk about that a little bit? Carl: Bias is incredibly important in any system that tries to respond to human behavior. We have our own innate cultural biases that we’re sometimes not even aware of. As you point out, it’s impossible to separate human language from the underlying culture and, in some cases, geography and the lifestyle of the people who speak that language. Yes, this is something that we think about. I disagree with your remark about code being written in English. The most important pieces of code today are the frameworks for implementing various machine learning and deep learning architectures. These architectures for the most part are language or domain-agnostic. The language bias tends to creep in as an artifact of the data that we collect. If I were to, say, harvest a million pages randomly on the internet, a very large percentage of those pages would be in English, out of proportion to the proportion of the population of the planet who speaks English, just because English is common language for commerce, science, and so on. The bias comes in from the data or it comes in from the mindset of the architect, who may do something as simple-minded as allocating only eight bits per character or deciding that Python version 2 is an acceptable development platform. Brian: Sure. I should say, I wasn’t so much speaking about the script, the code, as much as I was thinking more about the humans behind it, their background, and their language that they speak, or these kinds of choices that you’re talking about because they’re informed by that person’s perspective. But thank you for clarifying. Carl: I agree with that observation as well. You’re certainly right. Brian: Do you have a way? You’re experts in this area and you’re obviously heavily invested in this area. Are there things that you have to do to prevent that bias, in terms of like, “We know what we don’t know about it, or we know enough about it but we don’t know if about, so we have a checklist or we have something that we go through to make sure that we’re checking ourselves to avoid these things”? Or is it more in the data collection phase that you’re worried about more so than the code or whatever that’s actually going to be taking the data and generating the software value at the other end? Is it more on the collection side that you’re thinking about? How do you prevent it? How do you check yourself or tell a client or customer, “Here’s how we’ve tried to make sure that the quality of what we’re giving you is good. We did A, B, C, and D.” Maybe I’m making a bigger issue out of this than it is. I’m not sure. Carl: No, it is a big issue. The best way to minimize that cultural bias is by building global teams. That’s something that we’ve done from the very beginning days of our company. We have a company in which collectively the team speaks over 20 languages, originate from many different countries around the world, and we do business in native countries around the world. That’s just been an absolute necessity because we produce products that are proficient in 40 different human languages. If you’re a large enterprise, more than 500 people, and you’re targeting markets globally, then you need to build a global team. That applies to all the different parts of the organization, including the executive team. It’s rare that you will see individuals who are, say, American culture with no meaningful international experience being successful in any kind of global expansion. Brian: That’s pretty awesome that you have that many languages going in the staff that you have working at the company. That’s cool and I think it does provide a different perspective on it. We talk about it even in the design firm. Sometimes, early managers in the design will want to go hire a lot of people that look like they do. Not necessarily physically but in terms of skill set. One of the practices that I’ve always liked is actually getting people that aren’t like you, that don’t think like you, in order to intentionally tease out what you don’t know, you know that you’re not going to look at the problem the same way they are, and you don’t necessarily know what the output is, but you can learn that there’s other perspectives to have, so too many like-minded individuals doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s better. I think that’s cool. Can you talk to me a little bit about one of the fun little nuggets that stuck in my head and I think you’ve attributed to somebody else, but was the word about getting insights from medium data. Can you talk to us about that? Carl: Sure. I should first start by crediting the individual who planted that idea in my head, which is Dr. Catherine Havasi of the MIT Media Lab, who’s also a cofounder of a company called Luminoso, which is a partner of ours. They do common sense understanding. The challenge with building truly capable text analytics from large amounts of unstructured text is obtaining sufficient volume. If you are a company on the scale of Facebook or Google, you have access to truly enormous amount of text. I can’t quantify it in petabytes or exabytes, but it is a scale that is much greater than the typical global enterprise or Fortune 2000 company, who themselves may have very massive data lakes. But still, those data lakes are probably three to five orders of magnitudes smaller than what Google or Facebook may have under their control. That intermediate-sized data, which is sloppily referred to as big data, we think of it as medium data. We think about the challenge of allowing companies with medium data assets to obtain big data quality results, or business intelligence that’s comparable to something that Google or Facebook might be able to obtain. We do that by building models that are hybrid, that combine knowledge graphs or semantic graphs, derived from very large open sources with the information that they can extract from their proprietary data lakes, and using the open sources and the models that we build as amplifiers for their own data. Brian: I believe when we were talking, you have mentioned a couple of companies that are building products on top of you. Difio, I think, was one, and Tamr, and Luminoso. So is that related to what these companies are doing? Carl: Yes, it absolutely is related. Luminoso, in particular, is using this process of synthesizing results from their customers, proprietary data with their own models. The Luminoso team grew out of the team at MIT that built something called Constant Net, which is a very large net of graph in multiple languages. But actually, Difio as well is also using this approach of federating both open and closed source repositories by integrating a large number of connectors into their architecture. They have access to web content. They have access to various social media fire hoses. They have access to proprietary data feeds from financial news providers. But then, they fuse that with internal sources of information that may come from sources like SharePoint, or Dropbox, or Google Drive, or OneDrive, your local file servers, and then give you a single view into all of this data. Brian: Awesome. I don’t want to keep you too long. This has been super informational for me, learning about your space that you’re in. Can you tell us any closing thoughts, advice for product managers, analytics practitioners? We talked a little about obviously thinking globally and some of those areas. Any other closing thoughts about delivering good experiences, leveraging text analytics, other things to watch out for? Any general thoughts? Carl: Sure. I’ll close with a few thoughts. One is repeating what I’ve said before about Unicode compliance. The fact that I again have to state that is somewhat depressing yet it’s still isn’t taken as an absolute requirement, which is today, and yet continues to be overlooked. Secondly, just thinking globally, anything that you’re building, you got to think about a global audience. I’ll share with you an anecdote. My company gives a lot of business to Eventbrite, who I would expect by now would have a fully globalized platform, but it turns out their utility for sending an email to everybody who signed-up for an event doesn’t work in Japanese. I found that out the hard way when I needed to send an email to everybody that was signed up for our conference in Tokyo. That was very disturbing and I’m not afraid to say that live on a podcast. They need to fix it. You really don’t want customers finding out about that during a time of high stress and high pressure, and there’s just no excuse for that. Then my third point with regard to natural language understanding. This is a really incredibly exciting time to be involved with natural language, with human language because the technology is changing so rapidly and the space of what is achievable is expanding so rapidly. My final point of advice is that hybrid architectures have been the best and continue to be the best. There’s a real temptation to say, “Just grow all of my text into a deep neural net and magic is going to happen.” That can be true if you have sufficiently large amounts of data, but most people don’t. Therefore, you’re going to get better results by using hybrids of algorithmic simpler machine learning architectures together with deep neural nets. Brian: That last tip, can you take that down one more notch? I assume you’re talking about a level of quality on the tail-end of the technology implementation, there’s going to be some higher quality output. Can you translate what a hybrid architecture means in terms of a better product at the other end? What would be an example of that? Carl: Sure. It’s hard to do without getting too technical, but I’ll try and I’ll try to use some examples in English. I think the traditional way of approaching deep nets has very much been take a very simple, potentially deep and recursive neural network architecture and just throw data at it, especially images or audio waveforms. I throw my images in and I want to classify which ones were taken outdoors and which ones were taken indoors with no traditional signal processing or image processing added before or after. In the image domain, my understanding is that, that kind of purist approach is delivered the best results and that’s what I’ve heard. I don’t have first-hand information about that. However, when it comes to human language in its written form, there’s a great deal of traditional processing of that text that boosts the effectiveness of the deep learning. That falls into a number of layers that I won’t go into, but to just give you one example, let’s talk about what we called Orthography. The English language is relatively simple and that the orthography is generally quite simple. We’ve got the letters A through Z, an uppercase and lowercase, and that’s about it. But if you look inside, say a PDF of English text, you’ll sometimes encounter things like ligatures, like a lowercase F followed by a lowercase I, or two lowercase Fs together, will be replaced with single glyph to make it look good in that particular typeface. If I think those glyphs and I just throw them in with all the rest of my text, that actually complicates the job of the deep learning. If I take that FI ligature and convert it back to separate F followed by I, or the FF ligature and convert it back to FF, my deep learning doesn’t have to figure out what those ligatures are about. Now that seems pretty obscure in English but in other writing systems, especially Arabic, for instance, in which there’s an enormous number of ligatures, or Korean or languages that have diacritical marks, processing those diacritical marks, those ligatures, those orthographic variations using conventional means will make your deep learning run much faster and give you better results with less data. That’s just one example but there’s a whole range or other text-processing steps using algorithms that have been developed over many years, that simply makes the deep learning work better and that results in what we call a hybrid architecture. Brian: So it sounds like taking, as opposed to throw it all in a pot and stir, there’s the, “Well, maybe I’m going to cut the carrots neatly into the right size and then throw them in the soup.” Carl: Exactly. Brian: You’re kind of helping the system do a better job at its work. Carl: That’s right and it’s really about thinking about your data and understanding something about it before you throw it into the big brain. Brian: Exactly. Cool. Where can people follow you? I’ll put a link up to the Basis in the show notes but are you on Twitter or LinkedIn somewhere? Where can people find you? Carl: LinkedIn tends to be my preferred social network. I just was never really good at summarizing complex thoughts into 140 characters, so that’s the best place to connect with me. Basically, we’ll tell you all about Basis Technology and rosette.com is our text analytics platform, which is free for anybody to explore, and to the best of my knowledge, it is the most capable text analytics platform with the largest number of languages that you will find anywhere on the public internet. Brian: All right, I will definitely put those up in the show notes. This has been fantastic, I’ve learned a ton, and thanks for coming on Experiencing Data. Carl: Great talking with you, Brian. Brian: All right. Cheers. Carl: Cheers.
Nancy Hensley is the Chief Digital Officer for IBM Analytics, a multi-billion dollar IBM software business focused on helping customers transform their companies with data science and analytics. Nancy has over 20 years of experience working in the data business in many facets from development, product management, sales, and marketing. Today’s episode is probably going to appeal to those of you in product management or working on SAAS/cloud analytics tools. It is a bit different than our previous episodes in that we focused a lot on what “big blue” is doing to simplify its analytics suite as well as facilitating access to those tools. IBM has many different analytics-related products and they rely on good design to make sure that there is a consistent feel and experience across the suite, whether it’s Watson, statistics, or modeling tools. She also talked about how central user experience is to making IBM’s tools more cloud-like (try/buy online) vs. forcing customers to go through a traditional enterprise salesperson. If you’ve got a “dated” analytics product or service that is hard to use or feels very “enterprisey” (in that not-so-good way), then I think you’ll enjoy the “modernization” theme of this episode. We covered: How Nancy is taking a 50-year old product such as SPSS and making it relevant and accessible for an audience that is 60% under 25 years of age The two components Nancy’s team looks at when designing an analytics product What “Metrics Monday” is all about at IBM Analytics How IBM follows-up with customers, communicates with legacy users, and how the digital market has changed consumption models Nancy’s thoughts on growth hacking and the role of simplification Why you should always consider product-market fit first and Nancy’s ideas on MVPs The role design plays in successful onboarding customers into IBM Analytics’ tools and what Brian refers to as the “honeymoon” experience Resources and Links: Nancy Hensley on Twitter Nancy Hensley on LinkedIn Quotes: “It’s really never about whether it’s a great product. It’s about whether the client thinks it’s great when they start using it.” –Nancy “Every time we add to the tool, we’re effectively reducing the simplicity of everything else around it.”–Brian “The design part of it for us is so eye-opening, because again, we’ve built a lot of best in class enterprise products for years and as we shift into this digital go-to-market, it is all about the experience…”–Nancy “Filling in that “why” piece is really important if you’re going to start changing design because you may not really understand the reasons someone’s abandoning.”–Brian “Because a lot of our products weren’t born in the cloud originally, they weren’t born to be digitally originally, doesn’t mean they can’t be digitally consumed. We just have to really focus on the experience and one of those things is onboarding.” –Nancy “If they [users] can’t figure out how to jump in and use the product, we’re not nailing it. It doesn’t matter how great the product is, if they can’t figure out how to effectively interact with it. –Nancy Episode Transcript Brian: Today on Experiencing Data, I [talked] to Nancy Hensley, the Chief Digital Officer of IBM Analytics. Nancy brings a lot of experience and has a lot to say about how user experience and design have become very integral to IBM’s success especially as they move their applications into the cloud space. They really try to bring the price point down and make their services and applications much more low touch in order to access a new base of subscribers and users. I really enjoyed this talk with her about what the designers and people focused on the product experience have been doing at IBM to keep their company relevant and keep them pushing forward in terms of delivering really good experiences to their customers. I hope you enjoy this episode with Nancy Hensley. Hello everybody. I’m super stoked to have Nancy Hensley, the Chief Digital Officer of IBM Analytics. How’s it going, Nancy? Nancy: Good. I’m happy to be here. Happy Friday. Brian: Yeah. It’s getting cold here in Cambridge, Mass ; [ you’re] in Chicago area, if I remember correctly. Nancy: Yeah, it’s a little bit chilly here as well. Brian: Nice. So it begins. You’ve done quite a bit of stuff at IBM when we had our little pre-planning call. You talked a lot about growth that’s been happening over at IBM. I wanted to talk to you specifically about the role that design and experience has played, how you guys have changed some of your products, and how you’re talking to new customers and that type of thing. Can you tell people, first of all, just a little bit about your background, what you’re currently doing, and then we could maybe […] some of those things. Nancy: Sure, happy to. Thank you for having me again. I think I’m one of those people that doesn’t fit nicely into a box of, “Are you product? Are you marketing?” I am a little bit of both. Most of my IBM career, I have moved in between product marketing and product management. That’s why I love digital so much because it really is a nice mixture. And in particular, growth hacking because it combines all the things I love, including data as a part of what we do. What I’m doing right now as a Chief Digital Officer in the Analytics Division and Hypercloud is how do we transform our products to make them more consumable, more accessible? We have best in class products in data science, in unified governments and integration, in hyper data management products, but our products and our business is built on a traditional face-to-face model. There is even a perception that we’re not as accessible to them and that’s what we’re looking to change. Creating those lower entry points, making it easier for people who didn’t have access to us before, to start small and grow through a digital channel, through a lower entry point product, and then scale up from there. That’s really what we’re trying to do and as part of a bigger mission to really democratize data science—I kind of cringe when I say that word—I think it’s really important for more clients to be able to be more data-driven, have tools that are easy to use, and leverage data science to optimize their business. Part of the way we’re doing that is to develop a digital route to market. We’re pretty excited about it. Brian: I think a lot of our listeners probably come from internal roles of companies. They might be someone that’s purchasing vendor software as opposed to a SaaS company where they may have a closer role to marketing and all that. Can you tell me what you guys are doing there? Part of the thing with my experience is that some of the legacy companies, the older companies that are out there tend to get associated with big giant enterprise installations, really crappy user experience. It’s just so powerful, you have to put up with all these stuff. People’s tendency these days to accept that poor experience as just status quo is changing. What have you guys done? Not that you’re to blame but I’m sure that opinion exist. How do you guys adapt to that and wonder if upstart analytics companies coming out with other things, what do you guys to to address the experience? Nancy: There’s certainly a perception that IBM is that big, complicated, enterprise-focused product out there. We see the data. There’s a lot of articles, there’s a lot of feedback, there’s endless report that all validate that clients are trading off complexity or features and functions for consumability, because they got to get things done, they have less people to do it. We fully recognize that. Where we started to look for that was how we first started to make things much more accessible, not just our cloud products because that’s pretty easy if you have stuff in the cloud—it’s pretty accessible—but our on-prime products as well. So, for clients that are running analysis behind the private cloud, whether it’s a statistical product, or a predictive analytics product, or data science project, or even what they’re doing on their data catalog, all of that was not something people would go to the cog to look for it. There are some things they need especially financial and health care, and there’s large and small companies on both sides. One of the things we set out to do is how do we create that cloud-like experience for clients that are running things behind their firewall. We started a project about a year ago to look at some of our on-prime products and create that experience where literally you could, within a couple of clicks, download, try, and be using a product within 15 minutes. That was our goal. As opposed to before where you would have to contact and IBM salesperson, get them to come out and meet with you, and then set-up a trial. That’s what we started to change was that at least make it accessible. As we progressed that capability, we started changing our pricing and packaging to be appropriate, to create that entry-level point, to create a shift to subscription. You want to buy everything on subscription these days, I think. The last part of that shift for us has been to really focus on the experience because a lot of these products were not born digital. We really need to make sure that when clients were coming through that channel, that it was a great experience. That’s really where design experience came into play for us. Brian: How did you know of what’s wrong beyond broad surveys or just that general feeling that like, “Oh, it’s the big giant bloated software…” the stereotype, right? How do you guys get into the meat and potatoes of like you said, sounds like there’s a benchmark there, 15 minutes on that first onboarding experience, but can you tell us a little bit of maybe if you have a specific example about how you figured it out? What do we need to change about this software application to make it easier to get value out of the analytics of the data that’s there? Nancy: I’ve got lots of examples. We’ll opt with one that clients actually are very familiar with, which is SPSS Statistics that a lot of us used back in college. That was a product that actually turns 50 years old this year. It’s been out a while, a lot of people still using it a lot, and most of our base of users for statistics, I think if you look at the demographics of it, over 60% are under the age of 25. So, their buying preferences were very different than they were when they started out in 1968. We look at the verbatims from our NPS feedback and it was clear that clients really wanted a much more simplified and flexible experience than buying SPSS Statistics and having access to it. A lot of times, students have to get it really quickly for a project because they’ve might have waited until the last minute and they wanted a much more flexible subscription-based program. They might only use it for a few months and then come back to it. That was one of the first things that we implemented was to change the buying experience for the consumption model. We didn’t actually change the product at that point. We just changed the consumption model to see if in fact that actually will help us have some growth on that product, and it absolutely did. Since then, we’ve actually gone back and change the product as well. It’s got a whole new UI for its 50th anniversary. Joke around that it’s got a face lift for it’s 50th anniversary. Brian: Does it have a green screen mode? Nancy: It is a completely different experience, not just from a buying perspective, but also from a UI perspective as well. We have other products, too, that have been around maybe not 50 years but have been very popular products like our DB2 Warehouse on Cloud and our DB2 database that clients have been buying for years to run their enterprises. We wanted to make that again, as we created a SaaS alternative of these products that it was extremely consumable. So, we’ve been looking specifically, is it easy to figure out which version to buy? How much to buy? What it’s going to do for you? Like I said, which version? How do I calculate things? We’ve been really looking at the experience of that is, if there was no salesperson at all, how do we help clients through that buying experience? Brian: I’m curious. When you decided to helping them through the buying experience, does any of that thinking or that strategy around hand-holding someone through that experience happen in the product itself? I’m guessing you’re downloading a package at some point, you’re running an installer, and at that point, did you continue that hand-holding process to get them out of the weeds of the installation and onboarding again to the actual, “Is this tool right for what I needed to do?” Everything else being friction up until that point where you’re actually working with your data, did you guys carry that through? Can you talk about that? Nancy: You’re hitting one of my favorite topics which is onboarding. Because a lot of our products weren’t born in the cloud originally, they weren’t born to be digital originally, doesn’t mean they can’t be digitally consumed. We just have to really focus on the experience and one of those things in onboarding. Let’s say, DB2 in particular, which won the process of creating onboarding experience for DB Warehouse on Cloud. For anybody who’s used DB2, we do have an updated UI for that. They can jump in and start using it. But that’s not everyone, the people that haven’t used it before. So, we just started working with a couple of different onboarding tools to create these experiences. Our goal was to be able—at least I’m offering management side alongside our partners but design—to create these experiences in a very agile way and make them measurable—my second favorite topic, which is instrumentation—but not have a burden on development, because the fact is, in almost any organization, development wants to build features and functions. Whenever we talk about this, they were prioritized lower because they want to build new capabilities. They’re less enthusiastic about building in things like onboarding experiences. With some of the tools like [.DB2..] give us, is a way to make it codeless to us. We can create these experiences, then pass the code snippet, and then measure whether those are effective or not because we actually see those flowing through segment into our amplitude as a part of the shuttle. We’ve got some great feedback as to whether they’re working or where they’re falling down. We can create checklists of things that we want the clients to do that we know makes the product sticky, and see if they actually complete that checklist. It’s giving us so much better view because before, what we would see with a client is register for trial, they downloaded the trial, they’ve created their instance, and then boom they fall off the cliff. What happened? Now we’re getting a much better view to what’s actually going on for the products that have been instrumented as well as the view we’re getting in from the onboarding experiences. Brian: For every one of these applications that you’re trying to move into a cloud model or simplify whether it’s cloud, to me the deployment model doesn’t matter. It’s really about removing the friction points whether it’s on-premise software or not. I think we all tend to use the word ‘cloud’ to kind of feel like, “Oh, is this browser-based thing? There’s no hard clients? There’s no running scripts at the terminal and all that kind of stuff?” Do you guys have a set of benchmarks or something that you establish for every one of these products that are going to go through a redesign? Nancy: We do. We’ve got a set of criteria, it’s really broken down into two pieces. Whether it’s going to be a cloud product or an on-premise product—I actually have a mix of both—there is what we call the MVP side, which might be something that’s not born in the cloud, it’s not a new product, and we’re looking to create a lower entry point, a really good trial experience, a very optimized journey. We’re even doing things like taking some of the capabilities that we used to have from a technical perspective and making those more digitally available. Online proof of concepts, hands-on labs that you do online instead of waiting for a technical salesperson to come out to see you. Tap us that can answer your questions faster even before you talk to a sales rep. All of that is included in the what we call the MVP portion of the criteria that we look at. Pricing and packaging’s got to be right for the product, for the marketplace. Got to have that right product market fit that you’ve got a good valuable product but a low-enough entry point where somebody can start small and scale up. The second part of the criteria is where the growth magic happens, where we’re dumbing down a lot more on the experimentation, where we’re making sure that we’ve got onboarding, instrumentation we want done, and the MVP phase, we don’t always get it, but our development partners really understand the value of that now, which is great. Though more often, we’re getting into the second phase of where we’re more doing the transformation. Through that, then we’re getting a lot more feedback, where we can create the onboarding experience. We can do even more on the optimized journey. We’re doing a lot of growth hacking that’s based on terms of optimizing. Things like how clear is information on the pricing page? Is it easy for the customer to figure out what they need to buy? What the pricing is for that? Can they get their questions answered quickly? Can we create a deeper technical experience for them, even outside of the trial itself? Like I mentioned, things we’re doing with our digital technical engagement, thinking that what used to be our tech sales modeling and making it more digital. Brian: That’s cool. When you guys go through this process of testing, are you primarily looking at quantitative metrics then that are coming back from the software that you guys are building, or you’re doing any type of qualitative research to go validate like, “Hey, is the onboarding working well?” Obviously, the quantitative can tell you what. It doesn’t tell you why someone might have abandoned at this point. You guys do any research there? Nancy: We do. It happens in a couple of places. We run squads that are cross-functional across marketing, product, development, and design, each product. Then every Monday we have this thing called Metrics Monday where we get the cross-functional routines together, we share the insights around the metrics. If we had a big spike or we had a big decrease, or if we had a change in engagement, or if we did some experimentation that came out with a very interesting result, we actually share that across teams. We really focus on why did things happen. We have a dashboard. Everybody is religious in using on a daily basis that tracks all of our key metrics, whether it’s visits, engage visits, trials, trial-to-win conversions, number of orders, things like that, but we also want to dive deeper into the ebbs and flows of the business itself, why things are happening, and if the experimentation we’re doing is helping or not helping. We’ve got a lot of focus on that on a daily and a weekly basis. Brian: Do you have any way to access the trial users and do one-on-one usability study or a follow-up with them that’s not so much quantitative? Nancy: Our research team and design will do that and they’ll take a very thorough approach to both recording users using the product, getting their feedback. It’s pretty thorough and also gives us some feedback. We usually don’t do that until the product’s been in the market for a little bit longer. We’ve got some hypothesis of how we think it’s doing, and then the research team will spend a couple of weeks diving a lot deeper into it. We get some great feedback from that. Honestly, as a product person, as much as I’d to think I’m focused on a beautiful experience, my lens versus our designers’ lens is completely different and they just see things we don’t. Brian: Yeah, the friction points and filling in the why’s, it takes time to go and do that, but it can tell you things, it helps you qualify the data, and makes sense especially when you’re collecting. I’m sure at the level that you guys are collecting that, you have a lot of inbound analytics coming back on what’s happening. But it’s really filling in that “why” piece that is really important if you’re going to start changing design because you may not really understand the reasons someone’s abandoning. Maybe it’s like, “I couldn’t find the installer. I don’t know where the URL is. I ended up locking the server on my thing and I don’t know how to localhost, but I forgot the port number,” and the whole product is not getting accessed because they don’t know the port number for the server they installed or whatever the heck it is, and it’s like, “Oh, they dropped off. They couldn’t figure it out how to turn it on, like load the browser…” Nancy: Right, and even behavioral things that we don’t always think of, like putting a really cool graphic in the lead space that actually takes the attention away from the callback-ends. We’re all proud of, “Hey look at this cool graphic we built.” One of our designers uses a tool that tracks eye movements and [wait a second] “We’re losing the focus here.” But again, you don’t always see from that lens. The design part of it, for us has been so eye-opening because again, we’ve built a lot of best in class enterprise products for years. As we shift into this digital go-to market, it is all about the experience. It’s all about how good the experience is, how easy the experience is, how frictionless it is, and it’s also about how consumable and accessible the product is in the marketplace. Brian: You mentioned earlier, it sounded like engineering doesn’t want to go back and necessarily add onboarding on all of this. This gets into the company culture of who’s running the ship, so to speak. Is it engineering-driven in your area? How do you guys get aligned around those objectives? I’ve seen this before with larger enterprise clients where engineering is the most dominant force and sprints are often set up around developing a feature and all the plumbing and functionality required to get that feature done, but there’s not necessarily a collective understanding of, “Hey, if someone can’t get from step A to step G, horizontally across time, then all that stuff’s a failure. Step F which you guys went in deep on is great, but no one can get from E to F, so definitely they can’t get to G.” So, that’s you’re qualifier of success. How do you guys balance that? Who’s running the ship? Does your product management oversee the engineering? Can you talk a little bit about that structure? Nancy: We call operating management aside from product management for a reason, because we really do want the operating managers to feel like they’re the CEO of their business and run the ship. Of course, development has a big say at the table, but they have a natural tendency to want to build capabilities. It’s never going to go away. It’s been that way for ages. We just don’t want to fight that tendency. We want them to focus on building, not take six months to build an onboarding experience when they could build in really valuable functionality in that six months instead. So, we really run it as a squad, just like many other companies. Operating management does leave a lot of the strategy with our products and development, but I would say that design is also a really, really chief at the table, for sure, absolutely. Brian: Tell us a little bit about your squads and is this primarily a designer or a UX professional up in your offering manager? Are they a team and then you pull in the engineering representatives as you strategize? Nancy: My team is a digital offering management. We’re a subset of offering management better known as product management. We will run the squads and the squads will be a cross-function of our product marketing team, our performance marketing team, which is demand to and type marketing. They run the campaigns, design, developments, the core product managers because we’re the digital product managers and such, and then there’s the core product managers. They have all routes to market. We’re just focused on the digital ones. With that is the cross-functional squad that gets together on a weekly basis and they run as a team. From a digital perspective, it’s led by the Digital OM for our route to market there. Brian: That’s interesting. How do you ensure that there are some kind of IBMness to all these offerings? Your UX practice and offering managers sound like they are part of one organization, but I imagine some of these tools, you might be crossing boundaries as you go from tool X to tool Y. Maybe you need to send data over like, “Oh, I have this package of stuff and I need to deploy this model,” then we have a different tool for putting the model into production and there’s some cross user experience there. Can you talk about that? Nancy: That’s really why design’s been key because their job is to keep us onus making sure that the experience is somewhat consistent across the tools so they seem familiar to us, especially within a segment data science. Some of these are using our Watson Studio tool and then moves to our statistics for our modeler tool. There should be a very familiar experience across those. That’s why design is really the lead in the experience part of it. From pricing and packaging, we try to maintain a consistency as much as possible across all the products again. Whatever level of familiarity you have and how we price and package things should be consistent across the entire segment. So we strive for that as well. On the digital side, in terms of the experience on the actual web, we partner with a team called the Digital Business Group. They are basically the host of our digital platform and they maintain a level of consistency worldwide across all the products in terms of the digital journey itself with us. Brian: That’s cool that you guys are keeping these checkpoints, so to speak, as stuff goes out the door. You’ve got the front lenses on it looking at it from different quality perspectives, I guess you could say. Earlier, you mentioned democratizing data science and we hear this a lot. Are we talking about democratizing the results of the data science, so at some point there’s maybe decision support tool or there’s some kind of outcome coming from the data science? Is that what you’re talking about democratizing? Or are you saying for a data scientist of all levels of ability, it’s more for the toolers as opposed to the [consumers..]? Nancy: It’s about the capability. The ability to put more of these products or these products in people’s hands that bought, that they might have been out of their reach, or that they were too enterprisey, or that they are for big companies. That’s one of the key things that we want to do. When you look at some of our products, they start really, really low. Cognizant Analytics is another great example where people might have had a perception that it’s really expensive but we just introduced a new version of it, and it’s less than $100 a month. You can get these powerful tools for analysis for a lot less than you think. Statistics in $99 a month, one of our pay products are significantly less, and it allows these companies that might not have considered doing business with us, to smart small and build up. That’s one of the key things we noticed as we shifted to a subscription model. With that, we started to see double digit increases in the number of clients that were new on products. Just because opened up this new route to market, doesn’t mean that we still didn’t maintain our enterprise face-to-face relationships because, of course, we did, but this allowed us to open up relationships with clients might have not gotten to before. Brian: How are the changes affecting the legacy users that you have? I imagine you probably do have some people that are used to, “Don’t change my toolset,” like, “I’ve been using DB2 for 25 years.” How are they reacting to some of the changes? I imagine at some point maybe you have some fat clients that turn to browser-based interfaces. They undergo some redesign at that point. Do you have a friction between the legacy experience and maybe do you employ the slow change mentality? Or do you say, “Nope, we’re going to cut it here. We’re jumping to the new one and we’re not going to let the legacy drag us back”? You talk about how you guys make those changes? Nancy: We’re shifting towards the subscription model. Our clients are, too. We have clients that are demanding that this is the only way that they actually want to buy software is through a subscription model. So it’s changing for them as well. I think in many ways, it’s a welcome change across the board. I can’t think of any negativity that we’ve had in both the change for the consumption models on a subscription side, as well as the new UI changes and things that we’re doing to the product that really update them and give them a modern feel. I know a lot of the onboarding is a welcome change, even for clients that are familiar with us. It helps them because they have to do less training internally to help people use the tool because now we’re building it into the product. Brian: How do you measure that they’re accepting that? Do you wait for that inbound feedback? Do you see if there’s attrition and then go talk to them? I imagine there’s some attrition that happens when you make a large tooling change. Is there a way to validate that or why that happened? Was it a result of changing too quickly? Any comment on that? Nancy: I think it’s a couple of things. We’re constantly monitoring the flow of MRR and the contraction of revenue where the attrition that we get through some of our subscription, to see if there is any anomalies there. But also we’re always were very in-tune with NPS. A lot of our product managers live and die in the verbatims and with the integration of FLAX, they get a lot of it. They’re coming right at them constantly, that they respond to. We are very, very in-tune with NPS and the feedback we’re getting there. We’re also getting a lot of reviews now on our software using tools like G2 Crowd where we keep an eye on that. I think the feedback doesn’t just come from one place. We’ll look at things like the flow through Amplitude. Our clients, when they’re coming in and during the trial, are they getting stuck someplace? Are they falling off someplace? Are they falling off either at a specific page like the pricing page? Or are they falling off as soon as they get the trial because they don’t know what to do with it? We look at things like that. We look at NPS in particular after we’ve introduced new capabilities. Did our NPS go up? What’s the feedback? Are our clients truly embracing this? I think it’s a combination of things. There is a lot of information, a lot of data that we just need to stay in-tune with. We’ve got a couple of dashboards that I know my team wakes up with everyday and takes a look at, and the product team. The core product manager stayed very focused on NPS. Brian: Do you have a way of collecting end-user feedback directly? I would imagine maybe in your newer tools, it’s easier to tool some of that in, but is there any way to provide customer feedback or something to chat or any type of interactivity that’s directly in the tools that you’re creating these days? Nancy: Sure. We are rolling out more end-product nurture capability than we ever had before. That gives them the ability to chat directly within the product, as well as schedule a time with an expert. We’re working in making that even easier through a chat bot. So if you do get stuck and you’re chatting with that bot, you can schedule the appointment with an expert right there. I think there’s lots of ways to do that. I think sometimes I worry that there’s too much data coming at us but we [didn’t have enough..] before, so I’m not going to do that. Brian: Right. It’s not about data, right? It’s, do we have information? Nancy: Do we have information? Exactly. I would say my team spends a lot of time going through that, looking at Amplitude, analyzing the flows, looking in the patterns, in the orders, in the data, and the revenue. With the NPS feedback, it’s a combination of all of that stuff that really gives us a good view. As well as looking at the chat data, and analyzing some of the keywords that’s coming across on the chat, the Watson robots are constantly learning, which is great. We’re using machine learning to get smarter about what do people ask about, and that’s giving us also some good insight into the questions they ask, the patterns of information they’re searching for by product. Brian: In terms of the net promoter score that you talked about, tell me about the fact that how do you interpret that information when not everybody is going to provide a net promoter score? You have nulls, right? Nancy: Right. Brian: How do you factor that in? That’s the argument against NPS as the leading indicator. Sometimes, it’s not having any information. So you may not be collecting positive or potentially negative stuff because people don’t even want to take the time to respond. Do you have comments on how you guys interpret that? Nancy: I think you also have to look at the NPS is going to go up and down. If you have a client who has particularly a bad experience, it’s the week of thanksgiving, there was only X amount of surveys, and one of them had a bad experience that could make your NPS score looks like it drops like a rock. [right] you’ve got to look at it like the stock market. It’s more of the patterns over the long haul, what’s coming across within those patterns of information and feedback the clients are giving you. We react but you have to look at the data set, you have to look at the environmental things that are happening, and take that all into consideration from an NPS perspective. We’re very driven by that and that comes down from our CEO. She’s very cognizant, making sure that the product teams and the development teams are getting that feedback directly from the clients. As an organization—we’re a few years old—the way we used to do that is we would have these client advisory boards. It was a small number of clients that would give us feedback on our products, roadmap, and usability of that. The reality is just that then you end up building the product for 10% of your clients. Now it’s been eye-opening for us as we really open that up. Obviously, we’re still getting feedback from a larger community and client advisory board still, but NPS comments and feedback has really widen the aperture of the feedback we’ve gotten from a broader scope of clients. Brian: You brought up a good point. I had a client who luckily was cognizant of this and they did the same things where they fly their clients, they do two-day workshops, and they gather feedback from them. I was doing some consulting there and he said, “Brian, I’d like you to just go walk around, drop in some of the conversations and just listen, but take it with a grain of salt because I hate these freaking things. All we do is invite people that are willing to come for 2–3 days and tell us how much they love our stuff, it’s a free trip, we’re not getting to the people that don’t like our stuff…” Nancy: Or don’t use it. Brian: Or don’t use it at all. I love the concept of design partners, which is new, where you might have a stable of customers who are highly engaged, but that the good ones are the ones that are engaged who will pummel you when you’re stuff is not happening. They will come down on you and they will let you know. So it’s really about finding highly communicative and people who are willing to tell it like it is. It’s not, we’ll go out and find people that rah-rah, cheerleading crowd for you. Did that inspire the changes? Nancy: Even in the client advisory councils that we had—I ran a couple of them for products like Netezza for a while—we started to change the way we even ran those. I remember the biggest aha moment was, we had a client advisory board for Netezza one year and not too long ago. We decided to run a design thinking camp as part of the agenda, so that they would actually drive what they wanted from our requirements prospectus, going through the design thinking process through that. What came out of it was truly eye-opening. You know how a design thinking process progresses. I think even they were surprised at what they ended up prioritizing across the group of requirement. I think we’re really starting using differently about that feedback from clients. I do remember that day when we were looking at those things and that was not where we thought we would end up. Brian: Do you have a specific memory about something that was surprising to the group that really stuck? Something you guys learned in particular that stuck with you? Nancy: I think we focused a lot more at that point. At the time there was a lot of issues around security and what was one of our leading things going into the next version. What clients actually were not necessarily as verbal about was that, as they were using these appliances and they were becoming more mission-critical, they were doing more mixed workloads. Yes, security was still incredibly important, but what was emerging beyond that for them was workload management because they had this mixed workload that was emerging. So many different groups were jumping in with different types of workload. They have not anticipated on their [day route?] appliance, so it was something that I think came out of the next in the design thinking process that was important to them that they actually hadn’t been able to verbalize to us. Outside of that process, which was really, really interesting to us, we were on track with the requirements that we have but beyond that, the requirements that we just hadn’t thought of and quite honestly they hadn’t verbalized. Brian: You make a good point there. Part of the job of design is to get really good clarity on what the problems are and they’re not always going to be voiced to you in words or in direct statements. It’s your job to uncover the latent problems that are already there, crystalize them, so ideally whoever your project manager in the organization and your leadership, can understand and make them concrete because then you can go and solve them. When they’re not concrete and vague, like, “We need better security.” But what does that mean specifically? If you start there and really the problem had to do with the mixed workloads and managing all that, it’s like you can go down a completely different path. You can still write a lot of code, you can build a lot of stuff, and you can do a lot of releases, but if you don’t really know what that problem is that you’re solving, then you’re just going through activity and you’re actually building debt. You’re building more technical debt, you’re wasting money and time for everybody, and you’re not really driving the experience better for the customer. I think you made a good point about the design thinking helps uncover the reality of what’s there, when it’s not being explicitly stated, support requests are not going to get that type of information. They tend to be much more tactical. You’re not going to get a, “Hey, strategically I think the project needs to go this direction.” Nancy: Right and if you would have asked of us an open-ended question, you would have gotten and answer that could have been interpreted slightly differently. I think this was when I became the biggest fan of design is that, there was this magical person who was running this design camp for me that got information that I didn’t think I could get to. I mean, I knew nothing about the product. It was pretty amazing. Brian: That can happen when you also get that fresh lens on things even when they may not be a domain expert. You get used to seeing the friction points that people have and you can ask questions in a way to extract information that’s not biased. You’re not biased by the legacy that might be coming along with that product or even that domain space. It’s sometimes having jthat almost like first grade, “Tell it to me like I’m your grandfather,” or, “Explain that to me this way,” and then you can start to see where some of those friction points are and make them real. I always enjoyed that process of when you’re really fresh. Maybe this happens for other people but especially as a designer and consultant, coming into a product and a new domain, and just having that first-grader lens on it like, “Hey, could you unpack that for me?” “What is the workload in there like?” looking at you like, “What?” and you make them unpack that but you give that full honesty there to really get them to extract out of their head into words that you [and.] everyone can understand. That’s where some of those magical things happen like, “Oh my gosh. We had no idea that this was a problem,” because he or she thought it was so obvious like, “Of course, they know this,” and it’s like, “No. No one’s ever said that.” Nancy: Right. We’re experiencing that now. We have an embedded designer into our team that’s focused on our growth products. Again, she’s coming in with a complete fresh set of eyes and her perspective that she brings on the experience is just so completely different, not completely different but there are things that she flushes out we would have never see. It’s really helping because a lot of times, too, when you’re focused on the experience as opposed to the features and functions analysis, and you come down to looking at it from that perspective. I don’t want to go to development and tell them this because it’s like calling their baby ugly. But at the end of the day, the client needs to have a great experience. They need to see the value. When they’re even just trying the product out, they don’t get to that aha experience like, “I know how this will help me within 15 minutes.” We’re just not nailing it. If they can’t figure out how to jump in and use the product, we’re not nailing it. It doesn’t matter how great the product is, if they can’t figure out how to effectively interact with it. Brian: Effectively, none of the stuff really exist in their world. It just doesn’t exist because they can’t get to it. So, effectively it’s totally worthless. Whatever that island you have on the island, if there’s no bridge to get there, it doesn’t matter because its just totally inaccessible. Nancy: Right and it’s harder sometimes for even the product managers to see it. When I was sitting down in a demo of a product that we are going to be releasing, dude was cruising through the demo, my eyes were like glazed over, I just look and I was like, “Boy, we’re going to need some onboarding with that.” Great product, amazing capabilities, very complex and dense in its capability. It’s never really about whether it’s a great product. It’s about whether the client understands that’s great, when they start using it. Brian: Yeah and I think especially for analytics tools, highly technical tools used by engineers and other people that have better working in this kind of domain. Sometimes we gloss over stuff that seems like it would be totally easy or just not important. I have this specific example I was working on a storage application. It was a tool I think for migrating storage between an old appliance and a new appliance. At some point during that workload migration, something as simple as like, “Oh, I need a list of these host names and these IP addresses,” some other information that’s just basically setup-related stuff, and all the tool needed to do was have a CSV download of a bunch of numbers to be piped into another thing so that they could talk to each other. It’s not sexy. It’s literally a CSV. It was the only technical lift required, but it was not seen as engineering. It’s not part of the product. That has to do with some other product but you have to go type it into. It’s like yes, but that bridge is never going to happen. It takes them 10 years to go figure out where all these IP addresses are listed, domain names, and all these kind of stuff. It’s not sexy but if you look at the big picture, the full end-to-end arc, and if we’re all lying around, what is that A to G workflow, there’s six steps that have to happen there. This is not sexy, it’s not a new feature but this is the blocker from getting from B to E. They’re never get to A, which is where the product begins. Nancy: We definitely had those discussions in the early days about making it more consumable instead of giving it more features and functions, and can’t we really hack growth that way? That is a mind shift that if you are a design-led organization, you get it, and we believed in every part of our being that we are. Sometimes we still have that natural resistance that we really need to add more features and functions to make this product grow, but I think we’ve really turned the corner on that. Digital really has been the task for us to do that because we build the experience in the products as if there was no IBM sales team that’s going to surround you to help make you a success. That’s a very different way that we’ve done things for so many years, and the only way you can do that is by focusing on experience. Brian: You bring up a good point and I think that it’s worth reiterating to listeners. You can add these features but they do come at a cost. The cognitive load goes up. Every time we add to the tool, we’re effectively reducing the simplicity of everything else around it. Typically as a general rule, removing choice simplifies because you’re just removing the number of things that someone has to think about. So those features don’t really come for free. It’s almost like you have a debt as soon as you add the feature and then you hope you recoup it by, “Oh there’s high engagement. People are really using that,” so that was a win. If there’s low engagement with it, you just add it. It’s like Microsoft Word 10 years ago. You just added another menu bar and another thing that no one’s gonna use, and now it’s even worse. The pile continues to grow and it’s so hard to take stuff out of software once it’s in there, because you’re going to find, “You know what? But IBM’s our client, and they’re using it. IBM makes $3 million a year. We’re not taking that button out of the tool. End of story,” and now you have that short-term like, “We can’t take that out because Nancy’s group uses this.” Nancy: That’s right and we can’t point out exactly. I think my favorite story when it comes to that is the Instagram story that people talk about, where it was launched as a tool, a product called Bourbon. It had all of these great capabilities and it was going nowhere. So they dug into the usability side of things and said, “Well, what are people actually using?” which is what we do as well from an instrumentation perspective, and found that they were really only using a couple of things. They wanted to post a picture, they wanted to comment on the picture, they want to add some sort of emojis or in like system the picture and they are like, “Let’s [do.]. Let’s just do three or four things, do them really great, and relaunch the product,” and then of course the rest is history. I think that that’s a great illustration of more features and functions. If they’re not important, relevant, and consumable, all three of those things, are not going to give you growth. It comes down to, is it easy to use? Can I get value out of it? Do I immediately see that I can get value out of it? That’s all product market fit. That’s where we shifted our focus and digital’s helped us, too. That’s why my job is so cool. Brian: Cool. This has been super fun. Can you leave us with maybe an anecdote? Do you have a big lesson learned or something you might recommend to people that are either building internal tools, internal enterprise software or even SaaS products, something like, “Hey, if I was starting fresh today, I might do this instead of doing that.” Anything from your experience you could share? Nancy: For me, the biggest thing is just really focusing on product market fit because we build something sometimes to be competitively great, but not necessarily competitively great and competitively different, or that. So to understand that you not only have something that solves somebody’s problem but does it in a way that’s unique, and that’s so valuable that they’ll pay the price that’s appropriate for whatever they’ll pay for it. You’ve got to start thinking about that upfront because oftentimes, we’ll build something we’ll see a market opportunity for, but we may not truly understand product market fit whereas we know who the target is, we know what they’ll pay for this, we know what the value is, we know how to get to them, and I think you’ve got to start with that upfront, like you really got to understand product market fit or you’re never be able to grow the product. I’ve got a lot of religion around that and we really try very, very hard to create pricing and packaging around making sure we hit that, but the product has to have that value. It can’t be too overwhelming, it can’t be too underwhelming, it’s got to hit that great value spot. Brian: Fully agree on getting that fit upfront. You save a lot of time, you could solve a lot of technical debt instead of jumping in with the projects that you going to have to change immediately because you find out after the fact and now you’re starting it like… Nancy: See you in Instagram not a Bourbon, right? Brian: Exactly. Tell us where can people find you on the interwebs out there? Nancy: I probably spend a lot of time on Twitter. Maybe not so much lately. It’s been a little bit crazy but you can find me on Twitter @nancykoppdw […] or you can find me on LinkedIn. I am going to try and do better. I am on Medium. I haven’t done as good about blogging but that’s one of my goals for trying to get back on blogging. I’m usually out there on Medium or Twitter talking about growth hacking and digital transformation. I do podcast as well. Brian: Cool. I will put those links up on the show notes for anyone. Thanks for coming to talk with us, Nancy. It’s been fun. This has been Nancy Hensley from IBM Analytics, the Chief Digital Officer. Thanks again for coming on the show and hope we get the chance to catch up again. Nancy: Thank you.
Since 2013 Quiet Light's average transaction size has grown up to ten times. Back in those days, there were no private equity firms poking around the e-commerce space for these listings. Today it is a completely different story and more often than not we're seeing private equity firms come into the buyer spectrum. In fact, once a business reaches a certain size, it is more likely than not that a seller's potential buyer is going to be in the private equity space of the buyer pool. Today we are going to dissect the PE process a bit further. We'll delve into the process, the advantages and disadvantages, and give a general education on the subject for those who are curious about it how it works. Today's guest, Brian Rassel, is Vice President of Private Equity with Huron Capital. He's responsible for sourcing, evaluating, and analyzing investments made by his firm. Brian delves into ways he finds that e-commerce has entered into almost sector of investment that his group is involved in these days. Prior to joining Huron Capital, Brian was an Associate at Prophet, a global growth strategy consulting firm. Prior to Prophet, Brian was a consultant with New England Consulting Group where he led project management in their private equity practice for buy-side clients. Brian is sharing his wealth of private equity experience and how PE is entering more and more into the e-commerce space. Episode Highlights: How Brian defines private equity. How PE funds traditionally start up and get solidified. The difference between small, medium and large equity funds. The holding periods that private equity funds usually need to secure capital. Is PE all about acquiring to grow and sell or is there a category for buy and hold? Do evergreen funds exist? The difference between platform and bolt-on investments. Three things funds do to generate deal flow and types of business spaces they favor. The behind-the-scenes processes of putting a deal together. How many people are involved in the deal on the PE side. The backend investors committee and if that hinders the deal for the seller. Why time commitment is actually a good thing. How many deals Brian's PE firm evaluates per year. The defined process that gets them through the numbers. The growth potential for e-commerce – multiple appreciations and the role of private equity. Brian frames an ideal acquisition structure based on the general private equity model. Why the buyer/seller fit really matters. How private equity can work for sellers who want to get their business to the next stage. Transcription: Joe: Back in 2013 Mark I closed 23 transactions. It was a busy year for me. Do you have any idea what the average transaction size was? Mark: I … what do I guess? Well, it's you so I'm going to say like seven million dollars. Joe: I love putting you on the spot because you do it to me all the time. The average transaction size— Mark: You got to be like 250. Joe: It was 125. Mark: Holy cow. Joe: 125; very small. Mark: Okay. Joe: And at that time there were no Private Equity Firms poking around the e-commerce space for these smaller listings. Today it's a completely different story and my average transaction size was 10 times that last year. And a lot of buyers or a lot of sellers, the question I get asked all the time are who are your buyers? And it's a mix of everyone but more often than not now we're seeing Private Equity Firms come into this space. And I understand you had an expert in that area on the podcast. Mark: Yeah private equity is a topic that's coming up more and more frequently with sellers especially on the higher end of that revenue spectrum that we really work with. And it makes sense because once you get to a certain size of business your buyer is more likely than not going to be at least somewhat in the private equity place … area of the buyer pool. In addition, we've talked before … I had Ryan Tansom on and we talked about selling to a strategic buyer versus a marketplace buyer. And obviously, people always look at this especially at the higher ends and say I kind of want to have a strategic buyer. Well, one thing to keep in mind here is that this is kind of a spectrum right? It's not binary; you're either strategic or marketplace. But when you get into that private equity world, private equity is almost always going to be something of a strategic play. So I thought … look this private equity world is something that people keep asking about let's actually start to dissect it a little bit. So Brian and I talked and we spent probably about half of this interview just kind of going over what is private equity. How does that work? What is the definition of this? What are the sizes of it? And really just trying to ask some of those silly questions that maybe you kind of wonder about but don't want to ask because you don't want to sound like you don't know what you're talking about. And so we went over a bunch of those questions but then we also went over what does the process looked like. What does it look like to sell to a private equity firm? What are the drawbacks to it and what are the benefits of it as well? And really it's kind of a general education podcast but I think also … and maybe more importantly for those of you out there who are thinking about selling down the road and you're looking and trying to peg the different values that you want to get from an exit and maybe you think well I want a 10 million dollar exit or a 15 million dollar exit, if you get to that point what's it going to look like to sell to a private equity and what do you need to do to really make yourself appealing for a Private Equity Firm? And how does the deal change when you're signed to private equity as well. So we really covered a lot of ground in about 30 minutes. Brian is super knowledgeable obviously. He works in this space. And I really appreciated him coming on the podcast because … again I just downloaded a ton of information. Joe: Well let's get right to it. Mark: All right Brian thanks for joining me on the podcast. I really appreciate you coming on. Brian: Yeah I know. It's great to be here. Thanks for hosting. Mark: All right so I don't expect people to listen … my guests to have listened to the podcast in advance and I know … I don't know if Joe's been doing this, he records like 9 out of 10 episodes and I don't know if he's continued on the tradition but we like to have our guests introduce themselves mainly because you know your story better than I know your story and I figure it's a little bit easier. So why don't you give just kind of a quick 30 second to one minute rundown on who you are? Brian: Yeah I'm Brian Rassel. I'm a vice president with Huron Capital Partners which is a middle market private equity firm based at Detroit Michigan. The firm is 20 years old and has invested in … we're typically enthralled buyout investors where we'll buy a majority of a business and have done that through five successive fawns starting back in 1999. And the industries that we play in are business services, consumer, and specialty manufacturing. You know it'd kind of be interesting how I got to know you Mark for those listening is that believe it or not all of those basins are being affected by e-commerce or different kind of SaaS business models that are internet based. And I'm taking it upon myself to maybe be the person of the firm who is trying to understand those influences on all of our companies and make sure that we're in a position to incorporate those changes that are going on out and new coming at large number and being done by a lot of people who probably listen to your podcast and make sure that we're bringing more of the [inaudible 00:05:51.4] in the businesses we own so that they can be successful today and be well into the 21st century. Mark: All right, well I got a lot of questions for you because this world of private equity is encroaching or coming into the internet business acquisition world more and more. And whether it's because at Quiet Light our deal value is moving up or private equity is starting to look at different price ranges and maybe this convergence of these worlds and also private equity looking more in the online space is just becoming an increasing topic that we're seeing more and more of. We're also seeing individuals that have started up on their own raising funds to do large acquisitions or to string acquisitions together. Brian: Yeah. Mark: So what I'd like to do and I already kind of told you this in our conversation before I hit record, I'd like to go over some of the basics here of the private equity world and how it looks in the Internet space as well. And then know a little bit more about your fund and some of the things that you guys are doing over there and all that. So a quick shout out to Chris from Centurica and Rhodium I know that we've talked about him so much that it's almost as if he's a sponsor. He's not. But this is again how we got introduced. You spoke at the Rhodium and then you and I had a chance to speak after that and a good conversation. So thanks Chris for the introduction again. So let's start out really really basic here. How do you define private equity? Brian: Private equity is capital … private capital being put to work in private businesses. And so I like to name [inaudible 00:07:22.6] for folks who really don't know much about it a little quick stat just kind of on the US economy. There are half as many publicly listed companies as there were in 1996 or 1994 something like that. So even if the value of the public markets is larger the amount of places you can park that capital in the public markets is small in the total number of listed names. Private equity is a big part of either big institutionally managed money. Whether that's from insurance companies, [inaudible 00:07:52.4], pension funds, universities, those kinds of things. This is their way to go participate in the forces of economy that are still private companies that they can't get access to otherwise unless folks like me help them get access to it. It also includes folks that can kind of go into different flavors of private equity but depending on the size from the bing capitals of the world down to very very small funds that are more entrepreneurial. There's sort of every flavor under design in certain family offices and other things like that. That would be private equity, pooled private capital going into private businesses. Mark: Well how did these funds start-up traditionally? And I imagine that there's a lot of ways that they can start up. You've listed a number of sources of money and I think sometimes we forget just how much money there is in some of these places. So yeah [crosstalk 00:08:46.6]. Brian: For sure I mean there's just [crosstalk 00:08:49.4] I'm going to get this off, I'll be wrong by a hundred billion dollars. But I think something like 600 billion dollars flowed into private equity firms last year. So these … and the source of a fund or the way a fund works is that a fund manager like the folks I work for here where I'm a part of, they go out and they make their pitch about how talented their professionals are and what their track record is and the fact that they can get access to great deal flow and great opportunities, places to put private capital where it will go earn a reasonable return. And they raise this money from these other institutional or independent investors. It could be high in net worth individuals or anybody like that but … so they get started that way. They'll hold this farm estate back to the 1960s and there are new ones being created all the time. And frankly, as hedge funds have declined I believe in a large way in popularity just because of the efficiency of public markets there's been more and more money directed towards these private pools of capital and the private equity market. And when I say private equity I mean both kind of traditional buy-out funds for more mature businesses that have healthy positive cash flows on the one hand and on the other hand I mean venture capital is the son segment of private equity. And that might be for really really high growth businesses like the next dewberry of the world or whatever it might be. Mark: Right, absolutely. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And as far as the breakdown as to sizes what would you consider to be a small private equity firm and what are we talking about in terms of their capitalization rates when they start up? What would be the difference between the small, medium, large type of firms? We can get an idea for how much money we're actually dealing with? Brian: So I would say just kind of from my understanding again all this caviada being dead this is sort of Brian Rassell's take on private equity and my interpretation and may not really be the opinions of United Capital, I can only speak for myself as an individual but they have a dedicated fund. And when I say dedicated fund these are groups of people that other folks, other investors have made a promise and a pledge that is legally binding and written their name at the bottom that that dedicated fund, the small one might be 50 million dollars. That'd be very small. Folks who are trying to invest less than that, generally speaking, have something more akin to a pledge fund. They have a number of people that they can pass the hat with to raise money in a deal by deal basis versus having committed capital to go invest in five, six, 10, 12 companies in that particular fawn. So just kind of … back at the envelope type map that you can think of is every firm should have plus or minus roughly 10 investments that have enough diversification in it. So a 50 million dollar fund is looking to put five million dollars to work in the 10 different companies. And that would be the equity capital going to those companies. There's oftentimes a mix of equity and debt coming into those companies and we could talk about that later. And then a midsize fund might be three or four hundred million up and pawn up to the 2KR's of the world or Apollo or the very big managers who are doing 15 billion dollar funds and so all different world. Mark: Very. Brian: They're taking hotels private or something like that. Mark: I was going to say they're buying something completely different than your Amazon business. Brian: Yeah that's right. It's a whole different world. Mark: All right you talked about you have successive funds. In my understanding again is that we go through these rounds of investment that coming up. We had Andy Jones from PrivateEquityInfo.com on and he talked a lot about the holding periods that private equity looks for. Can you just again quickly touch on that? We're kind of doing private equity 101 here. Brian: Yeah. I didn't hear Andy's remarks but just as it relates to a whole period I would think of it just to be linear about it that a private equity firm once our capital is raised [inaudible 00:13:01.9] the time that it takes to raise that money they committed capital or even the past they had capital they're going to take that money and let's just use this fictional 50 million dollar fund. And they'll take something like four years to deploy the first 80% of it. And the goal would be you take 20% of that money and get it into a new platform company. Companies they had no money in before. In the first year or the next year next 20%, next year next 20%, next year next 20% thus 80%. The point at that point you can't do necessarily new investments you're reserving that last 20% for either a company that's struggling that you need to give more money to to keep it going or to do an add on investment to buy something else and add it on to something that's in the portfolio. That might take four or five years to really deploy the majority of it and then another four to five … you know an investment from year one that you only … you're exiting that investment three to seven years later and let's just use five as kind of a round middle of the road number there. So an investment from year one is maybe gone in year six so it's being harvested. It could be sooner, it could be later. And the investment that was your last platform investment from year four might be heading out the door in year eight or nine. So fund life is something like eight to ten years. It can be longer. And a traditional as you kind of draw it up on the whiteboard like I have behind me here is sort of a five year hold. Now there's … I've seen many that are much much shorter and many that are much much longer but those are the fat parts of the [inaudible 00:14:36.2] if you want. Mark: Sure. So is private equity … is the goal of all private equity companies to grow and sell? So acquire, grow, sell, or are there other strategies? Buy it and hold for long periods of time? Brian: There are certainly evergreen funds out there. They're much more … when I say evergreen they have the ability to hold and recycle the capital. They may be designed to have heard of a number that has committed capital from particularly family offices that never want to do the tax consequences of becoming liquid in an investment and actually realizing the gains so they're structured to reinvest the money that they make. Or if they sell something to quickly find someone else new for it to go into. Now that would be a more unique situation. And then certainly family offices there's a number out there that looks for longer hold periods and there are certain funds that are designed for a longer hold period. Mark: All right so this is going to be again another basic question but I want to make sure our terms are all well-defined here. We hear these terms of platform versus bolt on or add on investments. Just real quick the difference between a platform investment versus a bolt on. Brian: Yeah I'll just keep it simple. I'll say anything that is a brand new business, new industry for that firm to go into. They don't currently own something in that space. Whether that's a tiny initial acquisition or a big one that would be the platform investment. So let's just say with a … I don't know Internet broker pencils, I'm just making this up, all right? And they don't have any other investments in the internet broker pencils space and they invest in a company in that space that would be the platform [inaudible 00:16:17.1] that. And maybe there are 10 companies that make … that do internet broker pencils and they buy two other ones of their competitors and they make it bigger or somebody [inaudible 00:16:25.3] and now they're putting it all together those might be add-ons to that original entity that they purchased or recapitalized. That's what we mean. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with size which can be confusing. Sometimes you start with something small and you get the opportunity and do an add-on that's much bigger than the original investment. So it's more just where is the starting point in you can do a space or an industry. Mark: And if we think about the terms it makes sense right? Brian: Yeah. Mark: You build on top of the platform and you add-on top of the platform. So it makes … that makes complete sense. Brian: Or bolt-on, yup that's where the nomenclature comes from. Mark: Or bolt-on, absolutely. It's amazing when you dig in to definitions it's like the terms actually have a meaning and it makes sense. Brian: They do. Generally, they come from somewhere. Mark: They come from somewhere. There's logic to this stuff. I love it. All right so now I'll get into questions that I'm starting to be genuinely interested in and that is how does a fund develop a thesis or an entire direction to go after a particular platform investment? I mean if you're selling blue widgets and also if somebody comes and says no you don't need widgets what you really need are sprockets, if you don't do anything with sprockets at all how does that enter into a fund's psyche at all? Brian: There's really three things that we're doing here to generate the sort of deal flow and the ideas and spaces we want to go into. So here I'll speak more from Huron Capital. There are other firms who follow a similar philosophy potentially. So the first is businesses we didn't know about but are being represented by a broker or an investment banker like yourself Mark who … those are opportunities that are coming to us. They are being listed. They're being actively shopped around. We may have never thought of the sprocket industry before or we didn't know too much about it or we read materials on it and we say it has a lot of characteristics and things we like; great cash flow, seems very resilient, seems countercyclical, if the economy goes down it'll still do well, it's a leader on its space, any of those kinds of things. Those are opportunities that come to us and that is more of a passive thing. And then we get active once we realize that it fits a lot of criteria and we believe we could be successful with it. And that sets into motion a whole chain of things where we kind of prove out of the pieces that we might like this business and we try to get educated. The second that we spend a lot of time on is networking with executives from a broad, broad variety of industries. Those people know where there are spaces that are changing. And generally speaking, change creates opportunities. Change creates winners on one side and losers on the other side. And less be to the losers but you need that kind of disruption to create any sort of sort interesting investment outcome. The study ID is probably the market's sufficient enough that the study ID is not going to return the greatest returns. So we've spent a lot of time with executives unless I knew them about spaces that could be interesting and trying to listen to areas they know about and start to build some [inaudible 00:19:37.4]. And then even more proactively than that there's a lot of opportunities where we meet the executive who has a view of one particular thing they want to do here at Huron it's got a registered trademark or the like of the firm. We call that an exact factor investment where we will actually flip the process and say we really believe in the sprocket industry. We met Phil who is going to be our perspective CEO in the space and he has this vision that is going to totally turn the industry [inaudible 00:20:11.5]. To do that we need to go find the platform, we call that like getting fuel behind the wheel. We need to find a car to fulfill the drive. We believe he's the best driver in that industry. And we will do all the work, we'll go write a hundred page white paper on it to prove to our investment committee why it's such a fabulous opportunity and Phil is the greatest operator in this space. And then we will commit dollars into going and finding businesses in that space and find Phil the car he can drive and we'll get off to the races that way. So it starts with a commitment from our farms for a certain amount of money behind Phil to go do an acquisition more and more in this space. So it … I guess ranges from that passive we find things and then we get educated too. We educate ourselves as much as possible and align ourselves with an executive who can execute and work the process the other way. Mark: Cool. All right that [inaudible 00:21:04.07]. So let's talk a little bit about the process that goes on behind the scenes when you are evaluating an opportunity. And I think for a lot of potential sellers this sort of conversation is going to be really insightful. So let's say we have somebody that they have an e-com business, 30 million in revenue, eight, nine million in earnings on an annual basis and they've got a couple of private equity firms looking at their business. Where does that start and what is the process going through? And you can talk about maybe Huron's process and then if there are variations that you know as well. The number of people that are going to look and touch that deal as it goes through the steps. Brian: Yeah. Mark: What are some of those behind the scenes looks? Brian: Yeah so once you've got that moment where there's a couple of firms interested there's going to be an incredible amount of information about the business across insurance, benefits, compliance with laws and regulatory statutes, information about the market; anything the business can possibly produce about itself, fairly every file that's off the shelf that they have, every non-disclosure agreement they have with somebody that they on boarded or employment agreement, every contract they have with a customer, or maybe it's an industry where you don't have a lot of contracts with customers but you have a lot of contracts with suppliers. All that information needs to be made available for these perspective buyers to digest. And the more they can be made available, the more that that's organized into different pockets of legal, employee, insurance, benefits, all of that, the better. It's going to save the company a lot of time from serving requests versus being proactive by getting that stuff out there. And you know well everything here all the buyers be under a non-disclosure agreement and that's just a very kind of well-oiled machine around making that information available to give your last few buyers down to the one you would like to choose and have them under a Letter of Intent. And that starts to be an exclusive relationship where the buyer is going to spend a lot of money in due diligence and in exchange for spending that money, they would like the exclusive right to [inaudible 00:23:19.3] business for a period of time. 60 days … 90 days where they engage and here is where it starts to get to be a lot more kind of in your trousers and really analyzing your business but they're going to engage in quality of earnings earned to go and understand did you actually produce the amount of revenue, if you put it in the right time periods, if you really counted for every cost etcetera. They're going to engage legal professionals who are going first to sort of just again a full work up of registration, compliance, [inaudible 00:23:51.9] and then those folks are going to work on the actual transaction documents as well as a host of other advisors. And that would be like again a 60 to 90 day process. It could be 30 days on the short end. There are firms who can do it in that time particularly if you're a smaller business and an add-on to a much larger or a very simple business. Mark: So how many people are we talking about there that are going to be involved in the process? Outside of the consultants like a Q of E … a quality of earnings report that's going to be an outside accounting firm right? Brian: Yeah. Mark: So we're not going to— Brian: Okay so from the acquiring firm? Mark: Mm-hmm. And we can start at the beginning. We can start at your interns that are digesting deals. That's going to be part one. Brian: Sure call it four and they're going to be answering to the remainder of their firm particularly their investment committee. Ideally, it's a tighter team and there's four and if it's an add-on expect more. So you'll have the management team of that kind of platform investment as well. So four to eight and then when you get to the advisor well now you're talking 20 something more. Mark: Right, getting all those outside advisers. Now one of the things I know people get worried about during this process is you start out again with that guy who's that in deals up front and he sees some he passes it on to the team and they end up liking it so now you're dealing with a handful of people that are asking the questions digging deep in that due diligence right? Pages and pages of collecting information possibly even submitting an offer because on the surface things look okay. Brian: Yup. Mark: There seems to be these back end investors committee as well which can also kind of wash the deal far in the process. What would you say to people that get kind of frustrated when they hear that and they think do I really want to work with private equity because there are so many people that could potentially disrupt this deal? Brian: So I would think about the time investment to it. So the private equity firm is in no way interested in wasting any of their time. Huron looks at something like little over a thousand deals a year. That takes a lot of time and we're very thoughtful about moving things to the funnel and connecting our firm's resources to evaluating an opportunity. So if somebody is spending the time I would tell the listeners that they are encouraged. If everything checks out the way I told to them so far or they've written so far about that business then there are absolutely no issues. The firm, an organized and real firm is going to be thoughtful and time is kind of their most valuable resource and they're set up to be able to make a number of staged gates kind of we're interested and we're not interested. We're interested subject to confirm affirmation I want two and three. And you can have a very quick conversation like you and I are having now to say is this the case is this not the case? Here's a big concern we have, should we be worried? And they will both take your answer and that gives them that kind of gumption to proceed. And they'll probably have to go validate that as well later. And that validation just has to support what's been told to them. But they are also making a big commitment with their time in the same way that the seller is and I would take it as genuine on their part that they're not looking for it to fall apart. It's just things do. Certain deals fall apart because new information becomes available. I've seen that happen a number of times where the seller learns things about their business or thinks about their business in a way they hadn't before and can agree that that's a genuine risk and may be something they want to work out within a course of another year and then they might be back to market. Mark: Yeah, that happens often. We see that all the time even in the amount of work that we put a seller through upfront it pales in comparison to what you guys are going to be doing in your actual dig deep due diligence. And the number of times that we have people come back and tell us that was a lot of work but that was really useful. Brian: Yeah. Mark: I have learned a lot about my own business, right? Brian: Yeah a great advisor like somebody like you and using a broker who's been through and understands the questions that are going to be asked is going to save a tremendous amount of time. And we call folks like you Mark a river guide we're using on our side and we love them. Sellers use them too because they're that much more prepared for the process. Mark: Yeah. And I can tell you like the one thing that … I'm going to play both sides here, I would say the one thing that can be difficult with working with private equity is because there are so many people that can come in with a dissenting viewpoint. You're not trying to … convince is a bad word but show the opportunity to one person and have them agree to it; you're having to show a number of people. But the great thing and I love working with private equity on is that it's completely unemotional throughout the process. Brian: Yeah. Mark: I mean it really is does this check the boxes we needed to check and if it doesn't we're going to find out as quick as we can. You said something, I was going to ask this question, you guys evaluate you said about a thousand deals per year? Brian: Yeah the pipeline you think about now it's working its way down at the top of the funnel and so we're a thousand and then that's working its way down to 250 that real solid time is being spent on and then 75 that we're spending real tons of resources and traveling around to visit them … maybe 80. Now I'll get these numbers wrong this is kind of directional and then down to the 30 or so that are getting a Letter Of Intention and we'll close 22 transactions a year. Mark: Yeah so that's an amazing amount of data to be pulling in. And you guys have criteria at every stage I assume that you're looking for up front? Brian: That's right. Mark: Okay. All right that makes sense. Do you publish those criteria? I know we get a lot of just the very broad stuff sent to us. Brian: We don't only because it's just so bespoke for every company. There are so many things that really are as you just said that are check the box and we're highly confident that we will go confirm later. We're highly confident that's not an issue and we are trying to get to it very, very quickly. The three or four things we want to make sure are the reasons we're most excited and confirm that that is factual and that was going to continue. Whatever that might be; on the customer relationship or the recurring purchasing or … whatever it might be. And then at the same time the three or four things that are kind of we're concerned that could be deal killers. We believe we're spending the time because we think that's going to turn out to be true or we need to get to a yes no about is this a real problem very, very quickly. And so you know it's just they're different for every business. Mark: Yeah I know a lot of people listening right now you guys are buyers that are out there looking to acquire. So technically Brian you guys are somewhat of competitors although I think that you operate at a range that a lot of our buyers wouldn't. But I think one thing interesting that they should hear is this idea of having this defined process number one and then number two the amount of deal flow that you have to look at. I've talked to buyers that been out there looking for a year, year and a half but then you find out the number of deals that they're actually looking at doesn't really … this is a numbers game. I mean it's purely a numbers game. Brian: It is and one thing I want to say on that numbers game for us and it may be different for some of your buyers or not is that we're looking for situations that are great for us and we're also looking for situations where the seller in some ways choosing us. Now I don't want to overstate that but I do want to say that there has to be a great fit in every piece and why we're a better owner than someone else for that business. Some angle that we have, some affinity we have for what they do, or some prior experience or something. Otherwise and it could be a little different for particularly small businesses. Maybe it's a little bit less like that and it doesn't need as much of the chemistry but that's a big part of what we're looking for, for sure. Mark: And we talk about that a lot on these pockets. I know you guys are probably tired of hearing Joe and I talk about the need for a buyer being a good fit. And we talked a lot about this general concept of being likable because sellers do eventually choose and for most of these sellers they do have a choice. I mean right now it's a seller's market. They do have a choice of who they're going to work with. I want to talk about the exciting stuff. Let's talk about the actual deals; the money. Brian: Sure. Mark: Why is selling to a private equity something that people should be excited about? Brian: I think I spoke a little bit about this at Rhodium but I just … I see then the difference in multiples that are paid for businesses that are exclusively e-commerce or SaaS based businesses. Those multiples are so much lower than what private equity firms are paying for more traditional businesses out in the economy. And I believe that those worlds will come together. And I believe that businesses that are a hybrid of both or have excellence in both and are flipping both worlds are going to be extremely, extremely valuable. Because on the one hand, they have the relevance for the future, it's coming from kind of the types of businesses that you represent. And also they have that anchor of the traditional business that makes them more under writable and it makes them more predictable because it's a less dynamic place that they're out in. And so that's where I think private equity firms in the coming two, three, four, five years are number one going to become much more comfortable with standalone e-commerce business models that are exclusive that and there are going to be people participating from the much more kind of like formal private equity world participating in your markets. And then I think there's going to be a convergence where a lot of more traditional business models are going to look for the influence and the DNA as well as the revenue and the profits but the influence and the DNA and the growth that comes from the types of businesses you work with Joe. And I think that means that the market that you're playing in, the multiples will rise there. For every dollar of earnings they'll be more valuable in the future and I believe that's for now in a very significant way in 2018. Mark: Yeah and we talked about this this idea of multiple appreciation that we see. And a lot of it reaches over to the fact that this is where private equity starts to play right? So we often talk if your EBIDTA is less than a million dollars per year the … just again for the sake of a multiple, it's going to vary for each business but maybe 3 … maybe 3.5 would be the multiple on that EBIDTA depending on the type of business that you have. But once you start getting up into two, three, four million dollars of EBIDTA now we start seeing the multiples jump up in the different ranges. And the reason for this again is that we're no longer playing as much with an individual investor who really has a much higher risk profile because they don't necessarily have the entire team behind them or a portfolio behind them to be able to take some of that risk but also get the staff in the background and all the resources in private equity. Brian: Yeah. Mark: So let's talk … I am not going to pin you down because it would be a really bad idea for you to say hey we generally paid 25x on earnings which I know you don't. What does a deal structure often look like? Because I know these deals structures do change as well when we're talking about a private equity acquiring a small company. What does an ideal acquisition look like for you in terms of its structure of cash that the owner is going to be getting, maybe equity or debt that you would hope that they stay around and I'd also like to address the idea that a lot of private equity likes to have or prefers to have an owner stay on board with the new company and why that's a good thing also for that owner to think about that. So that's a lot; the general structure, the ideals for a structure. Brian: Okay so let's keep this out of your space and let's just talk about the general PE model. When deals were cheaper a couple of years ago you might get a higher ratio of debt than equity in a deal but for this sake, I'm just going to make it 50-50. I think that more reflects the market today in terms of underwriting. But let's take a deal where a private equity firm is paying at least eight times. That's still a relatively rich multiple. I could have said six but let's use eight times. So we're paying four times the earnings in their own cash that they're talking and they are going and putting the company on the hook or raising four times and they do it. Private equity firm does it but on behalf of the company of debt for the business to take on. So let's say it's a business with 10 million dollars of EBIDTA. So it's an 80 million dollar transaction and a firm like Huron is putting 40 million of equity and raising 40 million of debt in that transaction. And that 40 million of equity can come either from Huron or some portion of it could be rolled over from the seller. If that seller has no debt on the business today, no capital leases or anything else that could be thought of as indebtedness over the normal trade payables. And in your day to day you've got cash coming in and cash going out; that thing that keeps the shop running. And they have no debt on the business theoretically on the day of closing they're getting a check for 80 million dollars. If they choose to roll over some of that … let's just say 10% of the purchase price, eight million of it I would argue that a private equity firm or somebody like me would take that as them stating a high degree of confidence in the future of the business that they want to continue participating and have a relatively [inaudible 00:37:34.7] portion of their net worth tied up in that outcome. Or that they see the opportunity to turn that eight million into 16 or whatever it might be that there is a great opportunity to continue driving growth and equity value in that business. They'll … I start there that the rollover investments are very useful because if you're saying you want to do no roll over whatsoever and you just want to walk away from the business it's not conveying a lot of confidence in the future of the business. There are certainly reasons to do that but it's not conveying a lot of confidence in the future of the business. And where somebody might have been agreeing to pay you eight if you were rolling over and giving that kind of tacit support for the business going over, they might kind of say this is we're not so sure. It makes them a little more nervous and it might be a seven times deal. So you may actually be shooting yourself in the foot in terms of the total proceeds you perceive. Again so it's an 80 million dollar deal, 40 million of debt, the seller is choosing to roll over. They got their 80 million dollar check, it doesn't work like this you're actually [inaudible 00:28:28.9] but they got their 80 million dollar check and maybe we wrote one back for eight and so Huron holds 32 million of the equity and that seller holds eight million of it. So Huron owns 80% of the business and they own 20% and we've got some obligations to pay. That would be kind of the middle of the road structure. There's certainly a lot more that happens as it relates to creating incentives for management teams and that's a very, very big part of what we do to make sure that if we do well they do well and vice versa so that we're all talking in terms of growing the underlying equity value of the business. And that can often be very different for a business that didn't have that before. And it was just solely kind of the founder driving it or minding the growth of equity value. We believe in creating a broad base of ownership so that we're all on the same page. Mark: Yeah. Brian: Our management team is on incentives exclusively through their salary or bonus or both. Mark: Right so one of the things that I've talked a lot in the past especially on like the main street sort of deals is this almost dichotomy and it really shouldn't be set up as a dichotomy of a marketplace based sale where you only have an investor looking to acquire business in a strategic sale where you have a company that it would effectively be like an add-on acquisition in your world right? They already have the sort of strategic advantage to acquiring that company. Within your world, it seems like so much of what you do is going to be the strategy based type of acquisition anyways. Brian: Right. Mark: So it's like you're not going to do an acquisition unless you think that you have a strategic advantage. And when we … you and I talked out in Las Vegas back last October one thing that you talked about quite a bit was we want to pour gasoline on the fire that's already existing. So whatever that might be and so as a seller who's out there thinking about this and saying man I've been growing my business like crazy but I'm investing all this cash back into acquiring more inventory and expanding the product line and I'd like to take money off the table and then keep growing it. This is that perfect sort of handoff to a private equity because you can say you know what you [inaudible 00:40:54.0] your income statement rich in cash flow pour. Brian: Yup. Mark: We got cash. We'll help you out there. You're going to get some cash on the table and then let's grow this from a 30 million dollar business to a hundred million dollar business. Brian: Right. Mark: And so there's an incentive there for that owner to double dip that [inaudible 00:41:11.7]. Brian: Absolutely. Particularly in situations … we see this all the time where additional capital is going to be an accelerant to growth. So capital is what we have and we're trying to find a smart place to put it work and if that means we can buy a business and continue and support that business with more dollars and we believe in the strategy and what's going on in the way it's being operated there's nothing … that's the easiest dollar for us to put out versus the whole re-under writing process of a new investment. And then for that seller to have all their eggs in one basket … I don't care what their life situation is they could be in their 30's and just want to diversify or they could be somebody who's looking at kids who are about to go to college and it just doesn't make sense to have 100% of their net worth or close to it tied up in their business. And if they could diversify a little bit or generate a little bit of cash but their vision hasn't changed at all that's a great situation to bring on a strategic partner like a private equity firm. And that's where that [inaudible 00:42:11.9] fit it really matters and the chemistry between the seller. For the most part, you're not going to sell it to a private equity firm, they don't want to be in the business or definitely not in the business of operating these companies. So round the business and investing in them helping to bring the right resources to it and bring the right capital solutions or capital availability all that. Helping them set strategy and all the other things but the actual day to day operations. So it's not going to be for your sellers or for buyers [inaudible 00:42:45.1] sellers who are looking to exit the business and hand it off somebody else private equity is not going to be the right solution. But for those companies that they either want to go to be a division of something larger and they think they can be a great cross selling opportunity or the way they've built their mousetrap if just they had more to sell in the same way, and I'll say like let's say you're the number one muffler seller online and you also want to do transmissions and drive cams and stuff but you don't have the capital and you don't have the ability to go source and expand that way, going and selling to a larger entity and being that e-commerce division is a very powerful idea. Or just continue and do your own business and double down … accelerate the organic growth, private equity firm could be a great partner. Mark: Yeah, we're just about out of time in fact we've gone a bit long but one thing I wanted to emphasize here, you said that capital obviously is the resource you guys have and are able to invest and I know a lot of people that I talk to say look I don't really need money from this, the business is making money and I feel good about this. But what I find when I actually start to dig in with these guys is I say well what would it take to move to that next level. Oh well, I would have to hire out this other division or create this other division and you know okay but what's the obstacle to that? I don't want to invest in it. It often comes up. Okay, that's the area where a firm like yours can also come in and say well look we have the capital to be able to invest in this. You know what you need; do you want to invest in it to get to that next stage? And even if that means bringing in someone and you can help with that let's do it. Exactly we can do that and we could— Brian: Not to mention that I think we find that often business owners are willing to do one out of their five ideas that are like that and were willing to do all five knowing that three won't work but two should work out beautifully and we're willing to go [inaudible 00:44:39.4] the bodies of the business and the capital and have the appetite to take two steps backward to take four forward and understand that they're not going to all work. And where maybe an independent owner would do those sequentially, try idea one it wasn't really working, didn't feel pleased with making that investment and losing that cash flow, fired that new sales person who was supposed to do something else. We're willing to go do things faster and make sure that that doesn't hover around in the business and the core of what we're interested in the first place. And so we'll work through that with the business owner by giving them that support and the dollars needed to make that happen. Mark: Brian, I really appreciate you taking the time here [inaudible 00:45:19.8] some of the small questions I had but really good to get those things— Brian: No it's my pleasure. It's fine. Mark: So thanks again and maybe we'll have you back again in the future at some point. Brian: That sounds great. Yeah, I enjoyed it. Thanks, Mark. Links and Resources: https://www.huroncapital.com/member/brian-rassel/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianrassel
We’re back with a special music-related analytics episode! Following Next Big Sound’s acquisition by Pandora, Julien Benatar moved from engineering into product management and is now responsible for the company’s analytics applications in the Creator Tools division. He and his team of engineers, data scientists and designers provide insights on how artists are performing on Pandora and how they can effectively grow their audience. This was a particularly fun interview for me since I have music playing on Pandora and occasionally use Next Big Sound’s analytics myself. Julien and I discussed: How Julien’s team accounts for designing for a huge range of customers (artists) that have wildly different popularity, song plays, and followers How the service generates benchmark values in order to make analytics more useful to artists How email notifications can be useful or counter-productive in analytics services How Julien thinks about the Data Pyramid when building out their platform Having a “North Star” and driving analytics toward customer action The types of predictive analytics Next Big Sound is doing Resources and Links: Julien Benatar on Twitter Next Big Sound website Next Big Sound blog The Data Pyramid model Quotes from Julien Benatar "I really hope we get to a point where people don’t need to be data analysts to look at data." "People don’t just want to look at numbers anymore, they want to be able to use numbers to make decisions." "One of our goals was to basically check every artist in the world and give them access to these tools and by checking millions of artists, it allows us to do some very good and very specific benchmarks" “The way it works is you can thumb up or thumb down songs. If you thumb up a song, you’re giving us a signal that this is something that you like and something you want to listen to more. That’s data that we give back to artists.” “I think the great thing today is that, compared to when Next Big Sound started in 2009, we don’t need to make a point for people to care about data. Everyone cares about data today.” Episode Transcript Brian: I’m really excited today for this episode. We have Julien Benatar on the show and he’s from a company that I’m sure a lot of people here know. You probably have had headphones on at your desk, at home, or wherever you are listening to Pandora for music. Julien , correct me if I’m wrong, you were the product manager for artist tools and insights at Next Big Sound, which is a type of data product that provides information on music listening stats to, I assume, artists’ labels as well to help them understand where their fans are and social media engagement. I love this topic. I’m also a musician, I have a profile on Next Big Sound and I feel music’s a fun way to talk about analytics and design as well because everybody can relate to the content and the domain. Welcome to the show. Did I get all that correct? Julien: Yeah, it was perfect. Brian: Cool. Tell us a little about your background. You’re from France originally? Julien: Yes, exactly. I grew up next to Paris, in Versailles more specifically, and moved to New York in 2014 to join Next Big Sound. Brian: Cool, nice. You’ve been there for about four years, something like that. You have a software engineering background and then now you’re on the product side, is that right? Julien: Exactly yes. I joined the company back when we were a startup. Software engineering was perfect, there was so much to do. To our move to Pandora, I moved to a product manager role around a year ago. Brian: Next Big Sound was independent and then they were acquired by Pandora. I assume there is good stuff about your data. Why did Pandora acquire you and how did they see you guys improving their service? Julien: We got acquired in 2015. The thing is, Next Big Sound was already really involved in the music industry. We already had clients like the three major labels and a lot of artists were using us to get access to their social data. I think it was a very natural move for Pandora as they wanted to get closer to creators and provide better analytics tools. Brian: For people that aren’t on the service, I always like to know who are the actual end users, the people logging in, not necessarily the management, but who sits down and what are some of the things that they would do? Who would log in to Next Big Sound and why? Julien: Honestly, it’s really anyone having any involvement into the music industry, so that can be an artist, obviously, try looking to try their socials and their audience on Pandora. But you can also be a booker trying to book artists in their town. We have a product that can really be used by many different user personas. But our core right now is really artists and labels, having contents on Pandora and trying to tell them the most compelling story about what they’re doing on the platform. Brian: When you think about designs, it’s hard to design and we talk about this on the mailing list sometimes but it’s really hard to design one great thing that’s perfect for everybody so usually you have to make some choices. Do you guys favor the artist, or the label, or as you call them,the bookers or whom I know as presenters,in the performing arts industry? Do you have a sweet spot, like you favor one of those in terms of experience? Julien: I think it’s something we’re moving towards, but it hasn’t always been this way. Like I told you, we used to be a startup or grow us to make a product that could work for as many people as possible. What is funny is we used to have an entity on Next Big Sound called Next Big Book where we used to provide the same type of service for the book industry. If anything, it’s been great to join Pandora because then we could really refocus on creators and it really allowed us to, I believe, create much better and more targeted analytics tools to really fulfill needs for specific people like artists and labels. Brian: I would assume individual artists are your biggest audience or is it really heavily used by the labels or who tends to... Julien: I think it’s pretty much the same honestly. I think the great thing today is that, compared to when Next Big Sound started in 2009, we don’t need to make a point for people to care about data. Everyone cares about data today. I think that everyone has reasons to look at their dashboards and especially for a platform like Pandora with millions of users every month. Our goal is really just telling them a story about what does it mean to be spinning on the platform and the opportunities it opens. Brian: You talked about opportunities, do you have any stories about a particular artist or a label that may have learned something from your data and maybe they wrote to you or you found out like in an interview how they reacted like, “Hey, we changed our tool routing,” or, “Hey, we decided to focus on this area instead of that area.” Do you know anything about how it’s been put into use in the wild? Julien: Yeah, it’s used for so many different reasons. For the people who don’t use Pandora, something I really like about the platform is it’s really about quality. As you use Pandora, you have the opportunity to thumb up or thumb down songs and as you do, you’re going to get recommended more songs like the ones you like. It’s really about making sure that you get the best songs at all times. The reality then is that for artists, their top songs on Pandora can be pretty different than their top songs on other platforms because sometimes their friends are going to be just reacting more to some part of their catalog than another one. I’ve heard many times of artists changing their playlists in looking at which songs where their fans thumbing up the most on Pandora. Brian: Could you go through that again? How would they adjust their playlist? Julien: Usually, people use Pandora as a radio service. While we already have internet today, most people are listening to the radio because they’re usually are very targeted and it just works really well. The way it works is you can thumb up or thumb down songs. If you thumb up a song, you’re giving us a signal that this is something that you like and something you want to listen to more. That’s data that we give back to artists. We tell them, “This are your most thumbed songs on Pandora. These are the songs that people engage with the most on the platform.” Looking at this data, you can actually inform them songs that they believe they should be playing more on the store. Brian: I see. A lot of it has to do with the favoriting aspect to give them idea what’s resonating with their audiences. Julien: Qualitative feedback, yes. Brian: Got it. Actually, it’s funny you mentioned the qualitative feedback. In preparation for this, I was reading an article that you guys put out back in March about a new feature called weekly performance insights, which is really cool and this actually reminds me of something that I talked about in the Designing for Analytics mailing list, which is the act of providing qualitative guides with your analytics. A lot of times they analyze for turnout quantitative data and whenever there’s an opportunity to put stuff into context or provide qualifiers, I think that’s a really good thing and you guys look like you’ve have done some really nice things here. I’ll paraphrase it and then you can jump in and maybe give us some backstory on it. One of the things that I think is really cool is there're concepts of normalcy in here so that, if I’m an artist and I look at my numbers, I have an idea. For your Twitter mentions, for example, you say, “For artists with 26,000 followers, we expect you to get around 44 mentions.” When you show me that I have 146 mentions, I can tell that I’m substantially higher than what my social group would be. I think that’s a really fantastic concept that people not in music could try to apply as well which is, are there normalcy bans where you’d want to sit? Is there some other type of group, maybe, an industry, or apparent group, or another business unit, whatever it may be to provide some context for what these out of the blue numbers mean that don’t have any context? How did you guys come up with that and can you tell us a bit about the design process of going from maybe just showing, “You’re at 826 apples,” as compared to what? How did you move from just a number into this these kind of logical groupings where you provide the comparisons? Julien: I think what’s really fascinating is, we really live in an age of data. As an artist, you need to be on social media for the most part. There still a lot of artists I listen to but just decide not to. It’s part of things but at the same time, real big success in the music industry didn’t change. It’s still being on the Billboard chart, getting a Grammy and all these things. But as we see this, we have millions of artists looking at their data every day and just are not able to understand, like is it good or is it not good. Everyone starts at zero. We have a strong belief that data can only be useful when put in context. Looking at the number on its own can give you a sense of how things are doing but that can also be dismissive. An example is, a very common way to look at data is to look at a number and look at the percent changing comparison to the previous week. You’ve got a bunch of tables and you look at, am I growing or am I not growing. The reality is it’s actually impossible to always have a positive percent change. There’s no artist in the world that always does better week by week. Even Beyonce, I can assure you that the week she released Lemonade, she had more engagement on Twitter than the week after. With that in mind, we really try to give a way for artists to understand how are they doing for who they are and where they are currently in their career. Next Big Sound started in 2009. One of our goals was to basically check every artist in the world and give them access to these tools and by checking millions of artists, it allows us to do some very good and very specific benchmarks. For an artist, like the example you said, for instance an artist with a thousand Twitter mentions in a week, is it good or bad in comparison to their audience size? This feature comes because that’s just the question we’re asked. Artists want to know is it any good? What does this number actually mean for me? That’s why we really wanted to, in some ways, get out of being a content aggregator platform and really be a data analytics platform. How can we actually give information that can help artist make better decisions? Brian: I remember the first time I got what I would call an anomaly detection email from your service and it was about some spike in YouTube views or something like that. I thought it’s fantastic in two reasons. First of all, you identify an anomalous change and I think in this case it’s a positive anomalous change. That tells me that I should log in the tool. Secondly, you proactively delivered that to me. On the Designing for Analytics mailing list, we talk about is that user experience does not necessarily live inside your web browser interface or your hard client or whatever you’re using to show your analytics. Email and notifications are a big part of that. Can you tell me about how you guys also arrived at when you pushed these things out and maybe talk about this little anomaly detection service that you have? Julien: It all started when we got acquired by Pandora. We decided to just invite a bunch of users and just talk to them, understand how to use our product and what did they think about it. We had artists, managers, and label people come over and we just talk to them and basically they all said, “We love it.” But then, by looking at their actual usage, they don’t use it that much. I guess one of their questions was when should I be looking at my data? Everyone is very busy. As you’re an artist, you need to perform, you need to write music, you need to engage with your fans and same goes with everyone. When should I look at data? The reality is by being a data company, we do get all the data, we have all the numbers. We have ways to know when things are supposed to be known, when artists should be acting on something. We just turn this into this email notifications. Anytime we notice that an artist is doing better than expected, we just let them know right away. Brian: That’s great. Do you do it on the opposite end too? If there’s an unexpected drop or maybe like, “Oh, you put a new track out and your socials dropped,” or something like that, do you look at the negative side too or do you tend to only promote the positive changes? Julien: As far as pushes, we decided to only do push for positive. But as you mentioned weekly performance, weekly performance can give you some negative insights, like, “You’re not doing as well as artists with the same size of audience as yours.” The reason we didn’t do it for our notification is, anomalies are really hard to completely control. A reason, for instance, is Twitter removing bots. Basically, every single artist would have had an email telling them, “You lost Twitter followers this week.” It was a lot of work to really tune our anomaly factor to actually only send emails when something legitimate happens. That’s the reason we only decided so far to do it for positive but we actually have been thinking about doing the same for negative but that’s another type of work. Brian: Yeah, you’re right. You have to mature these things over time. You don’t want to be a noise generator. Julien: Exactly. Brian: Too many, then people start to ignore you. I’ve seen that with other data products I’ve worked on which just have really dumb alerting mechanisms that are very binary or they’re set at a hard threshold and just shootout noise and people just tune it out. Julien: I’m glad you mentioned this because this feature was in beta for a year for that specific reason. Brian: Got it. Julien: We had to learn the hard way. We had like a hundred beta users. We’ve got way too many emails because anytime there were an anomaly anywhere, they would just get an email. For the most part, it was things that were supposed to help them. If a notification becomes noise, then that’s absolutely against its purpose. Brian: I don’t know if everybody knows how the music business works, at least from the popular music side, but just to summarize. You have individual artists that are actually performers. They may or may not have an artist manager which takes care of their business affairs, represents them like negotiations with people that book shows. Then you have labels which are sort of like an artist manager except they’re really focused on the recording assets that the artist makes and they actually tend to own the recordings outright at the beginning and then over time, the artist may recoup through sales they make it the ownership act and the sound recordings they make. Of those kinds of three major groups, is there a one that’s particularly hungry or you’re the squeaky wheel that is most interested in what you’re doing? Julien: I really think that into these three groups, we have a subset of users that are really into the data and into the actionability of it. I don’t think it’s one specific group of user. It could be all around the industry like we have the data-savvy, they really want to know. We have some users that actually would rather get more notifications even if they need to on their end to figure what is right from what is wrong. But since we have such a wide user base of different type of people, we decided to go on the conservative side and make sure to only share things that we thoroughly validated through all of our filters. Brian: I assume that your group reports into some division of Pandora, I’m not sure of that. Are you reporting into a technology, like an IT, or a business unit, or marketing? Where do you guys fit in the Pandora world? Julien: We’re part of the creator’s tools. I don’t really have a perfect answer to this. Brian: Okay. I guess my main question being, because when we talk about designing services, we talk about both user experience, which is the end user thing and about business success or organization success. I’m curious, how does Pandora measure that Next Big Sound as delivering value? I can understand, I’m sure our artist can understand how the artists value it through understanding how is my music moving my audiences, et cetera. Is there a way that Pandora looks at it? Are they interested in just time spent? The analytics on the analytics, so to speak, is what I’m asking about. How do you guys look at it like, “Hey, this is really doing a good job,” or whatever? Do you know how that’s looked at? Julien: To be honest, I think you said it right. Our goal is to help artists make their decisions through data and having artists use the platform is currently the way Pandora sees us doing a good job. Actually, it hasn’t changed that much since our acquisition. One of our main KPI for the past and couple of years is something I would call insights consumes. Just making sure that our users, artists, anyone using Next Big Sound are consuming data. That can be them logging into the website or that can be them opening one of our notifications. But so far that was our main KPI. We’re trying to work on some more targeted KPI, potentially like actions taken, that would be the North Star, but we're still working on how to do that right. Brian: Do you guys facilitate actions, so to speak, directly in the tool or are there things people can do with those actions really take place outside of the context of Next Big Sound? Julien: There are actions that artists can take to the other creator’s tools provided by Pandora. For instance, artists have the ability to send audio messages to anyone listening to them. If they go on tour into the US, they can have targeted messages in every single song they’re going to play. If anyone listens to them there, they can just click and buy a ticket. We’re working to make sure that artists are aware of these tools because they are free and they’re generally helping them grow at their careers. But regarding external actions, so far we don’t have any one-click way to tweet at the right time to the right people or with the right content or anything like this. Brian: Sure and that’s understood. Not every analytics product is going to have a direct actionable insight that comes right out of it. You guys may be feeling a longer term picture about trending and maybe for a certain artist to get an idea if they’re releasing music fairly frequently, what stuff is working and resonating, and what stuff is not. I can understand that. There may not be a button to click as a result immediately. Julien: That’s the goal though. Everything we do right now is going towards this objective. Maybe I can tell you a little about the way we think about data and that can give more sense to it. In order to work on any new feature, we follow this concept called the data pyramid. It’s something that you can Google. There’s a Wikipedia page for it. Let me explain to you how it works. The data pyramid, it’s a pyramid formed of four layers. It could be upon each other and each representing an exquisitely useful application of data. At the bottom of the pyramid we have the data layer. Any sort of data that we may have. For our case, Android data, Twitter, Facebook just getting the numbers, getting the raw data. On top of it, we have the information layer. The information layer is going to be ways you have to visualize this data. I guess it’s like the very broad sense of analytics. We’re going to give you tables, graphs, pie charts, you name it. We’re giving you ways to craft stories about this data but it’s on you to figure it out. Then on top of it we have what we call the knowledge layer. That’s where things start to get interesting. The knowledge layer is the contextual part of it. It’s like, “What do this number actually mean?” It has industry expertise. For instance, the way we’re going to work about it for musicians and their true data may be different than any other industry. The knowledge layer goes like a weekly performance. It’s a perfect answer to it. It’s what does it mean for me as a musician with a hundred fans to get two mentions this week. Same for notifications. It’s telling you that you should be looking at your data right now because something is happening. That’s how we get to the North Star and the last part of the data pyramid which is intelligence. The goal of intelligence is actionability. Now that I get to understand what does this number mean to the specific context, what should I be doing? Following your question, everything we’re trying to do here is to get to a point where we can just send an email to an artist and tell them, “Hey, you should be doing this right now because, with all the data that we have, we believe that this is going to have the highest impact for you.” Brian: It‘s really fascinating that you just outlined this data pyramid. I actually haven’t heard of this before. It made me think of one of the kind of, it’s not a joke but in the music community, I’m also a composer and when we write stuff, the kind of running joke is like nothing is new. Your ideas for this new song or this new melody I’m composing, it probably came before you. You heard it there before. I wrote a post on my list that was pretty much exactly the same thing except the knowledge layer. I was calling that insight. Data have been this raw format and information being the first human-readable format that’s like say going from raw data to a chart, a histogram. Now I have a line on a chart and then the insight layer being, I have a line on the chart and another line comparing it to like you said, average, or my social group, or a parent group, or some taxonomy, or an index. Then the action or the prescription for what to do or the prediction those that kind of lead you in about action which would be that fourth state. You’re like, “Oh, is this really a new concept?” It’s like, “Nope. Someone else already thought of that.” I totally want to go read about this data pyramid. Julien: That’s amazing. Brian: I’ll find that link to the data pyramid and I’ll put that in the show notes for sure. I thought that was really funny. Julien: It’s funny that you called it insight because that’s the way we call a lot of our features are working out. The way we define insight is bite-size, noteworthy, sharable content. How can we get into the noise of all of the data that only gives you exactly what you should be looking at. That’s how we got into notification and weekly performances. This is the one thing you should be looking at. Brian: I understand what you’re getting at there. The insights are, like you said, bite-size chunks of interesting stats that someone can put some kind of context around. That’s great and it’s good. One of the things I liked, too, that you talked about was you said, “Oh we got like a hundred users, like a beta group and that kind of inspired some of this.” Your product response to how do we help people know when to come and look at our service. I think this is really good because one of the problems that I see with clients and people on the list, I think is low engagement. This is especially true for internal analytics companies. Low engagement can be a symptom of a difficult product, it doesn’t provide the right information at the right time, it may not have a lot of utility, or it’s a resistance to change. People have done something the old way and they don't want to do it the new way. One of the recipes you can follow if you’re trying to do a redesign or increase engagement is to involve the people that are going to use the service in the design process, both the stakeholders as well as the end customers. This is especially true again for the internal analytics people. Your customers or other employees and your colleagues. By engaging them in the design process, they’re much more likely to want to change whatever they’re doing now. I loved how you guys did some research. Now I want to ask, do you frequently do either usability testing or interviews? Is that an ongoing thing at your company or is it really just in front of a big feature release or something like that? How do you guys do this research? Can you tell me about that? Julien: Of course. It’s consent. We haven’t released any major feature without doing some heavy user testing. I’m very lucky to be working with two designers, Justin and Anabelle who are very user-focused. Honestly, if you come to our office, at least every week we’re going to have some user interview and just talking to them, showing them prototypes, and just see how do they play with it. Brian: So you’re doing a lot of testing it sounds like. That’s fantastic. Julien: At the same time it’s always to find the right balance because you could be overtesting things too. We really are focusing on user testing for new things and make sure that the future that we are working on actually answers their user story that we intended. Brian: I don’t know how involved you get participating in these, but do you have any interesting stories or anecdotes that you got from one of those that you could share? Julien: Let me think. I do participate into a lot of them but I’m not sure I have an example right now. Brian: Are most of the people you interview, are they current users of Next Big Sound or do you tend to focus on maybe artists that haven’t experienced the service yet or you mix it up? Julien: We mix it up. We mostly engage with users that we already have but then we can decide to go with users that haven’t used the platform for a while, or more active users if you want to understand how we’re useful into their day to day. What I would say is that, surprisingly, it’s very easy to get users to chat about their experience with the product. I didn’t assume that we would get so many responses when we tried to have people come over or just hop on the zoom to check a new feature. Brian: I’m glad you actually mentioned that because I think in some places, recruiting is perceived to be difficult and it probably isn’t. Maybe you haven’t done it before but as I tell a lot of my clients, a lot of people love to have someone listen to them talk, tell them all about their life and what’s wrong with it, and how it could be better with their tools. They love having someone listen to them and especially if they know that their feedback is going to influence a tool or a service that they’re using. They tend to be pretty engaged with it. I find it’s really rare that I do an interview with a client’s customer and they don’t want to be included in the future round like, “Hey, when we redesign the service, can we come back to you and show you what we’ve done?” “Oh, I love to do that!” Everybody wants to get engaged with it. There are places where recruiting can be difficult when it’s hard to access the users, some of the enterprise software space that can be an issue sometimes. But generally, if you can get access to them, they tend to be pretty willing to participate. I’m glad you mentioned that. Julien: I think the great part about testing with current users on the platform is to actually show them prototypes with real data, not just show them an abstract idea that we want to work on. As soon as they can see what we’re working on apply to their own career as musicians, for instance, that can lead to fascinating discussions. Brian: You made a really good point on the real data thing. I remember as far back as 10 years ago or whenever, I use to work at Fidelity Investments, we would see this issue when we’re working on the retail site for investors. When you show a portfolio that, for example, has Apple stock trading at $22 in it, you’re not really there to test what is the price of Apple stock but you might be testing something entirely different and the customer cannot bear what is going on? They’re so stuck on this thing. It’s all fake seed data in the prototype. The story here being if you’re a listener, when you test it’s important to have at least realistic data. You don’t want to have noise in the test or whatever your studying or else you can end up on this tangent. Try to make the numbers looks somewhat realistic if you’re using quantitative data. In some cases, people can be taught to roleplay. Pretend you’re Drake or pretend you’re some big artist and then they can get their head around why they have billions of streams instead of thousands which they’re used to. Julien: Absolutely. That also helps us just build better products because the reality is we have a lot of artists with maybe 10 plays in a month. As we build visualizations like something that we built a line of looking at Drake’s data, it’s not going to work as intended for a smaller artist sometimes. Having real data involved as soon as possible into the design process has been such a game changer for us. We really have a multidisciplinary team involved into the research and design of everything we do. I’m working with a data scientist, data engineer, a web engineer, and designer on a daily basis. Obviously, we all have our things to do. But as we get into creating something new, we just make sure to have someone helping us get the real data, interview the right user, and just create prototypes as soon as possible. Working with prototypes is essential into building useful data analytics tools. Brian: Yes, you do learn a lot more with a working prototype. It’s not to say you can’t test with lower fidelity goods, especially early on but for a service like yours when the range of possible use both the personas and also you’ve got the Drakes of the world, big major label artist and then down to really small independents, it’s really important to have an idea how your charts are going to scale, and what’s going to happen with data. Even just small stuff like how many decimal points should you be showing on a mobile device, some of the numbers might cram up. Julien: Exactly. Brian: All this stuff that you never think, if you only look at one version of everything, you can end up with a mess. I’m glad that you brought that up. Julien: I couldn’t say better. The decimal is actually something that we’ve had to discover through real data. Brian: To all of you in the technical people out there, I will say this. If I’ve seen one trend with engineers, is they love precision and there’s a lot of times when there’s very unnecessary precision being added to numbers. Such as charts and histograms. Histograms are usually about the trend, they’re not about identifying what was the precise value on this date at this time. It’s about the change over time. Showing what’s my portfolio worth down to three digits of micro-cents or something like that is just unnecessary detail. You can probably just round up to the dollar or even hundreds of dollars or even thousands of dollars in some cases. It actually is worse. The reason it’s worse is that adds unnecessary noise to the interface, you’re providing all these inks that someone has to mentally process, and it’s actually not really meaningful ink because the change is what’s important. Think about precision when you’re printing values. Julien: This concept of noise is so essential today for any data analytics tools. There is so much data today. There is data for everything. I think it’s our responsibility as a data analytics company to make sure what are we actually trying to help our user with this data set is not just about adding new metrics. Adding new metrics usually is just going to add noise and not be helpful in comparison to fairing what do they need to make the right decision. Brian: Right. Complexity obviously goes up. The single verb, ‘add,’ as soon as you do that, you’re generally adding complexity. One of the design tools that is not used a lot, and this is something I try to help clients with is, what can we take away? If we're not going to cut it out entirely, can we move this feature, maybe this comparison to a different level of detail? Maybe it’s hidden behind a button click, or it’s not the default. But removing some stuff is a way to obviously simplify as well, especially if you do need to add new things. Your only weapon is not the pencil, you’ve got the eraser as well in the battle so to speak. Julien: I couldn’t agree more. On Next Big Sound we have this concept of artist stages. It’s a way for us to put artist into buckets and by looking at their social instrument data. It goes from undiscovered to epic. We do that by looking at all of the data we have and looking at it in context. I don’t have the numbers right now because they update on a daily basis but every artist starts undiscovered. For instance, as they get 1000 Facebook likes, maybe they’re going to get to a promising stage. We have all of these thresholds moving everyday looking at trends among social services. But what is interesting is that for instance, for a booker, a booker doesn’t need to look at the exact number of Twitter followers for an artist. He needs to know that he’s booking for a midsized venue in the city he’s in and he’s probably going to be looking for promising to established artists and not looking for the mainstream to epic artists. It’s always about figuring a way to use the numbers to tell the story. Brian: I’m totally selfishly asking for myself here, but I was immediately curious. I live in Cambridge which is in the Boston area, and I am curious who are the big artists in our area and what is the concentration? I’m in a niche. I’m more in the performing arts market, in the jazz, in world music, and classical music but I’m just curious. Is there a way to look at it by the city and know what your artist community looks like? You guys do anything like that? Julien: We don’t currently. But I think YouTube has actually a C-level chart available. It’s not part of something we do because I think the users it would benefit are not the users we specifically try to work on new features. It’s more something for bookers than artists ,specifically ,but it’s exactly the type of thing that we need to think about when we prioritize new features. Brian: I’m curious just because the topic’s fairly hot. Everybody is trying to do machine learning projects these days. I don’t like the term AI because it tends to be a little bit overloaded but are you guys using machine learning to accomplish any particular problems or add any new value to your service right now? Is that on your horizon? Julien: How do you think about machine learning? Brian: A lot of times I associate it with predictive analytics or understanding where you might be running instead of just using statistics. I don’t know what kind of data you might have for your learning that you can feed in but maybe there’s aspects about artists that can predict. Especially, I would think like in the pop music world where there tends to be more commercialization of the music, I would say, where it’s like we need a two-minute dance track at this tempo specifically because DJs are going to play it. It’s a very commercial thing. It’s very different than what I’m used to. So I’m curious if there’s a way to predict out how an artist may do or what kinds of tracks are performing well. Like these tempo songs, we predict over the next six months that tech house music at 160 beats for a minute is going to do really well based on the trending. I don’t know. I’m throwing stuff out there. The goal, obviously, is not to try to use like, “Oh Home Depot has this new hammer, let’s run out and get it. We don’t even know what it’s for but everyone else is buying it.” That’s how I joke about machine learning. It’s like you need to have a problem that necessitates that particular tool. I don’t ask such that, “Oh there should be some.” I’m more curious as to whether or not it’s a tool that you guys are leveraging at this time. Julien: The Next Big Sound team doesn’t worked on features following the musical aspects of things. We really are focused on the user data. Brian: Engagement and social. Julien: Engagement data mostly, yes. But at the same time, I’m sure teams have worked on this because of the way that genome works. We have a lot of data about the way songs are made. Regarding machine learning, on the Next Big Song team, we actually have something that is called the prediction chart. You said predictions. We have this chart that is available every week. Basically, it really goes back to having data for a long time. The fact that we’ve had data since 2009, we’ve been able to see artists actually get from starting to charting on the Billboard 200. By having all of these data, we’ve been able to see some trends, some things that usually happen for artists at specific times in their career up until they get into the Billboard 200. We actually do have some algorithms that allow us to apply this learning to all of the artists on Next Big Sound right now and have a list every week of artist that we believe are most likely to appear on the Billboard 200 chart next year. Brian: I see. Got it. Do you track your accuracy rate on that internally and change it over time? Do you adjust the model? Julien: Yeah, we do. Brian: Cool That’s really neat. Tell me, this chat has been super fun. I’ve selfishly got a little indulgent because being a musician, it’s fun to talk about these two worlds that I’m really passionate about so I could go on forever with you about this. But I’m curious. Do you have any advice for other product managers or analytics practitioners about how to design good data products and services? How to make either your own organization happy or your customers happy? Do you have any advice to them? Julien: Yeah, of course. I guess it’s all about asking questions, honestly. What is very good with working at Next Big Sound is that it all started in 2009. Maybe actually I can go back and tell you the story about how it started and why it’s so different today. It started in 2009. It was actually a project, a university project by the three co-founders. Basically, they were wondering about one thing. How many plays does a major artist get on the biggest music platform in the world? At that time, it was MySpace. The artist they picked was Akon. Basically, they just built a crawler, went to bed, woke up, and discovered that an artist like Akon was getting 500,000 plays on MySpace in one night in 2009. The challenge in 2009 was to get the data. That’s why for the most part in Next Big Sound as it started was, I really think a data aggregation tool. Our goal was to get as many sources as possible and just make them easily accessible into the same place. We really are much into the information layer here. We’re giving you all the numbers and you can compare Tumblr to Vimeo, to YouTube, to Twitter, to Facebook, to Vine, to you name it into a table or a graph that you want to. The reality is, today things change. We don't need to fight to get data anymore. We don’t need to hike our way into getting the numbers. Now, data is accessible to everyone in a very easy way. It’s kind of a contract. You, by being an artist, you know you’re going to get access to your Spotify, YouTube, Pandora, Apple Music or any other platform data very easily just by signing up and authenticating as an artist. That’s where our goal changes. Thankfully, we don’t need to convince people to care about data, we know they do already. But now the challenge is different. Now, the challenge is to make them understand what does their data mean and how can they turn it into getting even more data, getting into having even more engagement, and having even more plays. I think that’s something that is very interesting because it really resonates into the question we’ve been asked in the past few years like, “What does my data mean and when should I be looking at my data?” If anything, these two things correlated pretty well. People don’t just want to look at numbers anymore, they want to be able to use numbers to make decisions. That’s the core of what we’re trying to achieve today. We couldn’t be there if we didn’t have users that ask us the right questions. Brian: Cool that’s really insightful. Just to maybe tie it off at the end and maybe you can’t share this but what’s your home run? What is your holy grail look like? Is there a place you guys know you want to get? Maybe it’s the lack of data or you don’t have access to the data in order to provide that service. Do you guys have kind of a picture of where it is you want to take the service? Julien: What is very noble about our goal at Next Big Sound specifically is we’re here to help artists. The North Star would be to make sure that any artist at any time in their career is doing everything they can do to play more shows, to reach to more people, and to make sure their music is heard. Brian: Nice. I guess it’s like you’re already there, just maybe the level of quality and improving that experience over time, that’s your goal. It’s not so much that there’s so much unobtainable thing at this moment. Is that kind of how you see it? Julien: I think the more we don’t feel just a data analytics tool, the more we’re getting to that goal. I really hope we get to a point where people don’t need to be data analysts to look at data. We’re always going to provide a very customizable tool for the data-savvy because they know what they need more than we can ever do it for them. We want to make sure that for everyone else, we can just make it very easy and as simple as a click for them to do something that’s going to impact them positively. Brian: Cool, man. This has been really exciting to have you on the show. Julien, can you tell the listeners where can they find you on the interwebs? Are you on Twitter or LinkedIn? How do they find you? Julien: For sure. @julienbenatar on Twitter, nextbigsound.com is free for everyone. Actually, we made our data public recently, so if you ever want to learn more about what we do, please check it out. We try to post on our blog about what we learn through data science, through design, and share more about why we build what we build. I recommend to just check blog and do some commitment to learn more about what we do. Brian: I definitely recommend people check out the site. The fun thing is again, as you said, it’s public. If there’s a band you like or whatever, you can type in any group that you like to listen to and you can get access to those insights. Just kind of get a flavor of what the service does. I’ll put those links in the show notes as well as the data pyramid. Julien, cool. Thanks for coming on. Is there anything else do you like to add before we wrap it up? Julien: No, thank you so much. I love reading your newsletters and I’m very happy to be here. Brian: Cool. Thank you so much. Let’s do it again. Julien: Cool. Brian: Cool. Thank you. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Experiencing Data with Brian O’Neill. If you did enjoy it, please consider sharing it with #experiencingdata. To get future podcast updates or to subscribe to Brian’s mailing list where he shares his insights on designing valuable enterprise data products and applications, visit designingforanalytics.com/podcast. Never forget to look up the online HTML CheatSheet when you forget how to write an image, a table or an iframe or any other tag in HTML!
We’re back with a special music-related analytics episode! Following Next Big Sound’s acquisition by Pandora, Julien Benatar moved from engineering into product management and is now responsible for the company’s analytics applications in the Creator Tools division. He and his team of engineers, data scientists and designers provide insights on how artists are performing on Pandora and how they can effectively grow their audience. This was a particularly fun interview for me since I have music playing on Pandora and occasionally use Next Big Sound’s analytics myself. Julien and I discussed: How Julien’s team accounts for designing for a huge range of customers (artists) that have wildly different popularity, song plays, and followers How the service generates benchmark values in order to make analytics more useful to artists How email notifications can be useful or counter-productive in analytics services How Julien thinks about the Data Pyramid when building out their platform Having a “North Star” and driving analytics toward customer action The types of predictive analytics Next Big Sound is doing Resources and Links: Julien Benatar on Twitter Next Big Sound website Next Big Sound blog The Data Pyramid model Quotes from Julien Benatar “I really hope we get to a point where people don’t need to be data analysts to look at data.” “People don’t just want to look at numbers anymore, they want to be able to use numbers to make decisions.” “One of our goals was to basically check every artist in the world and give them access to these tools and by checking millions of artists, it allows us to do some very good and very specific benchmarks” “The way it works is you can thumb up or thumb down songs. If you thumb up a song, you’re giving us a signal that this is something that you like and something you want to listen to more. That’s data that we give back to artists.” “I think the great thing today is that, compared to when Next Big Sound started in 2009, we don’t need to make a point for people to care about data. Everyone cares about data today.” Episode Transcript Brian: I’m really excited today for this episode. We have Julien Benatar on the show and he’s from a company that I’m sure a lot of people here know. You probably have had headphones on at your desk, at home, or wherever you are listening to Pandora for music. Julien , correct me if I’m wrong, you were the product manager for artist tools and insights at Next Big Sound, which is a type of data product that provides information on music listening stats to, I assume, artists’ labels as well to help them understand where their fans are and social media engagement. I love this topic. I’m also a musician, I have a profile on Next Big Sound and I feel music’s a fun way to talk about analytics and design as well because everybody can relate to the content and the domain. Welcome to the show. Did I get all that correct? Julien: Yeah, it was perfect. Brian: Cool. Tell us a little about your background. You’re from France originally? Julien: Yes, exactly. I grew up next to Paris, in Versailles more specifically, and moved to New York in 2014 to join Next Big Sound. Brian: Cool, nice. You’ve been there for about four years, something like that. You have a software engineering background and then now you’re on the product side, is that right? Julien: Exactly yes. I joined the company back when we were a startup. Software engineering was perfect, there was so much to do. To our move to Pandora, I moved to a product manager role around a year ago. Brian: Next Big Sound was independent and then they were acquired by Pandora. I assume there is good stuff about your data. Why did Pandora acquire you and how did they see you guys improving their service? Julien: We got acquired in 2015. The thing is, Next Big Sound was already really involved in the music industry. We already had clients like the three major labels and a lot of artists were using us to get access to their social data. I think it was a very natural move for Pandora as they wanted to get closer to creators and provide better analytics tools. Brian: For people that aren’t on the service, I always like to know who are the actual end users, the people logging in, not necessarily the management, but who sits down and what are some of the things that they would do? Who would log in to Next Big Sound and why? Julien: Honestly, it’s really anyone having any involvement into the music industry, so that can be an artist, obviously, try looking to try their socials and their audience on Pandora. But you can also be a booker trying to book artists in their town. We have a product that can really be used by many different user personas. But our core right now is really artists and labels, having contents on Pandora and trying to tell them the most compelling story about what they’re doing on the platform. Brian: When you think about designs, it’s hard to design and we talk about this on the mailing list sometimes but it’s really hard to design one great thing that’s perfect for everybody so usually you have to make some choices. Do you guys favor the artist, or the label, or as you call them,the bookers or whom I know as presenters,in the performing arts industry? Do you have a sweet spot, like you favor one of those in terms of experience? Julien: I think it’s something we’re moving towards, but it hasn’t always been this way. Like I told you, we used to be a startup or grow us to make a product that could work for as many people as possible. What is funny is we used to have an entity on Next Big Sound called Next Big Book where we used to provide the same type of service for the book industry. If anything, it’s been great to join Pandora because then we could really refocus on creators and it really allowed us to, I believe, create much better and more targeted analytics tools to really fulfill needs for specific people like artists and labels. Brian: I would assume individual artists are your biggest audience or is it really heavily used by the labels or who tends to… Julien: I think it’s pretty much the same honestly. I think the great thing today is that, compared to when Next Big Sound started in 2009, we don’t need to make a point for people to care about data. Everyone cares about data today. I think that everyone has reasons to look at their dashboards and especially for a platform like Pandora with millions of users every month. Our goal is really just telling them a story about what does it mean to be spinning on the platform and the opportunities it opens. Brian: You talked about opportunities, do you have any stories about a particular artist or a label that may have learned something from your data and maybe they wrote to you or you found out like in an interview how they reacted like, “Hey, we changed our tool routing,” or, “Hey, we decided to focus on this area instead of that area.” Do you know anything about how it’s been put into use in the wild? Julien: Yeah, it’s used for so many different reasons. For the people who don’t use Pandora, something I really like about the platform is it’s really about quality. As you use Pandora, you have the opportunity to thumb up or thumb down songs and as you do, you’re going to get recommended more songs like the ones you like. It’s really about making sure that you get the best songs at all times. The reality then is that for artists, their top songs on Pandora can be pretty different than their top songs on other platforms because sometimes their friends are going to be just reacting more to some part of their catalog than another one. I’ve heard many times of artists changing their playlists in looking at which songs where their fans thumbing up the most on Pandora. Brian: Could you go through that again? How would they adjust their playlist? Julien: Usually, people use Pandora as a radio service. While we already have internet today, most people are listening to the radio because they’re usually are very targeted and it just works really well. The way it works is you can thumb up or thumb down songs. If you thumb up a song, you’re giving us a signal that this is something that you like and something you want to listen to more. That’s data that we give back to artists. We tell them, “This are your most thumbed songs on Pandora. These are the songs that people engage with the most on the platform.” Looking at this data, you can actually inform them songs that they believe they should be playing more on the store. Brian: I see. A lot of it has to do with the favoriting aspect to give them idea what’s resonating with their audiences. Julien: Qualitative feedback, yes. Brian: Got it. Actually, it’s funny you mentioned the qualitative feedback. In preparation for this, I was reading an article that you guys put out back in March about a new feature called weekly performance insights, which is really cool and this actually reminds me of something that I talked about in the Designing for Analytics mailing list, which is the act of providing qualitative guides with your analytics. A lot of times they analyze for turnout quantitative data and whenever there’s an opportunity to put stuff into context or provide qualifiers, I think that’s a really good thing and you guys look like you’ve have done some really nice things here. I’ll paraphrase it and then you can jump in and maybe give us some backstory on it. One of the things that I think is really cool is there’re concepts of normalcy in here so that, if I’m an artist and I look at my numbers, I have an idea. For your Twitter mentions, for example, you say, “For artists with 26,000 followers, we expect you to get around 44 mentions.” When you show me that I have 146 mentions, I can tell that I’m substantially higher than what my social group would be. I think that’s a really fantastic concept that people not in music could try to apply as well which is, are there normalcy bans where you’d want to sit? Is there some other type of group, maybe, an industry, or apparent group, or another business unit, whatever it may be to provide some context for what these out of the blue numbers mean that don’t have any context? How did you guys come up with that and can you tell us a bit about the design process of going from maybe just showing, “You’re at 826 apples,” as compared to what? How did you move from just a number into this these kind of logical groupings where you provide the comparisons? Julien: I think what’s really fascinating is, we really live in an age of data. As an artist, you need to be on social media for the most part. There still a lot of artists I listen to but just decide not to. It’s part of things but at the same time, real big success in the music industry didn’t change. It’s still being on the Billboard chart, getting a Grammy and all these things. But as we see this, we have millions of artists looking at their data every day and just are not able to understand, like is it good or is it not good. Everyone starts at zero. We have a strong belief that data can only be useful when put in context. Looking at the number on its own can give you a sense of how things are doing but that can also be dismissive. An example is, a very common way to look at data is to look at a number and look at the percent changing comparison to the previous week. You’ve got a bunch of tables and you look at, am I growing or am I not growing. The reality is it’s actually impossible to always have a positive percent change. There’s no artist in the world that always does better week by week. Even Beyonce, I can assure you that the week she released Lemonade, she had more engagement on Twitter than the week after. With that in mind, we really try to give a way for artists to understand how are they doing for who they are and where they are currently in their career. Next Big Sound started in 2009. One of our goals was to basically check every artist in the world and give them access to these tools and by checking millions of artists, it allows us to do some very good and very specific benchmarks. For an artist, like the example you said, for instance an artist with a thousand Twitter mentions in a week, is it good or bad in comparison to their audience size? This feature comes because that’s just the question we’re asked. Artists want to know is it any good? What does this number actually mean for me? That’s why we really wanted to, in some ways, get out of being a content aggregator platform and really be a data analytics platform. How can we actually give information that can help artist make better decisions? Brian: I remember the first time I got what I would call an anomaly detection email from your service and it was about some spike in YouTube views or something like that. I thought it’s fantastic in two reasons. First of all, you identify an anomalous change and I think in this case it’s a positive anomalous change. That tells me that I should log in the tool. Secondly, you proactively delivered that to me. On the Designing for Analytics mailing list, we talk about is that user experience does not necessarily live inside your web browser interface or your hard client or whatever you’re using to show your analytics. Email and notifications are a big part of that. Can you tell me about how you guys also arrived at when you pushed these things out and maybe talk about this little anomaly detection service that you have? Julien: It all started when we got acquired by Pandora. We decided to just invite a bunch of users and just talk to them, understand how to use our product and what did they think about it. We had artists, managers, and label people come over and we just talk to them and basically they all said, “We love it.” But then, by looking at their actual usage, they don’t use it that much. I guess one of their questions was when should I be looking at my data? Everyone is very busy. As you’re an artist, you need to perform, you need to write music, you need to engage with your fans and same goes with everyone. When should I look at data? The reality is by being a data company, we do get all the data, we have all the numbers. We have ways to know when things are supposed to be known, when artists should be acting on something. We just turn this into this email notifications. Anytime we notice that an artist is doing better than expected, we just let them know right away. Brian: That’s great. Do you do it on the opposite end too? If there’s an unexpected drop or maybe like, “Oh, you put a new track out and your socials dropped,” or something like that, do you look at the negative side too or do you tend to only promote the positive changes? Julien: As far as pushes, we decided to only do push for positive. But as you mentioned weekly performance, weekly performance can give you some negative insights, like, “You’re not doing as well as artists with the same size of audience as yours.” The reason we didn’t do it for our notification is, anomalies are really hard to completely control. A reason, for instance, is Twitter removing bots. Basically, every single artist would have had an email telling them, “You lost Twitter followers this week.” It was a lot of work to really tune our anomaly factor to actually only send emails when something legitimate happens. That’s the reason we only decided so far to do it for positive but we actually have been thinking about doing the same for negative but that’s another type of work. Brian: Yeah, you’re right. You have to mature these things over time. You don’t want to be a noise generator. Julien: Exactly. Brian: Too many, then people start to ignore you. I’ve seen that with other data products I’ve worked on which just have really dumb alerting mechanisms that are very binary or they’re set at a hard threshold and just shootout noise and people just tune it out. Julien: I’m glad you mentioned this because this feature was in beta for a year for that specific reason. Brian: Got it. Julien: We had to learn the hard way. We had like a hundred beta users. We’ve got way too many emails because anytime there were an anomaly anywhere, they would just get an email. For the most part, it was things that were supposed to help them. If a notification becomes noise, then that’s absolutely against its purpose. Brian: I don’t know if everybody knows how the music business works, at least from the popular music side, but just to summarize. You have individual artists that are actually performers. They may or may not have an artist manager which takes care of their business affairs, represents them like negotiations with people that book shows. Then you have labels which are sort of like an artist manager except they’re really focused on the recording assets that the artist makes and they actually tend to own the recordings outright at the beginning and then over time, the artist may recoup through sales they make it the ownership act and the sound recordings they make. Of those kinds of three major groups, is there a one that’s particularly hungry or you’re the squeaky wheel that is most interested in what you’re doing? Julien: I really think that into these three groups, we have a subset of users that are really into the data and into the actionability of it. I don’t think it’s one specific group of user. It could be all around the industry like we have the data-savvy, they really want to know. We have some users that actually would rather get more notifications even if they need to on their end to figure what is right from what is wrong. But since we have such a wide user base of different type of people, we decided to go on the conservative side and make sure to only share things that we thoroughly validated through all of our filters. Brian: I assume that your group reports into some division of Pandora, I’m not sure of that. Are you reporting into a technology, like an IT, or a business unit, or marketing? Where do you guys fit in the Pandora world? Julien: We’re part of the creator’s tools. I don’t really have a perfect answer to this. Brian: Okay. I guess my main question being, because when we talk about designing services, we talk about both user experience, which is the end user thing and about business success or organization success. I’m curious, how does Pandora measure that Next Big Sound as delivering value? I can understand, I’m sure our artist can understand how the artists value it through understanding how is my music moving my audiences, et cetera. Is there a way that Pandora looks at it? Are they interested in just time spent? The analytics on the analytics, so to speak, is what I’m asking about. How do you guys look at it like, “Hey, this is really doing a good job,” or whatever? Do you know how that’s looked at? Julien: To be honest, I think you said it right. Our goal is to help artists make their decisions through data and having artists use the platform is currently the way Pandora sees us doing a good job. Actually, it hasn’t changed that much since our acquisition. One of our main KPI for the past and couple of years is something I would call insights consumes. Just making sure that our users, artists, anyone using Next Big Sound are consuming data. That can be them logging into the website or that can be them opening one of our notifications. But so far that was our main KPI. We’re trying to work on some more targeted KPI, potentially like actions taken, that would be the North Star, but we’re still working on how to do that right. Brian: Do you guys facilitate actions, so to speak, directly in the tool or are there things people can do with those actions really take place outside of the context of Next Big Sound? Julien: There are actions that artists can take to the other creator’s tools provided by Pandora. For instance, artists have the ability to send audio messages to anyone listening to them. If they go on tour into the US, they can have targeted messages in every single song they’re going to play. If anyone listens to them there, they can just click and buy a ticket. We’re working to make sure that artists are aware of these tools because they are free and they’re generally helping them grow at their careers. But regarding external actions, so far we don’t have any one-click way to tweet at the right time to the right people or with the right content or anything like this. Brian: Sure and that’s understood. Not every analytics product is going to have a direct actionable insight that comes right out of it. You guys may be feeling a longer term picture about trending and maybe for a certain artist to get an idea if they’re releasing music fairly frequently, what stuff is working and resonating, and what stuff is not. I can understand that. There may not be a button to click as a result immediately. Julien: That’s the goal though. Everything we do right now is going towards this objective. Maybe I can tell you a little about the way we think about data and that can give more sense to it. In order to work on any new feature, we follow this concept called the data pyramid. It’s something that you can Google. There’s a Wikipedia page for it. Let me explain to you how it works. The data pyramid, it’s a pyramid formed of four layers. It could be upon each other and each representing an exquisitely useful application of data. At the bottom of the pyramid we have the data layer. Any sort of data that we may have. For our case, Android data, Twitter, Facebook just getting the numbers, getting the raw data. On top of it, we have the information layer. The information layer is going to be ways you have to visualize this data. I guess it’s like the very broad sense of analytics. We’re going to give you tables, graphs, pie charts, you name it. We’re giving you ways to craft stories about this data but it’s on you to figure it out. Then on top of it we have what we call the knowledge layer. That’s where things start to get interesting. The knowledge layer is the contextual part of it. It’s like, “What do this number actually mean?” It has industry expertise. For instance, the way we’re going to work about it for musicians and their true data may be different than any other industry. The knowledge layer goes like a weekly performance. It’s a perfect answer to it. It’s what does it mean for me as a musician with a hundred fans to get two mentions this week. Same for notifications. It’s telling you that you should be looking at your data right now because something is happening. That’s how we get to the North Star and the last part of the data pyramid which is intelligence. The goal of intelligence is actionability. Now that I get to understand what does this number mean to the specific context, what should I be doing? Following your question, everything we’re trying to do here is to get to a point where we can just send an email to an artist and tell them, “Hey, you should be doing this right now because, with all the data that we have, we believe that this is going to have the highest impact for you.” Brian: It‘s really fascinating that you just outlined this data pyramid. I actually haven’t heard of this before. It made me think of one of the kind of, it’s not a joke but in the music community, I’m also a composer and when we write stuff, the kind of running joke is like nothing is new. Your ideas for this new song or this new melody I’m composing, it probably came before you. You heard it there before. I wrote a post on my list that was pretty much exactly the same thing except the knowledge layer. I was calling that insight. Data have been this raw format and information being the first human-readable format that’s like say going from raw data to a chart, a histogram. Now I have a line on a chart and then the insight layer being, I have a line on the chart and another line comparing it to like you said, average, or my social group, or a parent group, or some taxonomy, or an index. Then the action or the prescription for what to do or the prediction those that kind of lead you in about action which would be that fourth state. You’re like, “Oh, is this really a new concept?” It’s like, “Nope. Someone else already thought of that.” I totally want to go read about this data pyramid. Julien: That’s amazing. Brian: I’ll find that link to the data pyramid and I’ll put that in the show notes for sure. I thought that was really funny. Julien: It’s funny that you called it insight because that’s the way we call a lot of our features are working out. The way we define insight is bite-size, noteworthy, sharable content. How can we get into the noise of all of the data that only gives you exactly what you should be looking at. That’s how we got into notification and weekly performances. This is the one thing you should be looking at. Brian: I understand what you’re getting at there. The insights are, like you said, bite-size chunks of interesting stats that someone can put some kind of context around. That’s great and it’s good. One of the things I liked, too, that you talked about was you said, “Oh we got like a hundred users, like a beta group and that kind of inspired some of this.” Your product response to how do we help people know when to come and look at our service. I think this is really good because one of the problems that I see with clients and people on the list, I think is low engagement. This is especially true for internal analytics companies. Low engagement can be a symptom of a difficult product, it doesn’t provide the right information at the right time, it may not have a lot of utility, or it’s a resistance to change. People have done something the old way and they don’t want to do it the new way. One of the recipes you can follow if you’re trying to do a redesign or increase engagement is to involve the people that are going to use the service in the design process, both the stakeholders as well as the end customers. This is especially true again for the internal analytics people. Your customers or other employees and your colleagues. By engaging them in the design process, they’re much more likely to want to change whatever they’re doing now. I loved how you guys did some research. Now I want to ask, do you frequently do either usability testing or interviews? Is that an ongoing thing at your company or is it really just in front of a big feature release or something like that? How do you guys do this research? Can you tell me about that? Julien: Of course. It’s consent. We haven’t released any major feature without doing some heavy user testing. I’m very lucky to be working with two designers, Justin and Anabelle who are very user-focused. Honestly, if you come to our office, at least every week we’re going to have some user interview and just talking to them, showing them prototypes, and just see how do they play with it. Brian: So you’re doing a lot of testing it sounds like. That’s fantastic. Julien: At the same time it’s always to find the right balance because you could be overtesting things too. We really are focusing on user testing for new things and make sure that the future that we are working on actually answers their user story that we intended. Brian: I don’t know how involved you get participating in these, but do you have any interesting stories or anecdotes that you got from one of those that you could share? Julien: Let me think. I do participate into a lot of them but I’m not sure I have an example right now. Brian: Are most of the people you interview, are they current users of Next Big Sound or do you tend to focus on maybe artists that haven’t experienced the service yet or you mix it up? Julien: We mix it up. We mostly engage with users that we already have but then we can decide to go with users that haven’t used the platform for a while, or more active users if you want to understand how we’re useful into their day to day. What I would say is that, surprisingly, it’s very easy to get users to chat about their experience with the product. I didn’t assume that we would get so many responses when we tried to have people come over or just hop on the zoom to check a new feature. Brian: I’m glad you actually mentioned that because I think in some places, recruiting is perceived to be difficult and it probably isn’t. Maybe you haven’t done it before but as I tell a lot of my clients, a lot of people love to have someone listen to them talk, tell them all about their life and what’s wrong with it, and how it could be better with their tools. They love having someone listen to them and especially if they know that their feedback is going to influence a tool or a service that they’re using. They tend to be pretty engaged with it. I find it’s really rare that I do an interview with a client’s customer and they don’t want to be included in the future round like, “Hey, when we redesign the service, can we come back to you and show you what we’ve done?” “Oh, I love to do that!” Everybody wants to get engaged with it. There are places where recruiting can be difficult when it’s hard to access the users, some of the enterprise software space that can be an issue sometimes. But generally, if you can get access to them, they tend to be pretty willing to participate. I’m glad you mentioned that. Julien: I think the great part about testing with current users on the platform is to actually show them prototypes with real data, not just show them an abstract idea that we want to work on. As soon as they can see what we’re working on apply to their own career as musicians, for instance, that can lead to fascinating discussions. Brian: You made a really good point on the real data thing. I remember as far back as 10 years ago or whenever, I use to work at Fidelity Investments, we would see this issue when we’re working on the retail site for investors. When you show a portfolio that, for example, has Apple stock trading at $22 in it, you’re not really there to test what is the price of Apple stock but you might be testing something entirely different and the customer cannot bear what is going on? They’re so stuck on this thing. It’s all fake seed data in the prototype. The story here being if you’re a listener, when you test it’s important to have at least realistic data. You don’t want to have noise in the test or whatever your studying or else you can end up on this tangent. Try to make the numbers looks somewhat realistic if you’re using quantitative data. In some cases, people can be taught to roleplay. Pretend you’re Drake or pretend you’re some big artist and then they can get their head around why they have billions of streams instead of thousands which they’re used to. Julien: Absolutely. That also helps us just build better products because the reality is we have a lot of artists with maybe 10 plays in a month. As we build visualizations like something that we built a line of looking at Drake’s data, it’s not going to work as intended for a smaller artist sometimes. Having real data involved as soon as possible into the design process has been such a game changer for us. We really have a multidisciplinary team involved into the research and design of everything we do. I’m working with a data scientist, data engineer, a web engineer, and designer on a daily basis. Obviously, we all have our things to do. But as we get into creating something new, we just make sure to have someone helping us get the real data, interview the right user, and just create prototypes as soon as possible. Working with prototypes is essential into building useful data analytics tools. Brian: Yes, you do learn a lot more with a working prototype. It’s not to say you can’t test with lower fidelity goods, especially early on but for a service like yours when the range of possible use both the personas and also you’ve got the Drakes of the world, big major label artist and then down to really small independents, it’s really important to have an idea how your charts are going to scale, and what’s going to happen with data. Even just small stuff like how many decimal points should you be showing on a mobile device, some of the numbers might cram up. Julien: Exactly. Brian: All this stuff that you never think, if you only look at one version of everything, you can end up with a mess. I’m glad that you brought that up. Julien: I couldn’t say better. The decimal is actually something that we’ve had to discover through real data. Brian: To all of you in the technical people out there, I will say this. If I’ve seen one trend with engineers, is they love precision and there’s a lot of times when there’s very unnecessary precision being added to numbers. Such as charts and histograms. Histograms are usually about the trend, they’re not about identifying what was the precise value on this date at this time. It’s about the change over time. Showing what’s my portfolio worth down to three digits of micro-cents or something like that is just unnecessary detail. You can probably just round up to the dollar or even hundreds of dollars or even thousands of dollars in some cases. It actually is worse. The reason it’s worse is that adds unnecessary noise to the interface, you’re providing all these inks that someone has to mentally process, and it’s actually not really meaningful ink because the change is what’s important. Think about precision when you’re printing values. Julien: This concept of noise is so essential today for any data analytics tools. There is so much data today. There is data for everything. I think it’s our responsibility as a data analytics company to make sure what are we actually trying to help our user with this data set is not just about adding new metrics. Adding new metrics usually is just going to add noise and not be helpful in comparison to fairing what do they need to make the right decision. Brian: Right. Complexity obviously goes up. The single verb, ‘add,’ as soon as you do that, you’re generally adding complexity. One of the design tools that is not used a lot, and this is something I try to help clients with is, what can we take away? If we’re not going to cut it out entirely, can we move this feature, maybe this comparison to a different level of detail? Maybe it’s hidden behind a button click, or it’s not the default. But removing some stuff is a way to obviously simplify as well, especially if you do need to add new things. Your only weapon is not the pencil, you’ve got the eraser as well in the battle so to speak. Julien: I couldn’t agree more. On Next Big Sound we have this concept of artist stages. It’s a way for us to put artist into buckets and by looking at their social instrument data. It goes from undiscovered to epic. We do that by looking at all of the data we have and looking at it in context. I don’t have the numbers right now because they update on a daily basis but every artist starts undiscovered. For instance, as they get 1000 Facebook likes, maybe they’re going to get to a promising stage. We have all of these thresholds moving everyday looking at trends among social services. But what is interesting is that for instance, for a booker, a booker doesn’t need to look at the exact number of Twitter followers for an artist. He needs to know that he’s booking for a midsized venue in the city he’s in and he’s probably going to be looking for promising to established artists and not looking for the mainstream to epic artists. It’s always about figuring a way to use the numbers to tell the story. Brian: I’m totally selfishly asking for myself here, but I was immediately curious. I live in Cambridge which is in the Boston area, and I am curious who are the big artists in our area and what is the concentration? I’m in a niche. I’m more in the performing arts market, in the jazz, in world music, and classical music but I’m just curious. Is there a way to look at it by the city and know what your artist community looks like? You guys do anything like that? Julien: We don’t currently. But I think YouTube has actually a C-level chart available. It’s not part of something we do because I think the users it would benefit are not the users we specifically try to work on new features. It’s more something for bookers than artists ,specifically ,but it’s exactly the type of thing that we need to think about when we prioritize new features. Brian: I’m curious just because the topic’s fairly hot. Everybody is trying to do machine learning projects these days. I don’t like the term AI because it tends to be a little bit overloaded but are you guys using machine learning to accomplish any particular problems or add any new value to your service right now? Is that on your horizon? Julien: How do you think about machine learning? Brian: A lot of times I associate it with predictive analytics or understanding where you might be running instead of just using statistics. I don’t know what kind of data you might have for your learning that you can feed in but maybe there’s aspects about artists that can predict. Especially, I would think like in the pop music world where there tends to be more commercialization of the music, I would say, where it’s like we need a two-minute dance track at this tempo specifically because DJs are going to play it. It’s a very commercial thing. It’s very different than what I’m used to. So I’m curious if there’s a way to predict out how an artist may do or what kinds of tracks are performing well. Like these tempo songs, we predict over the next six months that tech house music at 160 beats for a minute is going to do really well based on the trending. I don’t know. I’m throwing stuff out there. The goal, obviously, is not to try to use like, “Oh Home Depot has this new hammer, let’s run out and get it. We don’t even know what it’s for but everyone else is buying it.” That’s how I joke about machine learning. It’s like you need to have a problem that necessitates that particular tool. I don’t ask such that, “Oh there should be some.” I’m more curious as to whether or not it’s a tool that you guys are leveraging at this time. Julien: The Next Big Sound team doesn’t worked on features following the musical aspects of things. We really are focused on the user data. Brian: Engagement and social. Julien: Engagement data mostly, yes. But at the same time, I’m sure teams have worked on this because of the way that genome works. We have a lot of data about the way songs are made. Regarding machine learning, on the Next Big Song team, we actually have something that is called the prediction chart. You said predictions. We have this chart that is available every week. Basically, it really goes back to having data for a long time. The fact that we’ve had data since 2009, we’ve been able to see artists actually get from starting to charting on the Billboard 200. By having all of these data, we’ve been able to see some trends, some things that usually happen for artists at specific times in their career up until they get into the Billboard 200. We actually do have some algorithms that allow us to apply this learning to all of the artists on Next Big Sound right now and have a list every week of artist that we believe are most likely to appear on the Billboard 200 chart next year. Brian: I see. Got it. Do you track your accuracy rate on that internally and change it over time? Do you adjust the model? Julien: Yeah, we do. Brian: Cool That’s really neat. Tell me, this chat has been super fun. I’ve selfishly got a little indulgent because being a musician, it’s fun to talk about these two worlds that I’m really passionate about so I could go on forever with you about this. But I’m curious. Do you have any advice for other product managers or analytics practitioners about how to design good data products and services? How to make either your own organization happy or your customers happy? Do you have any advice to them? Julien: Yeah, of course. I guess it’s all about asking questions, honestly. What is very good with working at Next Big Sound is that it all started in 2009. Maybe actually I can go back and tell you the story about how it started and why it’s so different today. It started in 2009. It was actually a project, a university project by the three co-founders. Basically, they were wondering about one thing. How many plays does a major artist get on the biggest music platform in the world? At that time, it was MySpace. The artist they picked was Akon. Basically, they just built a crawler, went to bed, woke up, and discovered that an artist like Akon was getting 500,000 plays on MySpace in one night in 2009. The challenge in 2009 was to get the data. That’s why for the most part in Next Big Sound as it started was, I really think a data aggregation tool. Our goal was to get as many sources as possible and just make them easily accessible into the same place. We really are much into the information layer here. We’re giving you all the numbers and you can compare Tumblr to Vimeo, to YouTube, to Twitter, to Facebook, to Vine, to you name it into a table or a graph that you want to. The reality is, today things change. We don’t need to fight to get data anymore. We don’t need to hike our way into getting the numbers. Now, data is accessible to everyone in a very easy way. It’s kind of a contract. You, by being an artist, you know you’re going to get access to your Spotify, YouTube, Pandora, Apple Music or any other platform data very easily just by signing up and authenticating as an artist. That’s where our goal changes. Thankfully, we don’t need to convince people to care about data, we know they do already. But now the challenge is different. Now, the challenge is to make them understand what does their data mean and how can they turn it into getting even more data, getting into having even more engagement, and having even more plays. I think that’s something that is very interesting because it really resonates into the question we’ve been asked in the past few years like, “What does my data mean and when should I be looking at my data?” If anything, these two things correlated pretty well. People don’t just want to look at numbers anymore, they want to be able to use numbers to make decisions. That’s the core of what we’re trying to achieve today. We couldn’t be there if we didn’t have users that ask us the right questions. Brian: Cool that’s really insightful. Just to maybe tie it off at the end and maybe you can’t share this but what’s your home run? What is your holy grail look like? Is there a place you guys know you want to get? Maybe it’s the lack of data or you don’t have access to the data in order to provide that service. Do you guys have kind of a picture of where it is you want to take the service? Julien: What is very noble about our goal at Next Big Sound specifically is we’re here to help artists. The North Star would be to make sure that any artist at any time in their career is doing everything they can do to play more shows, to reach to more people, and to make sure their music is heard. Brian: Nice. I guess it’s like you’re already there, just maybe the level of quality and improving that experience over time, that’s your goal. It’s not so much that there’s so much unobtainable thing at this moment. Is that kind of how you see it? Julien: I think the more we don’t feel just a data analytics tool, the more we’re getting to that goal. I really hope we get to a point where people don’t need to be data analysts to look at data. We’re always going to provide a very customizable tool for the data-savvy because they know what they need more than we can ever do it for them. We want to make sure that for everyone else, we can just make it very easy and as simple as a click for them to do something that’s going to impact them positively. Brian: Cool, man. This has been really exciting to have you on the show. Julien, can you tell the listeners where can they find you on the interwebs? Are you on Twitter or LinkedIn? How do they find you? Julien: For sure. @julienbenatar on Twitter, nextbigsound.com is free for everyone. Actually, we made our data public recently, so if you ever want to learn more about what we do, please check it out. We try to post on our blog about what we learn through data science, through design, and share more about why we build what we build. I recommend to just check blog and do some commitment to learn more about what we do. Brian: I definitely recommend people check out the site. The fun thing is again, as you said, it’s public. If there’s a band you like or whatever, you can type in any group that you like to listen to and you can get access to those insights. Just kind of get a flavor of what the service does. I’ll put those links in the show notes as well as the data pyramid. Julien, cool. Thanks for coming on. Is there anything else do you like to add before we wrap it up? Julien: No, thank you so much. I love reading your newsletters and I’m very happy to be here. Brian: Cool. Thank you so much. Let’s do it again. Julien: Cool. Brian: Cool. Thank you. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Experiencing Data with Brian O’Neill. If you did enjoy it, please consider sharing it with #experiencingdata. To get future podcast updates or to subscribe to Brian’s mailing list where he shares his insights on designing valuable enterprise data products and applications, visit designingforanalytics.com/podcast.
Jason Krantz is the Director of Business Analytics & Insights for the 135-year old company, Weil McLain and Marley Engineered Products. While the company is responsible for helping keeping homes and businesses warm, Jason is responsible for the creation and growth of analytical capabilities at Weil McLain, and was recognized in 2017 as a “Top 40 Under 40” in the HVAC industry. I’m not surprised given his posts on LinkedIn; Jason seems very focused on satisfying his internal customers and ensuring that there is practical business value anchoring their analytics initiatives. We talked about: How Jason’s team keeps their data accessible and relevant to the issue they need to solve for their customer. How Jason strives to keep the information simple and clean for the customer. How does Jason help drive analytics in a company culture with a lot of legacy (from its people to its parts) The importance of focusing on context How Jason drives his team to be business partners, and not report generators Resources and Links: Jason Krantz on LinkedIn Quotes from Jason Krantz: “You realize that small quick wins are very effective because, at its core, it’s really important to get executive buy-in.” “I’m a huge fan of simplicity. As analytics pros, we could very easily make very complex, very intricate models, and just, ‘Oh, look at how smart we are.’ It doesn’t help our customers. …we only use about two or three different visual types and we use mostly the exact same visual set-up. I can train a sales rep for probably five minutes on all of our reporting because if you understand one, you’re going to understand everything. That gets to the theme again of just simplicity. Don’t over complicate, keep it simple, keep it clean.” “…To get buy-in, you really got to have your business case, even to your internal customers, really dialed in. If you just bring them a bunch of crap, that’s how you’re going to lose credibility. They’re going to be like, “I don’t have the time to waste with you,” even though we’re trying to be helpful.” “What my team and I do is we really help companies weaponize their data assets.” Episode Transcript Brian: Jason, are you there? Jason: I’m here my friend. Brian: Sweet. How’s it going? Jason: It’s going very well today. How’s your Friday going? Brian: I’m doing awesome. We’re going to talk a little bit about analytics. Is it Wile McLain or Weil McLain? Jason: I say Weil McLain. If I’ve been saying it wrong, I’ve been saying it wrong for a while. Brian: As I recall from my musical training, I think in German, the second syllable is the one that says its name. I guess it would be Wile McLain, like if it was W-I-E-L it would be ‘Weil.’ But I don’t know. Its anglicized as they come over the pond. Jason: I’m going to go with you on that when you sound like an expert. Brian: Nice. Well, you sound like an expert in analytics at Weil McLain. Tell us about what you’re doing over there. We met on LinkedIn, I’ve been enjoying your postings on the social feed about your approach. You seem really passionate about what you’re doing and I’m like, “I don’t know who this guy is, but that was really interesting.” I just have. Tell us about the company, what they do. I know they’re in heating, right? Jason: Yes, absolutely. The company I work for, and I work in the HVAC space, we’re a 135-year-old boiler manufacturer. Whether you realize it or not, you probably have one of our products in your house or building or very close to where you live. What my team and I do is we really help companies weaponize their data assets. As you know, a lot of companies are very skilled at acquiring data since the Big Data Movement. But the reality is that a lot of these companies don’t know what to do with all this data. That’s where we really come in. What I always tell my team and our business partners that we work with internally and externally is that our focus is on solving business problems. In order to do that, you have to identify what is the business problem that you’re trying to solve or strategic agenda that you’re trying to address. In order to do that, you really have to be anchored in the biz. Again, that’s just my perspective, but if you’re in the business day in, day out, you develop this very keen stand of what the business would need to accomplish its objectives. Just like right now, we are based in the marketing group and it’s a great spot to be. I’m a firm believer that every analytics team should be based in the business for a reason that I just talked about. But what that does being business-first is that gives us a great lens to look at data from. Sometimes analytics people would be IT-centric and they can do a lot of academic work against the data set or different data sets. But the business might look at the output and be like, “Yeah, that doesn’t help us.” We always, always, always start with, “What is the business problem we’re trying to solve or strategy we’re looking to address?” It also helps us when it comes to curating data also. That’s one of our primary response [00:03:21] this too, is to look for different data sets both internal and external that can help us identify strategic opportunities. It sounds really unsexy, I’m not going to lie. I think some of my LinkedIn post just say that data is boring. It really is. It’s mind-numbing, too, about 85% of my customers. But that’s the important part is understanding what do our customers need and that’s really the lens that we look at this through. We are a service provider, our customers are internal and external, we have customers just like any other business. We have to take this really boring, but really potent product in data and make it accessible to them. That’s really where we use design to really try to make that magic happen. Brian: I love that you said, “Trying to understand what the problem is.” This is something we talk about on the mailing list quite a bit. In fact, falling in love with the problem is a good basis for doing good work instead of kind of jumping to solutions or feeling […]. As I tell my clients sometimes like, “Our job is not to go and visualize the data. It’s not […] available for someone to put into another tool or whatever the heck it is. The job is to find an insight that already is used. Probably they’re already in your job and you’re there to make […] if you’re doing internal analytics. Help them do a better job at what they’re doing, offer more value. You need to figure out how to work that into their life.” For example, for you guys then, your customer, I assume is it primarily sales people that you’re working with? Who are your customers and your […]? Jason: Yes. Great question. One of our biggest customers is sales. Sales has been one of my biggest customers for the past 10 years of my career. I’m very intimately involved with the sales team, sales operation, sales optimization, insight gathering, pricing, things like that, but also marketing. We do a lot in terms of competitive intelligence gathering, market research. We also do a lot of operations in finance obviously related to the prices, that sort of thing. We really touch all areas of the business, but without question, our biggest customers are going to be sales and marketing. Brian: If you were to bring a new initiative like, “Hey, we have access to…” I don’t know what it might be but for you maybe your point, [might be a line 00:05:49] of data that could actually give them more leverage. We know what the negotiation brings, better than […], we know we kind of have an idea now from what the industry is doing for their sales such that we can now tell the CRM like, “This is your […] or something.” When do you get that sales person involved? Do you deliver a solution and get feedback? Do you bring […] early and say, “Hey, we think we can tell you more about how to do better pricing on the spot with this thing.” Do you bring them in or when do they fit into your process? Jason: Great question. A lot of times because we spend so much time actually in the trenches, that’s one of things I think is unique about the way that I design my teams to do analytics. It’s not like hand off product and we’re like, “Godspeed. Good luck.” Once we deliver a solution, we’re actually in the trenches with the business trying to implement what we’re talking about because it just works better. The team work is just more effective and they know that they’ve got back up, they know they’ve got air support. Really, a lot of times when we come up with something new, a lot of times we will frame it from the lens like, “Hey, we know that we’ve got opportunity A or issue B, or whatever it is. This has been an issue or an opportunity for months or years or whatever.” We think that we’ve identified something that could help us in solving that issue or realizing the potential of that opportunity and then it becomes, “Okay, let’s sit down and talk about, do you agree that this might actually help us in this process?” Because the one thing that I’ve learned is, in order to get buy-in, you really, really got to have your business case, even to your internal customers, really dialed in. If you just bring them a bunch of crap, that’s how you’re going to lose credibility. They’re going to be like, “I don’t have the time to waste with you,” even though we’re trying to be helpful. What we found out is if you really dial in what are we trying to address with this, just as you would with any business case, and you bring that to them, I have found that they tend to be much more receptive. It’s not to say there’s not going to be resistance—resistance comes with any change—but we found that typically framing it from that lens and saying, “We’re trying to solve a problem that you have, we think that this data will help,” that’s a great starting point. Brian: Do you have an example of a before/after with that? I don’t want you to get into proprietary stuff you can’t talk about but is there like a, “Before they did it this way,” and then we brought them in and said, “Hey, we think we can get […].” and how you went [00:08:19]. Jason: Yeah. What I can talk about is just the manner in which we distribute sales information, specifically insights. I think that, for your listeners, this is going to ring true to a lot of sales forces. I know for all them that I’ve been in or worked with, this case was true 100% of the time. But one of the things that, again, keeping the customer-centric focus, that if you look at your sales reps, a lot of time is you’re going to be what I call casual data consumers. By that, I mean that these are guys and gals that aren’t really into data day in and day out like guys like you and I or some of the listeners maybe. What we have to do is, as I always encourage my team to take empathetic lens and look at, “Okay, if we give them what our first […] is going to look like, how are they going to interpret this?” A lot of times, to be honest, it’s not very good. Now that’s where we have to look at internally and kind of rationalize and say, “Okay, let’s find this. One of us will find [00:09:14].” But one example of that is traditionally, sales reps and sales teams will get the information in a flat Excel table. Just lots of rows and columns and just gibberish everywhere. That’s a very financial-centric view of sales data. But the reality is—I don’t know about the rest of mankind but I know for myself—I can’t remember much more than 10 numbers. The mental computational cost of extracting insights is just gargantuan. What happens is, I just don’t even bother to do it. I’m just like, “Yeah, whatever.” An equivalent of that is, you know if you get a big block of text in email? Even though if you took that same block of text and broke it up into two paragraphs or two sentence segments which is very easy to read when you put the effort in, but for me, if I get a big block of text, I’m not even going to read that. It’s kind of one of the same things that we see on the sales side. What we do is just say, “You know what? There’s a lot of really good information here and we need to make it digestible for our customers.” That’s where we found traditionally, visualization can be an incredibly effective tool to communicate insights to this casual data audience, to this casual data consumer. Brian: Do you have to work through the visuals with them? Do they tend to get it the first time? Is it a process of you share, “Here’s a report or here’s some new view on X.” How do you know if the visualization is actually allowing them to pull the insight out of what other [00:10:46] broad data? How do you know they’re actually “getting it”? Jason: That’s a great question. I’m a huge fan of simplicity. As analytics pros, we could very easily make very complex, very intricate models, and just, “Oh, look at how smart we are.” It doesn’t help our customers. It doesn’t help anything. Really what we do—this is going to get to the theme of simplicity—is we only use about two or three different visual types and we use mostly the exact same visual set-up. Just to kind of frame it, what I’m a big fan of is a simple bar chart. There’s more details attached to it but to the right of the bar chart, we’ll typically put a tabular data set. What we do is, as you think in US at least, we start in that left-hand side of the page or we […]. What we do is we look at the visual real estate. We say, “Our customers are going to start in the left-hand side. We want them to look at the bar chart because it allows them to very rapidly assimilate it at a high-level what’s going on.” It’s great at communicating at top-level churn very quickly but the trade-off is, is this horrible imprecision. You have no precision at all. What we like to do is then we address that issue by putting a simple table, very clean, very simple table over to the right. What that does is that then provides the precision that the customers are seeing in most financial-centric tables. What we found that does is that we have to train our sales team on one set-up and then that set-up is used virtually universally on all of our solutions. As an example, I can train a sales rep for probably five minutes on all of our reporting because if you understand one, you’re going to understand everything. That gets to the theme again of just simplicity. Don’t over complicate, keep it simple, keep it clean. Brian: I think those are good. A lot of times, when I work with engineering clients, they fall in love with consistency. I guess one point to maybe just the contrary of this is that, I think consistency is generally a good rule with design. We want to minimize unnecessary change but at the same time, I would recommend to listeners is to always look at context first, and context should always come in. Let’s say Jason comes up with report number 12 and they have 11 now or whatever, and it doesn’t feel right for number 11. That’s a place where a designer would probably push for, “Well, no. The 12th one actually needs to be different because it’s not […] 11th and even though it’s not consistent, in this context, we don’t need it to win. This version will deliver the usability and the utility that we’re looking for better than the other 11 will.” In general, I think it’s smart to not get creative unnecessarily with meaningless ink on the screen like, “Let’s try it this way. Let’s change the color palette. I’m tired of this.” Those are not good reasons for […], you’re just introducing noise and it’s unnecessary. But I like that you guys are thinking about simplicity and trying to reuse templates and not looking at it as a creative tableau. Ironically, people think it’s a creative “design” tool, but at the same time with all those weapons, you have a lot of different weapons you can use in that toolkit and part of that is knowing how to use this. It’s the same thing with Photoshop, a million buttons and all this stuff. The Photoshop doesn’t make you a designer. It’s being aware of your customer’s pain and the problems they need and knowing when to use all those filters and all those different things that it can do. I like that you guys are looking into that simplicity and reusing templates when it’s meaningful to do so. Jason: You bring up some great points and I 100% agree. My team that’s listening there, they’ll laugh because I beat it in their heads, “Context. Context, context, context.” Both in design as you’ve talked but especially with numbers in general. Like, “If I give you a number, a billion, that doesn’t mean anything, you got to have context.” I’d say the same is true for design just as you articulated. Great point. Brian: Where does the impetus for “everybody is a data company, everybody wants to do analytics”? But then there’s operationalizing that, there’s getting buy-in, leadership behind it. Where does that come from in your org? Where is the interest in taking a 130-year-old company and getting it to care about this? Where does that come from, your influence and all of that? Jason: That was driven by our current president because he saw it as part of a digital transformation. Obviously, this was an essential component of that. Obviously, we do a lot with analytics, but we’re also involved in a lot of other digital components that lead to that overall digital maturation. Analytics is a very, very big part of what we do but it’s not all that we do. We serve as kind of that quarterback for a lot of the digital initiatives to help basically, guide them through the process. Because even though some of the nuances of each of this project, each one will have its own nuances, they all come back to data. Data is the currency. We found out pretty quickly that if you want to stay relevant in this day and age, you need to be digitally evolved but more importantly, as you look at it, do you [compare the 00:16:02] advantage that you can derive from analytics? I would argue that gap is slowly closing known certain industries like manufacturing, but we probably have a little bit more runway [00:16:10] it. But for a lot of industries, analytics is becoming table stakes. It’s one of those where you can certainly expect incremental value and competitive advantage, but the question becomes how much longer. That was kind of the impetus of saying, “Hey, we got to get this going sooner rather than later.” Brian: Do you have people in sales that are resistant to using the reporting or taking advantage of your information or is it pretty ingrained in the company culture that it’s like, “This is a tool. Why would you not want to use it?” Or did you guys have a […] getting adoption? Jason: Yeah. I would say anytime you’re going through a transformation of this magnitude, it’s hard and I would say especially for other manufacturers. I found in general, manufacturing in general, tends to be one of the laggards industry-wise in analytical maturity. Unquestionably, it’s tough for no other reason than change is tough. You’re taking legacy plants, legacy steer pieces, legacy process, and some people has been around the company for decades potentially, and we’re asking them to change almost on a dime on their time scale how they do business. It’s not that it’s right or wrong but what we try to point out is that, as I always say, we have to acknowledge the past. We’ve been where we’ve been, we’ve been successful at where we been. But there’s been more change in the past two or three years than maybe you’ve seen in the past 15-20 years. In order to stay relevant, you really have to be ready to evolve, not only evolve but evolve quickly. But I have to openly acknowledge that that’s hard. It’s a hard proposition for a lot of people. Again, it comes down to change management and managing not only expectations but supporting that change. Change doesn’t happen by itself, we have to support that. That’s really what we try to coach through. The way that we try to do that is by developing a product with our customers. I’m sure as you can […], if you force something upon somebody, it doesn’t get received too well. But if you develop it in conjunction with them and do tie it around their needs, it tends to get better adaptation. Brian: You used the word product in there and I’m interested, do you see the outputs of your efforts? Primarily, it’s BI reporting as I understand it. Do you look at that as the product that you offer to sales? Is that kind of how you see it? Jason: Yeah. We offer a product in the form of the insight packages but it’s also the service. Service that goes with it where again, we serve as essentially internal consultant to help them along. If you take just the product-centric approach, you just deliver an insight package and you’re like, “Good luck. It’s [00:19:35]. Have at it.” What we do is we deliver the product and then we partner with them and say, “Okay, here’s what we see. Now, remember you’re talking about this going on in the channel last year and our note show that there’s been a lot of competitive activity in this area. Here’s some of the question that we have. You’re the expert, so what do you think?” What we found is that working together like that, we tend to get pretty good results versus just leaving these guys on an island to kind of figure it out themselves because they virtually always know the answer but sometimes it’s up to us using these products and then offering the service is to ask question that maybe aren’t getting asked. A lot of times, we find out that they know the answer it’s just that you kind of have to ask the question. Brian: Is that often like, “I was using XYZ report. Could you break this down by county instead of just by whatever because I feel there’s more people living in the East side of town and the average is here or […] the whole county. I really just need this one county because that’s where everyone lives. Is that really underserved? Blah, blah, blah,” that kind of stuff and then you guys will go off and work with them for more of that detail then maybe you release that back into the product as a feature if it seems like a one-off or something. Is that how it works? Jason: It’s actually a very fluid process. An example of what you just described is exactly what happens if hey come to us with questions. But we also do it where we flip it around because a lot of products that we create are more aggregate discussion tools. We don’t design a lot within our primary visualization package. To really get into the weeds and everything just becomes overwhelming. We have other tools like your traditional [00:21:22] pivot table to kind of dig into that stuff. But the exact example that you just gave, they will ask us those questions, but we will also flip the script and say, “Hey, we saw that the mechanical chain in the Northeast is up 50%,” I’m just making up a number, “and at a higher level, you can see that but when we segment it out, here’s what we see. Not only when we break this down to this level, we see that’s specifically being driven by A, B and C.” That gets to where I push heavier at my team to do root cause analysis. That’s really where we provide value is by digging into it and asking questions like that. Again, operating from the lens of trying to solve a problem or answer a question or root cause something in conjunction with the business. A lot of times, we will ask those questions and at the same time, they will ask us, which is great. It’s amazing because you get the better solution faster. Brian: I think that’s great. I’ve worked on several different tools that have varying sophisticated means of doing root cause analysis and I think it’s a really powerful way to bring some why to a what that has happened in the past. Most of the time, why is really where the money is at. The value comes in being able to understand why. A lot of times, we don’t have all the data. You can’t know for sure but a lot of times I tend to say, “Our guess, if they’re just going to make a WAG—a wild ass guess—then our guess, as long as we qualify what ingredients went into the pie, our guess may be better than any WAG.” They’re going to make one already. If they’re going to make a decision here and go off gut, there is maybe a chance they’re right and their experience will say something. But maybe our elementary root cause analysis, which we can improve over time, will actually be better and we can get out of the total guessing game and start with something that’s kind of a macro ballpark thing. Then overtime, you can improve that analysis as new data becomes available or maybe learn about how two variables are related in the business and you can bring that knowledge into the system. I totally hear what you’re saying. It’s a nice mix of internal product plus services and also, it sounds like it gets you guys do good discovery work as well. You guys are not just responding to questions but you’re maybe asking them questions together as a group. You kind of work through what opportunities maybe latent that no one’s talking about by asking questions using data to do that. Jason: Yeah. In the lens that we’ve been talking through, this is really sales-centric, but this applies to any group that we interact with. We have the same level of proactive discussion with any group that we interact with. In some of these, in our market research side, it’s 100% proactive. We’re going out there scouring for information and trying to see the other things that we see. That one it’s completely proactive and now we bring insights to the business and say, “What do you guys think?” The sales one is the most fun because, let’s be honest, there’s no business if you’re not selling anything and nothing happens until a sale is made. Brian: Right. I get that. You talked about other clients, do you work at all with the actual hardware, is there any IoT type of analytics going on with the boilers and machinery that you guys create? Jason: We’re early in that process. We actually are getting ready to go down that task very soon. On the hardware side, we tend to not have as much involvement. That’s really more on the engineering group. I think for any manufacturer product or engineering groups probably going to be the most involved in that. But obviously, we get involved into the discussions of answering the fundamental question. What are we actually going to do with this data when we collect it? Because as you can imagine, IoT can spit out a lot of data real quick. They can become incredibly burdensome very quickly if you don’t have a plan on how to manage it. But then, if you’re going to go through the effort of managing that, you got to be able to say, “What are we going to do with this?” Brian: Yeah. I guess the first thing that would come to mind for me would be predictive maintenance, like, “Is it going to break down soon?” I worked on a cooling company that does cooling and really as the guy told me is like, “We’re not selling refrigeration. We’re selling consistent temperature to our clients. It’s not really about coolers and all of that, so we need to deliver consistent temperature. If we don’t do that, they lose products, they can lose whatever is being stored in cold storage.” That is significant business. I’m sure for you guys, it’s heat, you want to sell heat so how do you get in front if there’s a maintenance plan or whatever, how do you stay on top of that kind of stuff? Jason: Absolutely. Brian: [00:26:13] IoT. One of my clients used this word one time, which I now use all the time which is like, “We don’t want a metrics toilet.” An example of you can get to a metrics toilet really quickly with every stat under the gun and how many ounces of water per minute through this pipe, that’s great because that’ll help me do, as a sales guy or as a technician, how am I going to use that information just because there’s a sensor on that pipe. It’s working something around like, “Oh, there’s a sensor. Put the data in the grid.” Jason: I’m going to have to borrow that. I’ll give credit whenever I use ‘metrics toilet,’ that’s a pretty good one. I may actually [00:26:56]. Brian: Nice. Tell me, where does it go from here? You had mentioned like, “Oh, the competitive edge, maybe it’s closing.” Or maybe you guys feel your competitors are all kind of maybe they’re doing the same thing that you guys are doing and we are all aware of where the data can be used to drive the business. Are there other places where you see design or technology like predictive analytics or machine learning and some of these other new technologies that are out there to help drive predictions and things like that? Are you guys leveraging any of that or have plans to look to the future? What does that look like? I know you probably can’t talk about everything but maybe broadly. Jason: Absolutely. I would say that that’s content that’s definitely, if it’s not already being done then it’s on our radar. We’ve got a pretty talented team here that goes a lot of your traditional data science turf. As you can probably surmise in this conversation, is in addition to having all skills, we’re probably the most heavily focused on the business side. As we say, we explore opportunities for a lot of this. We always look at it, again, like machine learning. Great, but we got to make sure it’s very powerful stuff. We got to make sure that whatever we’re embarking upon, because we have finite work capacity, if you pursue something, machine learning, it means we’re not doing something else. It’s not to say that it’s not important, but we really have to be able to answer to that question. Again, come back to, “This is our anchor. What are we going to do with it?” I love this stuff. I love the stats. I love machine learning, AI, all that stuff. If you’re not careful, you can really quickly get into an academic exercise that we think is really cool. “Oh wow, look at this. We’ve got this awesome algorithm here. It does all this magical stuff,” and then the business looks at it and goes, “Yeah, so what? I don’t care. How does that generate revenue? How does that improve our margins? How does that reduce our cost? How does that enable to build the sales pipeline?” If we can’t answer those base questions and we don’t get alignment, that’s probably the most important thing is executive buy-in on exactly what we’re going to be working on, why it’s important. No, we don’t pursue it but those things are most definitely, as with any analytics teams today, I think that that content is definitely being done and/or on your radar. Brian: You make a really good point. Sometimes I almost hesitate to ask the question. But I think it’s an exciting space in terms of predictive capability and removing viable analysis and what we call time tool time in the design world, there is there. But at the same time, you make a really good point which is again, these are tools that need to be leveraged to service an opportunity or a problem. The goal is not to go do the machine learning, the goal is to solve a business problem by which machine learning maybe applied a better […] do it, reduce cost or reduce effort, speed, something like that. I completely respect that. I’m glad to hear that you guy are looking that as not a leading step. I know there’s conflicting signals out there. I’ve been talking to people in the International Institute for Analytics about this and at the same time you hear a lot of stuff which is, “If AI is not part of your strategy, you’re going to be missing out,” and boards just want to hear that people are doing AI. At the same time, you’ve got academic exercises going on, you’ve got people trying to take on massive like, “We’re going to shoot for the moon,” and it’s like, “You don’t even have an airplane and you’re trying to go to the moon with this thing. Show us a small win if you’re going to do an investment in AI.” It’s okay to go try it out and say, “Let’s do a small thing but let’s try to solve a business problem or have some definable output that we’re looking to do here such that we’re not just writing code and doing experiments.” I hear there’s a problem with people putting this on their resume. It’s like people just want to have machine learning. Everyone’s a data scientist now that used to stay in analytics. [00:30:47] It’s scary in the sense of just wasting opportunity and wasting money because at some point, your smarter competitors are going to be saying, “This is a new hammer. Let’s find some nails that we can use for it. But we think […] right nails and it needs to be the right application before we whack at it. It’s not just […].” Jason: I really like your point because again, if my peers were listening to this they will laugh because they say, “We are professionals of this trade and the tools that we might want to use might not be the right tool to use for a specific job.” I couldn’t agree more with that sentiment. It’s one of those core philosophies that I have and share with my team. Also to it is with the AI. I think that you truly made a very astute observation here and comment in that, I think a lot of companies do feel compelled to have to make significant investment in AI like today. It’s not to say that there’s not merit. There clearly is plenty of merit and plenty of potential there, but kind of your point, I really believe that it’s much more beneficial when you really minimize the risk of project and budget flow and minimize overall project risk. You take that small bite and try a little bit, then try a little bit more. When you get to win, socialize the win, and your executives feel comfortable because I’ve done it on the analytics side. I went for a big bang approach and after nine months they were like, “Hey, man. Where’s the output?” All you need is to get bit by that once and then you realize that small quick wins are very effective because at its core, it’s really important to get executive buy-in. A lot of executives are not willing to wait nine months or a year for something when they’re expecting to see at three months. I totally agree with your sentiment. Brian: When you talked about the wins, I totally understand if you’re close to it and maybe hard to remember those, but is there a particular story or time where something in the product and the insights that you guys put out to your customers that it was like a real win, like a sales guy said something to you or maybe an executive said something to you about how this moved the needle, like this was a memorable moment for us. Like, “I changed a customer’s mind with this,” or, “We closed the sale that we never would have been looking over here if we didn’t do it.” Do you have any anecdotes like that that you can share? Jason: One that we had recently, again, just for confidentiality purposes I can’t get too deep. Brian: Sure. Jason: We did have one recently where we just basically revamped our insights packages that we distribute to our internal team. We really, really gathered feedback. We had version one, we gathered ton of feedback, kind of refined, iterated, got the feedback without making it a major release. Got feedback, refined it, refined it, and then what we did was, with a small group, we got that beta in their hand, they look at it and they’re like, “This is great. This is exactly what we need.” Because what we were doing, what we found was—I’m sure you’ve experienced this—everybody wants their own part of things. Everybody wants certain view of a report or they want certain insights or whatever it is, and it’s great. But if you have limited resources, really high-powered resources like an analytics team or data science team, you’re going to look at the opportunity cost of trying to do one of these one-offs, we were getting a ton of report flow. Again, what I tell my team, I don’t mean to be derogatory to the DI guys in this comment, but my team’s side, I always tell them, “We don’t create value if we’re just creating reports. We create value when we’re actually partnering with business to extract insights, identify opportunities amidst all that stuff that goes well with it.” What we realized though is that, what started out as a nice, clean, three- or four-page insights package and blow it up to like 20 and [34:21] doesn’t that meet our original criteria? Essentially, what we do is once we have the rationalization enough to say, “Okay, we’ve got all these stuffs right across 20 pages. We can actually distill it down to four pages.” It will give you the exact same information, but it might not look the exact way that you wanted it to look. The question becomes, are you willing to deal with less stuff and maybe have it look a little different, but you’ll get it in a much more concise package that you’re actually able to use and process? What we found out is that a lot of people were doing these packages and getting the reports that they want but they weren’t actually using them to drive decision-making because they can’t see the paragraph or the block of text story before. They look at it and they’re like, “I don’t know what the hell to do with this.” We would dial that in and it just been a screaming success. It’s really nice to have it where something like that you see the evolution of it. This is just one of those things that we had, and this was kind of a side package or wasn’t a primary, but it’s become a primary now because it’s so effective. Brian: Would you say that when you talk about reducing this, is the report like a PDF or do they access it through a browser the insights package? Jason: Yeah, we have the options to do both. We distribute it initially via PDF, sometimes along with our comments if there’s really, really big stuff in there. We’ll say, “Hey, we see this. Here’s a driver. Here’s a supplemental package.” A lot of times it’s PDF first and then if they want to go on the web, start interacting with it, they can do that. Those are nice, but the reality is a lot of them don’t do that which is understandable. Brian: You took it from 20 pages down to 4, is that what you’re saying? Jason: Yeah. Same information. Brian: This is a really good point. I’ve frequently had clients come in and they’re with data products and their concern is information overload. We’ve heard this a lot of times and the irony is that, the issue is usually not information overload. It’s usually a design problem that the information is not presented properly because sometimes, it can increase the density and increase the utility and usability, not the other way around. In fact, removing data can actually make it worse. A basic example of that is when you’re trying to compare A and B. If A and B are not on the same, what we call a viewport like in a browser world, it would be within the browser window there. When you require someone to toggle between two screens, they have to change context and visually, your eye can process the information a lot better when it’s within proximity. Sometimes, increasing the density actually will give you a better design. It takes more care in how you do it, but it’s not always about information overload, “Oh, it’s too crazy.” They may not get it on the first time but your sales people, if they’re looking at this stuff weekly or monthly, at some point they’re going to be pretty comfortable with this. I always tell my clients, “You need to look at the switch frequency as well because if it’s going to be used a lot, you can actually get more detailed and you can really push the, what you might see as complexity or the information density, can go up because they’re going to get familiar with the formatting. Typically, the density is actually going to probably improve the utility as long as care is given to the choices. But having that eyeball comparison without having to change pages and all of that, typically you’re going to give a better story as a broad rule. I like hearing that you guys went down in page count, up in density and in turn a better user experience at the end so that’s great. I think we’re about done here. I don’t have too many questions for you, but this is super great. One of the reasons I contacted Jason is because I remember seeing this quote, “Jason is like a category five hurricane in the data analytics world.” I’m like, “Who the hell is this guy? No one talks like that.” I started reading your stuff and I enjoyed watching your LinkedIn social posts and things like that. Where can people find out more about you? You’re obviously on LinkedIn, I can put LinkedIn in the show notes and stuff, but are you on Twitter, any social media places they can follow you? Jason: No, actually, I’m not on Twitter. But the best place unquestionably is going to be LinkedIn. I’m pretty involved there. I do like to engage. If you want to direct message me with questions, just talk, meetup, connect, whatever it is, I welcome that. I love the platform, it’s a great family. I just really started using it maybe nine months ago, really getting into it. It’s been great meeting guys like yourself. It’s actually phenomenal. Brian: Cool. I’ll put a link to Jason’s LinkedIn profile on there and you guys can find him. I recommend, especially if you’re in an internal analytics type of role at your company, to follow Jason and then check out what he has to say on there. This has been great. Thanks for coming on the show. I look forward to meeting you at some point in person. Jason: Dude, thank you for having me on here. I really appreciate it.
Jason Krantz is the Director of Business Analytics & Insights for the 135-year old company, Weil McLain and Marley Engineered Products. While the company is responsible for helping keeping homes and businesses warm, Jason is responsible for the creation and growth of analytical capabilities at Weil McLain, and was recognized in 2017 as a “Top 40 Under 40” in the HVAC industry. I'm not surprised given his posts on LinkedIn; Jason seems very focused on satisfying his internal customers and ensuring that there is practical business value anchoring their analytics initiatives. We talked about: How Jason’s team keeps their data accessible and relevant to the issue they need to solve for their customer. How Jason strives to keep the information simple and clean for the customer. How does Jason help drive analytics in a company culture with a lot of legacy (from its people to its parts) The importance of focusing on context How Jason drives his team to be business partners, and not report generators Resources and Links: Jason Krantz on LinkedIn Quotes from Jason Krantz: "You realize that small quick wins are very effective because, at its core, it’s really important to get executive buy-in." "I’m a huge fan of simplicity. As analytics pros, we could very easily make very complex, very intricate models, and just, 'Oh, look at how smart we are.' It doesn’t help our customers. …we only use about two or three different visual types and we use mostly the exact same visual set-up. I can train a sales rep for probably five minutes on all of our reporting because if you understand one, you’re going to understand everything. That gets to the theme again of just simplicity. Don’t over complicate, keep it simple, keep it clean.” "…To get buy-in, you really got to have your business case, even to your internal customers, really dialed in. If you just bring them a bunch of crap, that’s how you’re going to lose credibility. They’re going to be like, “I don’t have the time to waste with you,” even though we’re trying to be helpful.” "What my team and I do is we really help companies weaponize their data assets." Episode Transcript Brian: Jason, are you there? Jason: I’m here my friend. Brian: Sweet. How’s it going? Jason: It’s going very well today. How’s your Friday going? Brian: I’m doing awesome. We’re going to talk a little bit about analytics. Is it Wile McLain or Weil McLain? Jason: I say Weil McLain. If I’ve been saying it wrong, I’ve been saying it wrong for a while. Brian: As I recall from my musical training, I think in German, the second syllable is the one that says its name. I guess it would be Wile McLain, like if it was W-I-E-L it would be ‘Weil.’ But I don’t know. Its anglicized as they come over the pond. Jason: I’m going to go with you on that when you sound like an expert. Brian: Nice. Well, you sound like an expert in analytics at Weil McLain. Tell us about what you’re doing over there. We met on LinkedIn, I’ve been enjoying your postings on the social feed about your approach. You seem really passionate about what you’re doing and I’m like, “I don’t know who this guy is, but that was really interesting.” I just have. Tell us about the company, what they do. I know they’re in heating, right? Jason: Yes, absolutely. The company I work for, and I work in the HVAC space, we’re a 135-year-old boiler manufacturer. Whether you realize it or not, you probably have one of our products in your house or building or very close to where you live. What my team and I do is we really help companies weaponize their data assets. As you know, a lot of companies are very skilled at acquiring data since the Big Data Movement. But the reality is that a lot of these companies don’t know what to do with all this data. That’s where we really come in. What I always tell my team and our business partners that we work with internally and externally is that our focus is on solving business problems. In order to do that, you have to identify what is the business problem that you’re trying to solve or strategic agenda that you’re trying to address. In order to do that, you really have to be anchored in the biz. Again, that’s just my perspective, but if you’re in the business day in, day out, you develop this very keen stand of what the business would need to accomplish its objectives. Just like right now, we are based in the marketing group and it’s a great spot to be. I’m a firm believer that every analytics team should be based in the business for a reason that I just talked about. But what that does being business-first is that gives us a great lens to look at data from. Sometimes analytics people would be IT-centric and they can do a lot of academic work against the data set or different data sets. But the business might look at the output and be like, “Yeah, that doesn’t help us.” We always, always, always start with, “What is the business problem we’re trying to solve or strategy we’re looking to address?” It also helps us when it comes to curating data also. That’s one of our primary response [00:03:21] this too, is to look for different data sets both internal and external that can help us identify strategic opportunities. It sounds really unsexy, I’m not going to lie. I think some of my LinkedIn post just say that data is boring. It really is. It’s mind-numbing, too, about 85% of my customers. But that’s the important part is understanding what do our customers need and that’s really the lens that we look at this through. We are a service provider, our customers are internal and external, we have customers just like any other business. We have to take this really boring, but really potent product in data and make it accessible to them. That’s really where we use design to really try to make that magic happen. Brian: I love that you said, “Trying to understand what the problem is.” This is something we talk about on the mailing list quite a bit. In fact, falling in love with the problem is a good basis for doing good work instead of kind of jumping to solutions or feeling […]. As I tell my clients sometimes like, “Our job is not to go and visualize the data. It’s not […] available for someone to put into another tool or whatever the heck it is. The job is to find an insight that already is used. Probably they’re already in your job and you’re there to make […] if you’re doing internal analytics. Help them do a better job at what they’re doing, offer more value. You need to figure out how to work that into their life.” For example, for you guys then, your customer, I assume is it primarily sales people that you’re working with? Who are your customers and your […]? Jason: Yes. Great question. One of our biggest customers is sales. Sales has been one of my biggest customers for the past 10 years of my career. I’m very intimately involved with the sales team, sales operation, sales optimization, insight gathering, pricing, things like that, but also marketing. We do a lot in terms of competitive intelligence gathering, market research. We also do a lot of operations in finance obviously related to the prices, that sort of thing. We really touch all areas of the business, but without question, our biggest customers are going to be sales and marketing. Brian: If you were to bring a new initiative like, “Hey, we have access to…” I don’t know what it might be but for you maybe your point, [might be a line 00:05:49] of data that could actually give them more leverage. We know what the negotiation brings, better than […], we know we kind of have an idea now from what the industry is doing for their sales such that we can now tell the CRM like, “This is your […] or something.” When do you get that sales person involved? Do you deliver a solution and get feedback? Do you bring [...] early and say, “Hey, we think we can tell you more about how to do better pricing on the spot with this thing.” Do you bring them in or when do they fit into your process? Jason: Great question. A lot of times because we spend so much time actually in the trenches, that’s one of things I think is unique about the way that I design my teams to do analytics. It’s not like hand off product and we’re like, “Godspeed. Good luck.” Once we deliver a solution, we’re actually in the trenches with the business trying to implement what we’re talking about because it just works better. The team work is just more effective and they know that they’ve got back up, they know they’ve got air support. Really, a lot of times when we come up with something new, a lot of times we will frame it from the lens like, “Hey, we know that we’ve got opportunity A or issue B, or whatever it is. This has been an issue or an opportunity for months or years or whatever.” We think that we’ve identified something that could help us in solving that issue or realizing the potential of that opportunity and then it becomes, “Okay, let’s sit down and talk about, do you agree that this might actually help us in this process?” Because the one thing that I’ve learned is, in order to get buy-in, you really, really got to have your business case, even to your internal customers, really dialed in. If you just bring them a bunch of crap, that’s how you’re going to lose credibility. They’re going to be like, “I don’t have the time to waste with you,” even though we’re trying to be helpful. What we found out is if you really dial in what are we trying to address with this, just as you would with any business case, and you bring that to them, I have found that they tend to be much more receptive. It’s not to say there’s not going to be resistance—resistance comes with any change—but we found that typically framing it from that lens and saying, “We’re trying to solve a problem that you have, we think that this data will help,” that’s a great starting point. Brian: Do you have an example of a before/after with that? I don’t want you to get into proprietary stuff you can’t talk about but is there like a, “Before they did it this way,” and then we brought them in and said, “Hey, we think we can get […].” and how you went [00:08:19]. Jason: Yeah. What I can talk about is just the manner in which we distribute sales information, specifically insights. I think that, for your listeners, this is going to ring true to a lot of sales forces. I know for all them that I’ve been in or worked with, this case was true 100% of the time. But one of the things that, again, keeping the customer-centric focus, that if you look at your sales reps, a lot of time is you’re going to be what I call casual data consumers. By that, I mean that these are guys and gals that aren’t really into data day in and day out like guys like you and I or some of the listeners maybe. What we have to do is, as I always encourage my team to take empathetic lens and look at, “Okay, if we give them what our first […] is going to look like, how are they going to interpret this?” A lot of times, to be honest, it’s not very good. Now that’s where we have to look at internally and kind of rationalize and say, “Okay, let’s find this. One of us will find [00:09:14].” But one example of that is traditionally, sales reps and sales teams will get the information in a flat Excel table. Just lots of rows and columns and just gibberish everywhere. That’s a very financial-centric view of sales data. But the reality is—I don’t know about the rest of mankind but I know for myself—I can’t remember much more than 10 numbers. The mental computational cost of extracting insights is just gargantuan. What happens is, I just don’t even bother to do it. I’m just like, “Yeah, whatever.” An equivalent of that is, you know if you get a big block of text in email? Even though if you took that same block of text and broke it up into two paragraphs or two sentence segments which is very easy to read when you put the effort in, but for me, if I get a big block of text, I’m not even going to read that. It’s kind of one of the same things that we see on the sales side. What we do is just say, “You know what? There’s a lot of really good information here and we need to make it digestible for our customers.” That’s where we found traditionally, visualization can be an incredibly effective tool to communicate insights to this casual data audience, to this casual data consumer. Brian: Do you have to work through the visuals with them? Do they tend to get it the first time? Is it a process of you share, “Here’s a report or here’s some new view on X.” How do you know if the visualization is actually allowing them to pull the insight out of what other [00:10:46] broad data? How do you know they’re actually “getting it”? Jason: That’s a great question. I’m a huge fan of simplicity. As analytics pros, we could very easily make very complex, very intricate models, and just, “Oh, look at how smart we are.” It doesn’t help our customers. It doesn’t help anything. Really what we do—this is going to get to the theme of simplicity—is we only use about two or three different visual types and we use mostly the exact same visual set-up. Just to kind of frame it, what I’m a big fan of is a simple bar chart. There’s more details attached to it but to the right of the bar chart, we’ll typically put a tabular data set. What we do is, as you think in US at least, we start in that left-hand side of the page or we […]. What we do is we look at the visual real estate. We say, “Our customers are going to start in the left-hand side. We want them to look at the bar chart because it allows them to very rapidly assimilate it at a high-level what’s going on.” It’s great at communicating at top-level churn very quickly but the trade-off is, is this horrible imprecision. You have no precision at all. What we like to do is then we address that issue by putting a simple table, very clean, very simple table over to the right. What that does is that then provides the precision that the customers are seeing in most financial-centric tables. What we found that does is that we have to train our sales team on one set-up and then that set-up is used virtually universally on all of our solutions. As an example, I can train a sales rep for probably five minutes on all of our reporting because if you understand one, you’re going to understand everything. That gets to the theme again of just simplicity. Don’t over complicate, keep it simple, keep it clean. Brian: I think those are good. A lot of times, when I work with engineering clients, they fall in love with consistency. I guess one point to maybe just the contrary of this is that, I think consistency is generally a good rule with design. We want to minimize unnecessary change but at the same time, I would recommend to listeners is to always look at context first, and context should always come in. Let’s say Jason comes up with report number 12 and they have 11 now or whatever, and it doesn’t feel right for number 11. That’s a place where a designer would probably push for, “Well, no. The 12th one actually needs to be different because it’s not […] 11th and even though it’s not consistent, in this context, we don’t need it to win. This version will deliver the usability and the utility that we’re looking for better than the other 11 will.” In general, I think it’s smart to not get creative unnecessarily with meaningless ink on the screen like, “Let’s try it this way. Let’s change the color palette. I’m tired of this.” Those are not good reasons for […], you’re just introducing noise and it’s unnecessary. But I like that you guys are thinking about simplicity and trying to reuse templates and not looking at it as a creative tableau. Ironically, people think it’s a creative “design” tool, but at the same time with all those weapons, you have a lot of different weapons you can use in that toolkit and part of that is knowing how to use this. It’s the same thing with Photoshop, a million buttons and all this stuff. The Photoshop doesn’t make you a designer. It’s being aware of your customer’s pain and the problems they need and knowing when to use all those filters and all those different things that it can do. I like that you guys are looking into that simplicity and reusing templates when it’s meaningful to do so. Jason: You bring up some great points and I 100% agree. My team that’s listening there, they’ll laugh because I beat it in their heads, “Context. Context, context, context.” Both in design as you’ve talked but especially with numbers in general. Like, “If I give you a number, a billion, that doesn’t mean anything, you got to have context.” I’d say the same is true for design just as you articulated. Great point. Brian: Where does the impetus for “everybody is a data company, everybody wants to do analytics”? But then there’s operationalizing that, there’s getting buy-in, leadership behind it. Where does that come from in your org? Where is the interest in taking a 130-year-old company and getting it to care about this? Where does that come from, your influence and all of that? Jason: That was driven by our current president because he saw it as part of a digital transformation. Obviously, this was an essential component of that. Obviously, we do a lot with analytics, but we’re also involved in a lot of other digital components that lead to that overall digital maturation. Analytics is a very, very big part of what we do but it’s not all that we do. We serve as kind of that quarterback for a lot of the digital initiatives to help basically, guide them through the process. Because even though some of the nuances of each of this project, each one will have its own nuances, they all come back to data. Data is the currency. We found out pretty quickly that if you want to stay relevant in this day and age, you need to be digitally evolved but more importantly, as you look at it, do you [compare the 00:16:02] advantage that you can derive from analytics? I would argue that gap is slowly closing known certain industries like manufacturing, but we probably have a little bit more runway [00:16:10] it. But for a lot of industries, analytics is becoming table stakes. It’s one of those where you can certainly expect incremental value and competitive advantage, but the question becomes how much longer. That was kind of the impetus of saying, “Hey, we got to get this going sooner rather than later.” Brian: Do you have people in sales that are resistant to using the reporting or taking advantage of your information or is it pretty ingrained in the company culture that it’s like, “This is a tool. Why would you not want to use it?” Or did you guys have a […] getting adoption? Jason: Yeah. I would say anytime you’re going through a transformation of this magnitude, it’s hard and I would say especially for other manufacturers. I found in general, manufacturing in general, tends to be one of the laggards industry-wise in analytical maturity. Unquestionably, it’s tough for no other reason than change is tough. You’re taking legacy plants, legacy steer pieces, legacy process, and some people has been around the company for decades potentially, and we’re asking them to change almost on a dime on their time scale how they do business. It’s not that it’s right or wrong but what we try to point out is that, as I always say, we have to acknowledge the past. We’ve been where we’ve been, we’ve been successful at where we been. But there’s been more change in the past two or three years than maybe you’ve seen in the past 15-20 years. In order to stay relevant, you really have to be ready to evolve, not only evolve but evolve quickly. But I have to openly acknowledge that that’s hard. It’s a hard proposition for a lot of people. Again, it comes down to change management and managing not only expectations but supporting that change. Change doesn’t happen by itself, we have to support that. That’s really what we try to coach through. The way that we try to do that is by developing a product with our customers. I’m sure as you can […], if you force something upon somebody, it doesn’t get received too well. But if you develop it in conjunction with them and do tie it around their needs, it tends to get better adaptation. Brian: You used the word product in there and I’m interested, do you see the outputs of your efforts? Primarily, it’s BI reporting as I understand it. Do you look at that as the product that you offer to sales? Is that kind of how you see it? Jason: Yeah. We offer a product in the form of the insight packages but it’s also the service. Service that goes with it where again, we serve as essentially internal consultant to help them along. If you take just the product-centric approach, you just deliver an insight package and you’re like, “Good luck. It’s [00:19:35]. Have at it.” What we do is we deliver the product and then we partner with them and say, “Okay, here’s what we see. Now, remember you’re talking about this going on in the channel last year and our note show that there’s been a lot of competitive activity in this area. Here’s some of the question that we have. You’re the expert, so what do you think?” What we found is that working together like that, we tend to get pretty good results versus just leaving these guys on an island to kind of figure it out themselves because they virtually always know the answer but sometimes it’s up to us using these products and then offering the service is to ask question that maybe aren’t getting asked. A lot of times, we find out that they know the answer it’s just that you kind of have to ask the question. Brian: Is that often like, “I was using XYZ report. Could you break this down by county instead of just by whatever because I feel there’s more people living in the East side of town and the average is here or […] the whole county. I really just need this one county because that’s where everyone lives. Is that really underserved? Blah, blah, blah,” that kind of stuff and then you guys will go off and work with them for more of that detail then maybe you release that back into the product as a feature if it seems like a one-off or something. Is that how it works? Jason: It’s actually a very fluid process. An example of what you just described is exactly what happens if hey come to us with questions. But we also do it where we flip it around because a lot of products that we create are more aggregate discussion tools. We don’t design a lot within our primary visualization package. To really get into the weeds and everything just becomes overwhelming. We have other tools like your traditional [00:21:22] pivot table to kind of dig into that stuff. But the exact example that you just gave, they will ask us those questions, but we will also flip the script and say, “Hey, we saw that the mechanical chain in the Northeast is up 50%,” I’m just making up a number, “and at a higher level, you can see that but when we segment it out, here’s what we see. Not only when we break this down to this level, we see that’s specifically being driven by A, B and C.” That gets to where I push heavier at my team to do root cause analysis. That’s really where we provide value is by digging into it and asking questions like that. Again, operating from the lens of trying to solve a problem or answer a question or root cause something in conjunction with the business. A lot of times, we will ask those questions and at the same time, they will ask us, which is great. It’s amazing because you get the better solution faster. Brian: I think that’s great. I’ve worked on several different tools that have varying sophisticated means of doing root cause analysis and I think it’s a really powerful way to bring some why to a what that has happened in the past. Most of the time, why is really where the money is at. The value comes in being able to understand why. A lot of times, we don’t have all the data. You can’t know for sure but a lot of times I tend to say, “Our guess, if they’re just going to make a WAG—a wild ass guess—then our guess, as long as we qualify what ingredients went into the pie, our guess may be better than any WAG.” They’re going to make one already. If they’re going to make a decision here and go off gut, there is maybe a chance they’re right and their experience will say something. But maybe our elementary root cause analysis, which we can improve over time, will actually be better and we can get out of the total guessing game and start with something that’s kind of a macro ballpark thing. Then overtime, you can improve that analysis as new data becomes available or maybe learn about how two variables are related in the business and you can bring that knowledge into the system. I totally hear what you’re saying. It’s a nice mix of internal product plus services and also, it sounds like it gets you guys do good discovery work as well. You guys are not just responding to questions but you’re maybe asking them questions together as a group. You kind of work through what opportunities maybe latent that no one’s talking about by asking questions using data to do that. Jason: Yeah. In the lens that we’ve been talking through, this is really sales-centric, but this applies to any group that we interact with. We have the same level of proactive discussion with any group that we interact with. In some of these, in our market research side, it’s 100% proactive. We’re going out there scouring for information and trying to see the other things that we see. That one it’s completely proactive and now we bring insights to the business and say, “What do you guys think?” The sales one is the most fun because, let’s be honest, there’s no business if you’re not selling anything and nothing happens until a sale is made. Brian: Right. I get that. You talked about other clients, do you work at all with the actual hardware, is there any IoT type of analytics going on with the boilers and machinery that you guys create? Jason: We’re early in that process. We actually are getting ready to go down that task very soon. On the hardware side, we tend to not have as much involvement. That’s really more on the engineering group. I think for any manufacturer product or engineering groups probably going to be the most involved in that. But obviously, we get involved into the discussions of answering the fundamental question. What are we actually going to do with this data when we collect it? Because as you can imagine, IoT can spit out a lot of data real quick. They can become incredibly burdensome very quickly if you don’t have a plan on how to manage it. But then, if you’re going to go through the effort of managing that, you got to be able to say, “What are we going to do with this?” Brian: Yeah. I guess the first thing that would come to mind for me would be predictive maintenance, like, “Is it going to break down soon?” I worked on a cooling company that does cooling and really as the guy told me is like, “We’re not selling refrigeration. We’re selling consistent temperature to our clients. It’s not really about coolers and all of that, so we need to deliver consistent temperature. If we don’t do that, they lose products, they can lose whatever is being stored in cold storage.” That is significant business. I’m sure for you guys, it’s heat, you want to sell heat so how do you get in front if there’s a maintenance plan or whatever, how do you stay on top of that kind of stuff? Jason: Absolutely. Brian: [00:26:13] IoT. One of my clients used this word one time, which I now use all the time which is like, “We don’t want a metrics toilet.” An example of you can get to a metrics toilet really quickly with every stat under the gun and how many ounces of water per minute through this pipe, that’s great because that’ll help me do, as a sales guy or as a technician, how am I going to use that information just because there’s a sensor on that pipe. It’s working something around like, “Oh, there’s a sensor. Put the data in the grid.” Jason: I’m going to have to borrow that. I’ll give credit whenever I use ‘metrics toilet,’ that’s a pretty good one. I may actually [00:26:56]. Brian: Nice. Tell me, where does it go from here? You had mentioned like, “Oh, the competitive edge, maybe it’s closing.” Or maybe you guys feel your competitors are all kind of maybe they’re doing the same thing that you guys are doing and we are all aware of where the data can be used to drive the business. Are there other places where you see design or technology like predictive analytics or machine learning and some of these other new technologies that are out there to help drive predictions and things like that? Are you guys leveraging any of that or have plans to look to the future? What does that look like? I know you probably can’t talk about everything but maybe broadly. Jason: Absolutely. I would say that that’s content that’s definitely, if it’s not already being done then it’s on our radar. We’ve got a pretty talented team here that goes a lot of your traditional data science turf. As you can probably surmise in this conversation, is in addition to having all skills, we’re probably the most heavily focused on the business side. As we say, we explore opportunities for a lot of this. We always look at it, again, like machine learning. Great, but we got to make sure it’s very powerful stuff. We got to make sure that whatever we’re embarking upon, because we have finite work capacity, if you pursue something, machine learning, it means we’re not doing something else. It’s not to say that it’s not important, but we really have to be able to answer to that question. Again, come back to, “This is our anchor. What are we going to do with it?” I love this stuff. I love the stats. I love machine learning, AI, all that stuff. If you’re not careful, you can really quickly get into an academic exercise that we think is really cool. “Oh wow, look at this. We’ve got this awesome algorithm here. It does all this magical stuff,” and then the business looks at it and goes, “Yeah, so what? I don’t care. How does that generate revenue? How does that improve our margins? How does that reduce our cost? How does that enable to build the sales pipeline?” If we can’t answer those base questions and we don’t get alignment, that’s probably the most important thing is executive buy-in on exactly what we’re going to be working on, why it’s important. No, we don’t pursue it but those things are most definitely, as with any analytics teams today, I think that that content is definitely being done and/or on your radar. Brian: You make a really good point. Sometimes I almost hesitate to ask the question. But I think it’s an exciting space in terms of predictive capability and removing viable analysis and what we call time tool time in the design world, there is there. But at the same time, you make a really good point which is again, these are tools that need to be leveraged to service an opportunity or a problem. The goal is not to go do the machine learning, the goal is to solve a business problem by which machine learning maybe applied a better […] do it, reduce cost or reduce effort, speed, something like that. I completely respect that. I’m glad to hear that you guy are looking that as not a leading step. I know there’s conflicting signals out there. I’ve been talking to people in the International Institute for Analytics about this and at the same time you hear a lot of stuff which is, “If AI is not part of your strategy, you’re going to be missing out,” and boards just want to hear that people are doing AI. At the same time, you’ve got academic exercises going on, you’ve got people trying to take on massive like, “We’re going to shoot for the moon,” and it’s like, “You don’t even have an airplane and you’re trying to go to the moon with this thing. Show us a small win if you’re going to do an investment in AI.” It’s okay to go try it out and say, “Let’s do a small thing but let’s try to solve a business problem or have some definable output that we’re looking to do here such that we’re not just writing code and doing experiments.” I hear there’s a problem with people putting this on their resume. It’s like people just want to have machine learning. Everyone’s a data scientist now that used to stay in analytics. [00:30:47] It’s scary in the sense of just wasting opportunity and wasting money because at some point, your smarter competitors are going to be saying, “This is a new hammer. Let’s find some nails that we can use for it. But we think […] right nails and it needs to be the right application before we whack at it. It’s not just […].” Jason: I really like your point because again, if my peers were listening to this they will laugh because they say, “We are professionals of this trade and the tools that we might want to use might not be the right tool to use for a specific job.” I couldn’t agree more with that sentiment. It’s one of those core philosophies that I have and share with my team. Also to it is with the AI. I think that you truly made a very astute observation here and comment in that, I think a lot of companies do feel compelled to have to make significant investment in AI like today. It’s not to say that there’s not merit. There clearly is plenty of merit and plenty of potential there, but kind of your point, I really believe that it’s much more beneficial when you really minimize the risk of project and budget flow and minimize overall project risk. You take that small bite and try a little bit, then try a little bit more. When you get to win, socialize the win, and your executives feel comfortable because I’ve done it on the analytics side. I went for a big bang approach and after nine months they were like, “Hey, man. Where’s the output?” All you need is to get bit by that once and then you realize that small quick wins are very effective because at its core, it’s really important to get executive buy-in. A lot of executives are not willing to wait nine months or a year for something when they’re expecting to see at three months. I totally agree with your sentiment. Brian: When you talked about the wins, I totally understand if you’re close to it and maybe hard to remember those, but is there a particular story or time where something in the product and the insights that you guys put out to your customers that it was like a real win, like a sales guy said something to you or maybe an executive said something to you about how this moved the needle, like this was a memorable moment for us. Like, “I changed a customer’s mind with this,” or, “We closed the sale that we never would have been looking over here if we didn’t do it.” Do you have any anecdotes like that that you can share? Jason: One that we had recently, again, just for confidentiality purposes I can’t get too deep. Brian: Sure. Jason: We did have one recently where we just basically revamped our insights packages that we distribute to our internal team. We really, really gathered feedback. We had version one, we gathered ton of feedback, kind of refined, iterated, got the feedback without making it a major release. Got feedback, refined it, refined it, and then what we did was, with a small group, we got that beta in their hand, they look at it and they’re like, “This is great. This is exactly what we need.” Because what we were doing, what we found was—I’m sure you’ve experienced this—everybody wants their own part of things. Everybody wants certain view of a report or they want certain insights or whatever it is, and it’s great. But if you have limited resources, really high-powered resources like an analytics team or data science team, you’re going to look at the opportunity cost of trying to do one of these one-offs, we were getting a ton of report flow. Again, what I tell my team, I don’t mean to be derogatory to the DI guys in this comment, but my team’s side, I always tell them, “We don’t create value if we’re just creating reports. We create value when we’re actually partnering with business to extract insights, identify opportunities amidst all that stuff that goes well with it.” What we realized though is that, what started out as a nice, clean, three- or four-page insights package and blow it up to like 20 and [34:21] doesn’t that meet our original criteria? Essentially, what we do is once we have the rationalization enough to say, “Okay, we’ve got all these stuffs right across 20 pages. We can actually distill it down to four pages.” It will give you the exact same information, but it might not look the exact way that you wanted it to look. The question becomes, are you willing to deal with less stuff and maybe have it look a little different, but you’ll get it in a much more concise package that you’re actually able to use and process? What we found out is that a lot of people were doing these packages and getting the reports that they want but they weren’t actually using them to drive decision-making because they can’t see the paragraph or the block of text story before. They look at it and they’re like, “I don’t know what the hell to do with this.” We would dial that in and it just been a screaming success. It’s really nice to have it where something like that you see the evolution of it. This is just one of those things that we had, and this was kind of a side package or wasn’t a primary, but it’s become a primary now because it’s so effective. Brian: Would you say that when you talk about reducing this, is the report like a PDF or do they access it through a browser the insights package? Jason: Yeah, we have the options to do both. We distribute it initially via PDF, sometimes along with our comments if there’s really, really big stuff in there. We’ll say, “Hey, we see this. Here’s a driver. Here’s a supplemental package.” A lot of times it’s PDF first and then if they want to go on the web, start interacting with it, they can do that. Those are nice, but the reality is a lot of them don’t do that which is understandable. Brian: You took it from 20 pages down to 4, is that what you’re saying? Jason: Yeah. Same information. Brian: This is a really good point. I’ve frequently had clients come in and they’re with data products and their concern is information overload. We’ve heard this a lot of times and the irony is that, the issue is usually not information overload. It’s usually a design problem that the information is not presented properly because sometimes, it can increase the density and increase the utility and usability, not the other way around. In fact, removing data can actually make it worse. A basic example of that is when you’re trying to compare A and B. If A and B are not on the same, what we call a viewport like in a browser world, it would be within the browser window there. When you require someone to toggle between two screens, they have to change context and visually, your eye can process the information a lot better when it’s within proximity. Sometimes, increasing the density actually will give you a better design. It takes more care in how you do it, but it’s not always about information overload, “Oh, it’s too crazy.” They may not get it on the first time but your sales people, if they’re looking at this stuff weekly or monthly, at some point they’re going to be pretty comfortable with this. I always tell my clients, “You need to look at the switch frequency as well because if it’s going to be used a lot, you can actually get more detailed and you can really push the, what you might see as complexity or the information density, can go up because they’re going to get familiar with the formatting. Typically, the density is actually going to probably improve the utility as long as care is given to the choices. But having that eyeball comparison without having to change pages and all of that, typically you’re going to give a better story as a broad rule. I like hearing that you guys went down in page count, up in density and in turn a better user experience at the end so that’s great. I think we’re about done here. I don’t have too many questions for you, but this is super great. One of the reasons I contacted Jason is because I remember seeing this quote, “Jason is like a category five hurricane in the data analytics world.” I’m like, “Who the hell is this guy? No one talks like that.” I started reading your stuff and I enjoyed watching your LinkedIn social posts and things like that. Where can people find out more about you? You’re obviously on LinkedIn, I can put LinkedIn in the show notes and stuff, but are you on Twitter, any social media places they can follow you? Jason: No, actually, I’m not on Twitter. But the best place unquestionably is going to be LinkedIn. I’m pretty involved there. I do like to engage. If you want to direct message me with questions, just talk, meetup, connect, whatever it is, I welcome that. I love the platform, it’s a great family. I just really started using it maybe nine months ago, really getting into it. It’s been great meeting guys like yourself. It’s actually phenomenal. Brian: Cool. I’ll put a link to Jason’s LinkedIn profile on there and you guys can find him. I recommend, especially if you’re in an internal analytics type of role at your company, to follow Jason and then check out what he has to say on there. This has been great. Thanks for coming on the show. I look forward to meeting you at some point in person. Jason: Dude, thank you for having me on here. I really appreciate it. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Experiencing Data with Brian O’Neill. If you did enjoy it, please consider sharing it with #experiencingdata. To get future podcast updates or to subscribe to Brian’s mailing list where he shares his insights on designing valuable enterprise data products and applications, visit designingforanalytics.com/podcast. Never forget to look up the online HTML CheatSheet when you forget how to write an image, a table or an iframe or any other tag in HTML! [bws_google_captcha] Subscribe for Podcast Updates Get updates on new episodes of Experiencing Data plus my occasional insights on design and UX for custom enterprise data products and apps. Email Address [text-blocks id="eu-consent-checkbox-textblock" plain="1"]
My guest this week is Brian Nosek, co-Founder and the Executive Director of the Center for Open Science. Brian is also a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia doing research on the gap between values and practices, such as when behavior is influenced by factors other than one's intentions and goals. The topic of this conversation is how incentives in academia lead to problems with how we do science, how we can fix those problems, the center for open science, and how to bring about systemic change in general. Show Notes Brian’s Website Brian on Twitter (@BrianNosek) Center for Open Science The Replication Crisis Preregistration Article in Nature about preregistration results The Scientific Method If you want more, check out Brian on Econtalk Transcript Intro [00:00:00] This podcast I talked to Brian nosek about innovating on the very beginning of the Innovation by one research. I met Brian at the Dartmouth 60th anniversary conference and loved his enthusiasm for changing the way we do science. Here's his official biography. Brian nozik is a co-founder and the executive director for the center for open science cos is a nonprofit dedicated to enabling open and reproducible research practices worldwide. Brian is also a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia. He's received his PhD from Yale University in 2002 in 2015. He was on Nature's 10 list and the chronicle for higher education influence. Some quick context about Brian's work and the center for open science. There's a general consensus in academic circles that there are glaring problems in how we do research today. The way research works is generally like this researchers usually based at a university do experiments then when they have a [00:01:00] result they write it up in a paper that paper goes through the peer-review process and then a journal publishes. The number of Journal papers you've published and their popularity make or break your career. They're the primary consideration for getting a position receiving tenure getting grants and procedure in general that system evolved in the 19th century. When many fewer people did research and grants didn't even exist we get into how things have changed in the podcast. You may also have heard of what's known as the replication crisis. This is the Fairly alarming name for a recent phenomena in which people have tried and failed to replicate many well-known studies. For example, you may have heard that power posing will make you act Boulder where that self-control is a limited resource. Both of the studies that originated those ideas failed to replicate. Since replicating findings a core part of the scientific method unreplicated results becoming part of Cannon is a big deal. Brian has been heavily involved in the [00:02:00] crisis and several of the center for open science is initiatives Target replication. So with that I invite you to join my conversation with Brian idzik. How does open science accelerate innovation and what got you excited about it? Ben: So the theme that I'm really interested in is how do we accelerate Innovations? And so just to start off with I love to ask you sort of a really broad question of in your mind. How does having a more open science framework help us accelerate Innovations? And I guess parallel to that. Why what got you excited about it first place. Brian: Yeah, yeah, so that this is really a core of why we started the center for open science is to figure out how can we maximize the progress of science given that we see a number of different barriers to or number of different friction points to the PACE and progress of [00:03:00] Science. And so there are a few things. I think that how. Openness accelerates Innovation, and I guess you can think of it as sort of multiple stages at the opening stage openness in terms of planning pre-registering what your study is about why you're doing this study that the study exists in the first place has a mechanism of helping to improve Innovation by increasing The credibility of the outputs. Particularly in making a clear distinction between the things that we planned in advance that we're testing hypotheses of ideas that we have and we're acquiring data in order to test those ideas from the exploratory results the things that we learn once we've observed the data and we get insights but there are necessarily more uncertain and having a clear distinction between those two practices is a mechanism for. Knowing the credibility of the results [00:04:00] and then more confidently applying results. That one observes in the literature after the fact for doing next steps. And the reason that's really important I think is that we have so many incentives in the research pipeline to dress up exploratory findings that are exciting and sexy and interesting but are uncertain as if they were hypothesis-driven, right? We apply P values to them. We apply a story upfront to them we present them as. These are results that are highly credible from a confirmatory framework. Yeah, and that has been really hard for Innovation to happen. So I'll pause there because there's lots more but yeah, so listen, let's touch on that. What has changed to make the problem worse? Ben: There's there's a lot that right there. So you mentioned the incentives to basically make. Things that aren't really following the scientific method follow the clicker [00:05:00] following the scientific method and one of the things I'm always really interested in what has changed in the incentives because I think that there's definitely this. Notion that this problem has gotten worse over time. And so that means that that something has has changed and so in your mind like what what changed to make to sort of pull science away from that like, you know sort of ice training ideal of you have your hypothesis and then you test that hypothesis and then you create a new hypothesis to this. System that you're pushing back against. Brian: You know, it's a good question. So let me start with making the case for why we can say that nothing has changed and then what might lead to thinking something has changed in unpacking this please the potential reason to think that nothing has [00:06:00] changed is that the kinds of results that are the most rewarded results have always been the kinds of results that are more the most rewarded results, right? If I find a novel Finding rather than repeating something someone else has done. I'm like. To be rewarded more with publication without latex cetera. If I find a positive result. I'm more likely to gain recognition for that. Then a negative result. Nothing's there versus this treatment is effective, which one's more interesting. Well, we know which ones for interesting. Yeah. Yeah, and then clean and tidy story write it all fits together and it works and now I have this new explanation for this new phenomenon that everyone can can take seriously so novel positive clean and tidy story is the. They'll come in science and that's because it breaks new ground and offers a new idea and offers a new way of thinking about the world. And so that's great. We want those. We've always wanted those things. So the reason to think well, this is a challenge always is [00:07:00] because. Who doesn't want that and and who hasn't wanted that right? It turns out my whole career is a bunch of nulls where I don't do anything and not only fits together. It's just a big mess right on screen is not a way to pitch a successful career. So that challenge is there and what pre-registration or committing an advanced does is helps us have the constraints. To be honest about what parts of that are actual results of credible confrontations of pre-existing hypotheses versus stuff that is exploring and unpacking what it is we can find. Okay, so that in this in the incentive landscape, I don't think has changed. Mmm what thanks have changed. Well, there are a couple of things that we can point to as potential reasons to think that the problem has gotten worse one is that data acquisition many fields is a lot easier than it ever was [00:08:00] and so with access more data and more ways to analyze it more efficient analysis, right? We have computers that do this instead of slide rules. We can do a lot more adventuring in data. And so we have more opportunity to explore and exploit the malays and transform it into things signal. The second is that the competitive landscape is. Stronger, right there are fewer than the ratio of people that want jobs to jobs available is getting larger and larger and larger and that fact and then competitiveness for Grants and same way that competition than can. Very easily amplify these challenges people who are more willing to exploit more researcher degrees of freedom are going to be able to get the kinds of results more easily that are rewarded in the system. And so that would have amplify the presence of those in people that managed to [00:09:00] survive that competitive firm got it. So I think it's a reasonable hypothesis that people that it's gotten worse. I don't think there's definitive evidence but those would be the theoretical points. At least I would point to for that. That makes a lot of sense. So you had a just sort of jumping back. You had a couple a couple points and we had we have just touched on the first one. Point Number Two about Accelerating Innovation Ben: So I want to give you that chance to oh, yeah go back and to keep going through that. Brian: Right. Yeah. So accelerating Innovation is the idea, right? So that's a point of participation is accelerating Innovation by by clarifying The credibility of claims as they are produced. Yes, we do that better than I think will be much more efficient that will have a better understanding of the evidence base as it comes out. Yeah second phase is the ability is the openness of the data and materials for the purposes of verify. Those [00:10:00] initial claims right? I do a study. I pre-registered. It's all great and I share it with you and you read it. And you say well that sounds great. But did you actually get that and what would have happened if you made different decisions here here and there right because I don't quite agree with the decisions that you made in your analysis Pipeline and I see some gaps there so you're being able to access the materials that I produced in the data that came from. Makes it so that you can one just simply verify that you can reproduce the findings that I reported. Right? I didn't just screw up the analysis script or something and that as a minimum standard is useful, but even more than that, you can test the robustness in ways that I didn't and I came to that question with some approach that you might look at it and say well I would do it differently and the ability to reassess the data for the same question is a very useful thing for. The robustness particularly in areas that are that have [00:11:00] complex analytic pipelines where there's are many choices to make so that's the second part then the third part is the ReUse. So not only should we be able to verify and test the robustness of claims as they happen, but data can be used for lots of different purposes. Sometimes there are things that are not at all anticipated by the data originator. And so we can accelerate Innovation by making it a lot easier to aggregate evidence of claims across multiple Studies by having the data being more accessible, but then also making that data more accessible and usable for. Studying things that no one no one ever anticipated trying to investigate. Yeah, and so the efficiency gain on making better use of the data that already exists rather than the Redundant just really do Revenue question didn't dance it your question you did as it is a massive efficiency. Opportunity because there is a lot of [00:12:00] data there is a lot of work that goes in why not make the most use of it began? What is enabled by open science? Ben: Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Do you have any like really good sort of like Keystone examples of these things in action like places where because people could replicate the. The the study they could actually go back to the pipeline or reuse the data that something was enabled. That wasn't that wouldn't have been possible. Otherwise, Brian: yeah. Well, let's see. I'll give a couple of local mean personal examples just to just to illustrate some of the points, please so we have the super fun project that we did just to illustrate this second part of the pipeline right this robustness phase of. People may make different choices and those choices may have implications for the reliability results. So what we did in this project was that we get we acquired a dataset [00:13:00] of a very rich data set of lots of players and referees and outcomes in soccer and we took that data set and then we recruit a different teams. 29 in the end different teams with lots of varied expertise and statistics and analyzing data and have them all investigate the same research. Which is our players with darker skin tone more likely to get a red card then players with lighter skin tone. And so that's you know, that's a question. We'll of Interest people have studied and then we had provided this data set. Here's a data set that you can use to analyze that and. The teams worked on their own and developed an analysis strategies for how they're going to test that hypothesis. They came up with their houses strategy. They submitted their analysis and their results to us. We remove the results and [00:14:00] then took their analysis strategies and then share them among the teams for peer review right different people looking at it. They have made different choices. They appear each other and then went back. They took those peer reviews. They didn't know what each other found but they took. Because reviews and they wanted to update their analysis they could and so they did all that and then submitted their final analyses and what we observed was that a huge variation in analysis choices and variation in the results. So as a simple Criterion for Illustrated the variation results two-thirds of the teams found a significant. Write P less than 0.05 standard for deciding whether you see something there in the data, right and Atherton teams found a null. So the and then of course they debated amongst each other which was analysis strategy was the right strategy but in the end it was very clear among the teams that there are lots of reasonable choices that could be made. And [00:15:00] those reasonable choices had implications for the results that were observed from the same data. Yeah, and it's Standard Process. We do not see the how it's not easy to observe how the analytics choices influence the results, right? We see a paper. It has an outcome we say those are what the those fats those the outcomes of the data room. Right, but what actually the case is that those are the outcomes the data revealed contingent on all those choices that the researcher made and so that I think just as an illustrative illustrative. So it helps to figure out the robustness of that particular finding given the many different reasonable choices. That one would make where if we had just seen one would have had a totally different interpretation, right either. Yeah, it's there or it's not there. How do you encode context for experiments esp. with People? Ben: Yeah, and in terms of sort of that the data and. [00:16:00] Really sort of exposing the the study more something that that I've seen especially in. These is that it seems like the context really matters and people very often are like, well there's there's a lot of context going on in addition to just the procedure that's reported. Do you have any thoughts on like better ways of sort of encoding and recording that context especially for experiments that involve? Brian: Yeah. Yeah. This is a big challenge is because we presume particularly in the social and life sciences that there are many interactions between the different variables. Right but climate the temperature the time of day the circadian rhythms the personalities whatever it is that is the different elements of the subjects of the study whether they be the plants or people or otherwise, yeah. [00:17:00] And so the. There are a couple of different challenges here to unpack one is that in our papers? We State claims at the maximal level of generality. We can possibly do it and that that's just a normal pattern of human communication and reasoning right? I do my study in my lab at the University of Virginia on University of Virginia undergraduates. I don't conclude in the. University of university University of Virginia undergraduates in this particular date this particular time period this particular class. This is what people do with the recognition that that might be wrong right with recognition. There might be boundary conditions but not often with articulating where we think theoretically those boundary conditions could be so in one step of. Is actually putting what some colleagues in psychology of this great paper about about constraints on [00:18:00] generality. They suggest what we need in all discussion sections of all papers is a sexually say when won't this hold yeah, just give them what you know, where where is this not going to hold and just giving people an occasion to think about that for a second say oh. - okay. Yeah, actually we do think this is limited to people that live in Virginia for these reasons right then or no, maybe we don't really think this applies to everybody but now we have to say so you can get the call it up. So that alone I think would make a huge difference just because it would provide that occasion to sort of put the constraints ourselves as The Originators of findings a second factor, of course is just sharing as much of the materials as possible. But often that doesn't provide a lot of the context particularly for more complex experimental studies or if there are particular procedural factors right in a lot of the biomedical Sciences there. There's a lot of nuance [00:19:00] into how it is that this particular reagent needs to be dealt with how they intervention needs to be administered Etc. And so I like the. Moves towards video of procedures right? So there is a journal Journal of visualized events jove visualized experiments that that that tries to that gives people opportunities to show the actual experimental protocol as it is administered. To try to improve it a lot of people using the OSF put videos up of the experiment as they administered it. So to maximize your ability to sort of see how it is that it was done through. So those steps I think can really help to maximize the transparency of those things that are hard to put in words or aren't digitally encoded oil. Yeah, and those are real gaps What is the ultimate version of open science? Ben: got it. And so. In your mind what is sort of like the endgame of all this? What is it? Like what [00:20:00] would be the ideal sort of like best-case scenario of science? Like how would that be conducted? So I say you get to control the world and you get to tell everybody practicing science exactly what to do. What would that look like? Brian: Well, if it if I really had control we would just all work on Wikipedia and we would just revising one big paper with the new applicants. Ask you got it continuously and we get all of our credit by. You know logging how many words that I changed our words that survived after people have made their revisions and whether those words changed are on pages that were more important for the overall scientific record versus the less important spandrels. And so we would output one paper that is the summary of knowledge, which is what Wikipedia summarizes. All right, so maybe that's that's maybe going a little bit further than what like [00:21:00] that we can consider. The realm of conceptually possible. So if we imagine a little bit nearer term, what I would love to see is the ability to trace the history of any research project and that seems more achievable in the sense that. If a every in fact, my laboratory is getting close to this, right every study that we do is registered on the OSF. And once we finish the studies, we post the materials and the data or as we're doing it if we're managing the materials and data and then we attach a paper if we write a paper at the end preprint or the final report so that people can Discover it and all of those things are linked together. Be really cool if I had. Those data in a standardized framework of how it is that they are [00:22:00] coded so that they could be automatically and easily integrated with other similar kinds of data so that someone going onto the system would be able to say show me all the studies that ever investigated this variable associated with this variable and tell me what the aggregate result is Right real-time meta-analysis of the entire database of all data that I've ever been collected that. Enough flexibility would help to really very rapidly. I think not just spur Innovations and new things but to but help to point out where there are gaps right there a particular kinds of relationships between things particular effects of predict interventions where we know a ton and then we have this big assumption in our theoretical framework about how we get from X to y. And then as we look for variables that help us to identify whether X gets us to why we feel there just isn't stuff. The literature has not filled that Gap. So I think there are huge benefits for that [00:23:00] kind of aggregate ability. But mostly what I want to be able to do is instead of saying you have to do research in any particular way. The only requirement is you have to show us how you did your research and your particular way so that the marketplace of ideas. Can operate as efficiently as possible and that really is the key thing? It's not preventing bad ideas from getting into the system. It's not about making sure that the different kinds of best things are the ones that immediately are through with not that about Gatekeepers. It's about efficiency in how it is. We call that literature of figuring out which things are credible which things are not because it's really useful to. The ideas into the system as long as they can be. Self-corrected efficiently as well. And that's where I think we are not doing well in the current system. We're doing great on generation. [00:24:00] We're General kinds of innovative ideas. Yeah, but we're not is parsing through those ideas as efficiently as it could decide which ones are worth actually investing more resources in jumping. A couple levels in advance that Talmud for Science Ben: that makes a lot of sense and actually like I've definitely come across many papers just on the internet like you go and Google Scholar and you search and you find this paper and in fact, it has been refuted by another paper and there's no way to know that yeah, and so. I does your does the open science framework address that in any way? Brian: No, it doesn't yet. And this is a critical issue is the connectivity between findings and the updating of knowledge because the way that like I said doesn't an indirect way but it doesn't in the systematic way that actually would solve this problem. The [00:25:00] main challenge is that we treat. Papers as static entities. When what their summarizing is happening very dynamically. Right. It may be that a year later. After that paper comes out one realizes. We should have analyze that data totally different. We actually analyzed it wrong is indefensible the way that we analyzed it. Right right. There are very few mechanisms for efficiently updating that paper in a way that would actually update the knowledge and that's something where we all agree. That's analyze the wrong way, right? What are my options? I could. Retract the paper. So it's no longer in existence at all. Supposedly, although even retracted papers still get cited we guess nuts. So that's a base problem. Right or I could write a correction, which is another paper that comments on that original paper that may not itself even be discoverable with the original paper that corrects the analysis. Yeah, and that takes months and years. [00:26:00] All right. So the really what I think is. Fundamental for actually addressing this challenge is integrating Version Control with scholarly publishing. So that papers are seen as Dynamic objects not static objects. And so if you know what I would love to see so here's another Milestone of this if we if I could control everything another Milestone would be if a researcher could have a very productive career with. Only working on a single paper for his or her whole life, right? So they have a really interesting idea. And they just continue to investigate and build the evidence and challenge it and figure, you know, just continue to unpack it and they just revise that paper over time. This is what we understand. Now, this is where it is. Now. This is what we've learned over here are some other exceptions but they just keep fine-tuning it and then you get to see the versions of that paper over its [00:27:00] 50-year history as that phenomenon got unpacked that. Plus the integration with other literature would make this much more efficient for exactly the problem that you raised which is we with papers. We don't know what the current knowledge base is. We have no real good way except for these. These attempts to summarize the existing literature with yet a new paper and that doesn't then supersede those old papers. It's just another paper is very inefficient system. Can Social Sciences 'advance' in the same way as the physical sciences? Ben: Ya know that that totally makes sense. Actually. I just I have sort of a meta question that I've argued with several people about which is do you feel like. We can make advances in our understanding of sort of like [00:28:00] human-centered science in the same way that we can in like chemistry or physics. Like people we very clearly have like building blocks of physics and the Builds on itself. And there's I've had debates with people about whether you can do this in. In the humanities and the social sciences. What are your thoughts on that? Brian: Yeah. It is an interesting question and the. What seems to be the biggest barrier is not anything about methodology in particular but about complexity? Yeah, right, if the problem being many different inputs can have similar impact cause similar kinds of outcomes and singular inputs can have multivariate outcomes that it influences and all of those different inputs in terms of causal elements may have interactive effects on the [00:29:00] outs, so. How can we possibly develop Rich enough theories to predict the actions effectively and then ultimately explain the actions effectively of humans in a complex environments. It doesn't seem that we will get to the beautiful equations that underlie a lot of physics and chemistry and count for a substantial amount of evidence. So the thing that I don't feel like I under have any good hand along with that is if it's a theoretical or practical limit right is it just not possible because it's so complex and there isn't this predicted. Or it's just that's really damn hard. But if we had big enough computers if you had enough data, if we were able to understand complex enough models, we would be able to predict it. Right so is as a mom cycle historians, right? They figure it out right the head. [00:30:00] Oxidizing web series righty they could account for 99.9 percent of the variance of what people do next and but of course, even there it went wrong and that was sort of the basis of the whole ceilings. But yeah, I just don't know I don't have a way to. I don't yet have a framework for thinking about how is it that I could answer that question whether it's a practical or theoretical limit. Yeah. What do you think? Ben: What do I think I think that it's great. Yeah, so I usually actually come down on the I think it's a practical limit now how much it would take to get there might make it effectively a theoretical limit right now. But that there's there's nothing actually preventing us from like if you if you could theoretically like measure everything why not? I [00:31:00] think that is just with again. It's like the it's really a measurement problem and we do get better at measuring things. So that's the that's that's where I come down on but I. How do you shift incentives in science? Yep, that's just purely like I have no good argument. going going back to the incentives. It seems to me like a lot of what like I'm completely convinced that these changes would. Definitely accelerate the number of innovations that we have and so and it seems like a lot of these changes require shifting scientists incentives. And so and that's like a notoriously hard thing so we both like how are you going about shifting those incentives right now and how might they be shifted in the future. [00:32:00] Brian: Yeah, that's a great question. That's what we spend. A lot of our time worrying about in the sense of there is very little at least in my experience is very distal disagreement on the problems and the opportunities for improving the pace of Discovery and Innovation based on the solutions. It really is about the implementation. How is it that you change that those cultural incentives so that we can align. The values that we have for science with the practices that researchers do on a daily basis and that's a social problem. Yeah, there are technical supports. But ultimately it's a social problem. And so the the near term approach that we have is to recognize the systems of rewards as they are. And see how could we refine those to align with some of these improved practices? So we're not pitching. Let's all work on [00:33:00] Wikipedia because that's that is so far distant from. What they systems have reward for scientist actually surviving and thriving in science that we wouldn't be able to get actually pragmatic traction. Right? So I'll give one example of can give a few but here's the starting with one of an example that integrates with current incentives but changes them in a fundamental way and that is the publishing model of registered reports. Sophie in the standard process right? I do my research. I write up my studies and then I submit them for peer review at the highest possible prestigious Journal that I can hoping that they will not see all the flaws and if they'll accept it. I'll get all the do that process me and I understand it anyway - journal and the P plus Terminal C and eventually somewhere and get accepted. The register report model makes one change to the process and that is to move. The critical point of peer review [00:34:00] from after the results are known and I've written up the report and I'm all done with the research to after I've figured out what the question that I want to investigate is and what the methodology that I'm going to use so I don't have an observed the outcomes yet. All I've done is frame question. An articulated why it's important and a methodology that I'm going to just to test that question and that's what the peer reviewers evaluate right? And so the key part is that it fits into the existing system perfectly, right? The the currency of advancement is publication. I need to get as many Publications as I can in the most prestigious Outlets. I can to advance my career. We don't try to change that. Instead we just try to change. What is the basis for making a decision about publication and by moving the primary stage of peer reviewed before the results are known does a fundamental change in what I'm being rewarded for as the author [00:35:00] right? Yeah, but I'm being rewarded for as the author in the current system is sexy results, right get the best most interesting most Innovative results. I can write and the irony of that. Is that the results of the one thing that I'm not supposed to be able to control in your study? Right? Right. What I'm supposed to be able to control is asking interesting questions and developing good methodologies to test those questions. Of course that's oversimplifying a bit. There are in there. The presumption of emphasizing results is that my brilliant insights at the outset of the project are the reason that I was able to get those great results, right, but that depends on the credibility of that entire Pipeline and put that aside but the moving it to at the design stage means that my incentive as an author is to ask the most important questions that I can. And develop the most compelling and effective and valid methodologies that I can to test them. [00:36:00] Yeah, and so that changes to what it is presumably we are supposed to be being rewarded for in science. The other thing that it changes in the there's a couple of other elements of incentive changes that it has an impact on that are important for the whole process right for reviewers instant. It's. When I am asked to review a paper in my area of research when I when all the results are there, I have skin in the game as a reviewer. I'm an expert in that area. I may have made claims about things in that particular area. Yeah, if the paper challenges my cleanse make sure to find all kinds of problems with the methodology. I can't believe they did this is this is a ridiculous thing, right? We write my paper. That's the biggest starting point problem challenge my results all well forget out of you. But the amount of course if it's aligned with [00:37:00] my findings and excites me gratuitously, then I will find lots of reasons to like the paper. So I have these Twisted incentives to reinforce findings and behave ideologically as a reviewer in the existing system by moving peer review to the design stage. It fundamentally changes my incentives to right so say I'm in a very contentious area of research and there's only ten opponents on a particular claim when we are dealing with results You can predict the outcome right it people behave ideologically even when they're not trying to when you don't know the results. Both people have the same interests, right? If I truly believe in the phenomenon that I'm studying and the opponents of my point of view also believe in their perspective, right then both want to review that study and that design and that methodology to maximize its quality to reveal the truth, which I think I [00:38:00] have and so that alignment actually makes adversaries. To some extent allies and in review and makes the reviewer and the author more collaborative, right the feedback that I give on that paper can actually help the methodology get better. Whereas in the standard process when I say here's all the things you did wrong. All the author has this to say well geez, you're a jerk. Like I can't do anything about that. I've already done the research and so I can't fix it. Yeah. So the that shifts earlier is much more collaborative and helps with that then the other question is the incentives for the journal right? So in the. Journal editors have strong incentives of their own they want leadership. They want to have impact they don't want the one that destroyed their journal and so [00:39:00] the incentives and the in the existing model or to publish sexy results because more people were read those results. They might cite those results. They might get more attention for their Journal, right? And shifting that to on quality designs then shift their priorities to publishing the most rigorous research the most rust robust research and to be valued based on that now. Yeah, so I'll pause there there's lots of other things to say, but those I think are some critical changes to the incentive landscape that still fits. Into the existing way that research is done in communicated. Don't people want to read sexy results? Ben: Yeah. I have a bunch of questions just to poke at that last point a little bit wouldn't people still read the journals that are publishing the most sexy results sort of regardless of whether they were web what stage they're doing that peer review. Brian: Yeah. This is a key concern of editors and thinking about adopting registered reports. [00:40:00] So we have about a hundred twenty-five journals that are offering this now, but we continue to pitch it to other groups and other other ones, but one of the big concerns that Hunters have is if I do this then I'm going to end up publishing a bunch of no results and no one will read my journal known will cite it and I will be the one that ruined my damn door. All right. So it is a reasonable concern because of the way the system works now, so there's a couple answers to that but the one is empirical which is is it actually the case that these are less red or less cited than regular articles that are published in those. So we have a grant from the McDonald Foundation to actually study registered reports. And the first study that we finished is a comparison of articles that were done as register reports with this in the same published in the same Journal. [00:41:00] Articles that were done the regularly to see if they are different altmetrics attention, right citation and attention and Oppa in media and news and social media and also citation impact at least early stage citation impact because the this model is new enough that it isn't it's only been working for since 2014. In terms of first Publications and what we found in that is that at least in this initial data set. There's no difference in citation rates, and if anything the register report. Articles have gotten more altmetric impact social media news media. That's great. So at least the initial data suggests that who knows if that will sustain generalize, but the argument that I would make in terms of a conceptual argument is that if Studies have been vetted. In terms of without knowing the results. These are important results to know [00:42:00] right? So that's what the actors and the reviewers have to decide is do we need to know the outcome of this study? Yeah, if the answer is yes that this is an important enough result that we need to know what happened that any result is. Yeah, right. That's the whole idea is that we're doing the study harder find out what the world says about that particular hypothesis that particular question. Yeah, so it become citable. Whereas when were only evaluating based on the results. Well, yeah things that Purity people is that that's crazy, but it happened. Okay, that's exciting. But if you have a paper where it's that's crazy and nothing happened. Then people say well that was a crazy paper. Yeah, and that paper would be less likely to get through the register report kind of model that makes a lot of sense. You could even see a world where because they're being pre-registered especially for more like the Press people can know to pay attention to it. [00:43:00] So you can actually almost like generate a little bit more height. In terms of like oh we're not going to do this thing. Isn't that exciting? Yeah, exactly. So we have a reproducibility project in cancer biology that we're wrapping up now where we do we sample a set of studies and then try to replicate findings from those papers to see where where can we reproduce findings in the where are their barriers to be able to reproduce existing? And all of these went through the journal elife has registered reports so that we got peer review from experts in advance to maximize the quality of the designs and they published instead of just registering them on OSF, which they are they also published the register reports as an article of its own and those did generate lots of Interest rule that's going to happen with this and that I think is a very effective way to sort of engage the community on. The process of actual Discovery we don't know the answer to these [00:44:00] things. Can we build in a community-based process? That isn't just about let me tell you about the great thing that I just found and more about. Let me bring you into our process. How does were actually investigating this problem right and getting more that Community engagement feedback understanding Insight all along the life cycle of the research rather than just as the end point, which I think is much more inefficient than it could be. Open Science in Competitive Fields and Scooping Ben: Yeah and. On the note of pre-registering. Have you seen how it plays out in like extremely competitive Fields? So one of the world's that I'm closest to is like deep learning machine learning research and I have friends who keep what they're doing. Very very secret because they're always worried about getting scooped and they're worried about someone basically like doing the thing first and I could see people being hesitant to write down to [00:45:00] publicize what they're going to do because then someone else could do it. So, how do you see that playing out if at all? Brian: Yeah scoping is a real concern in the sense that people have it and I think that is also a highly inflated concern based on the reality of what happens in practice but nevertheless because people have the concern systems have to be built to address it. Yeah, so one simple answer on the addressing the concern and then reasons to be skeptical at the. The addressing the concern with the OSF you can pre-register an embargo your pre-registrations from to four years. And what that does is it still gets all the benefits of registering committing putting that into an external repository. So you have independent verification of time and date and what you said you were going to do but then gives you as the researcher the flexibility to [00:46:00] say I need this to remain private for some period of time because of whatever reason. As I need it to be private, right? I don't want the recent participants that I am engaged in this project to discover what the design is or I don't want it competitors to discover what the design is. So that is a pragmatic solution is sort of dress. Okay, you got that concern. Let's meet that concern with technology to help to manage the current landscape. There are a couple reasons to be skeptical that the concern is actually much of a real concerning practice Tristan. And one example comes from preprints. So a lot of people when they pre princess sharing the paper you have of some area of research prior to going through peer review and being published in a journal write and in some domains like physics. It is standard practice the archive which is housed at Cornell is the standard for [00:47:00] anybody in America physics to share their research through archive prior to publication in other fields. It's very new or unknown but emerging. But the exact same concern about scooping comes up regularly where they say there's so many people in our field if I share a preprint someone else with the lab that is productive lab is going to see my paper. They're going to run the studies really fast. They're going to submit it to a journal that will publish and quickly and then I'll lose my publication because it'll come out in this other one, right and that's a commonly articulated concern. I think there are very good reasons to be skeptical of it in practice and the experience of archive is a good example. It's been operating since 1991 physicists early in its life articulated similar kinds of concerns and none of them have that concern now, why is it that they don't have that concern now? Well the Norms have shifted from the way you establish priority [00:48:00] is not. When it's published in the journal, it's when you get it onto archive. Right? Right. So a new practice becomes standard. It's when is it that the community knows about what it is you did that's the way you get that first finder Accolade and that still carries through to things like publication a second reason is that. We all have a very inflated sense of self importance that our great our kids right? There's an old saw in in venture capital of take your best idea and try to give it to your competitor and most of the time you can write. We think of our own ideas really amazing and everyone else doesn't yeah people sleeping other people. Is Right Southern the idea that there are people looking their chops on waiting for your paper your registration to show up so they can steal your [00:49:00] idea and then use it and claim it as their own is is great. It's shows High self-esteem. And that's great. I am all for high self. I don't know and then the last part is that. It is a norm violation to do that to such a strong degree to do the stealing of and not crediting someone else for their work, but it's actually very addressable in the daily practice of how science operates which is if you can show that you put that registration or that paper up on a independent service and then it was it appeared prior to the other person doing it. And then that other group did try to steal it and claim it as their own. Well, that's misconduct. And if they did if they don't credit you as the originator then that's something that is a norm violation and how science operates and I'm actually pretty confident in the process of dealing with Norm [00:50:00] violations in the scientific Community. I've had my own experience with the I think this very rarely happens, but I have had an experience with it. I've posted papers on my website before there were pretty print services in the behavioral sciences since I. Been a faculty member and I've got a Google Scholar one day and was reading. Yeah, the papers that I have these alerts set up for things that are related to my work and I paper showed up and I was like, oh that sounds related to some things. I've been working on. So I've clicked on the link to the paper and I went to the website. So I'm reading the paper. I from these authors I didn't recognize and then I realized wait that's that's my paper. I need a second and I'm an author and I didn't submit it to that journal. And it was my paper. They had taken a paper off of my website. They had changed the abstract. They run it through Google translate. It looks like it's all Gobbledy gook, but it was an abstract. But the rest of it was [00:51:00] essentially a carbon copy of our paper and they published. Well, you know, so what did I do? I like contacted the editor and we actually is on retraction watch this story about someone stealing my paper and retraction watch the laughing about it and it got retracted. And as far as we heard the person that had gone it lost their job, and I don't know if that's true. I never followed. But there are systems place is the basic point to deal with the Regis forms of this. And so I have I am sanguine about those not be real issues. But I also recognize they are real concerns. And so we have to have our Technology Solutions be able to address the concerns as they exist today. And I think the those concerns will just disappear as people gain experience. Top down v Bottom up for driving change Ben: Got it. I like that distinction between issues and concerns that they may not be the same thing. To I've been paying attention to sort of the tactics that you're [00:52:00] taking to drive this adoption. And there's some bottom up things in terms of changing the culture and getting one Journal at a time to change just by convincing them and there's also been some some top-down approaches that you've been using and I was wondering if you could just sort of go through those and what you feel like. Is is the most effective or what combinations of things are are the most effective for really driving this change? Brian: Yeah. No, it's a good question because this is a culture change is hard especially with the decentralized system like science where there is no boss and the different incentive drivers are highly distributed. Right, right. He has a richer have a unique set of societies. Are relevant to establishing my Norms you could have funders that fund my work a unique set of journals that I publish in and my own institution. And so every researcher [00:53:00] has that unique combination of those that all play a role in shaping the incentives for his or her behavior and so fundamental change if we're talking about just at the level of incentives not even at the level of values and goals requires. Massive shift across all of those different sectors not massive in terms of the amount of things they need to shift but in the number of groups that need to make decisions tissue. Yeah, and so the we need both top-down and bottom-up efforts to try to address that and the top down ones are. That we work on at least are largely focused on the major stakeholders. So funders institutions and societies particularly ones that are publishing right so journals whether through Publishers societies, can we get them like with the top guidelines, which is this framework that that has been established to promote? What are the transparency standards? What could we [00:54:00] require of authors or grantees or employees of our organizations? Those as a common framework provide a mechanism to sort of try to convince these different stakeholders to adopt new standards new policies to that that then everybody that associated with that have to follow or incentivised to follow simultaneously those kinds of interventions don't necessarily get hearts and minds and a lot of the real work in culture change. Is getting people to internalize what it is that mean is good science is rigorous work and that requires a very bottom up community-based approach to how Norms get established Within. What are effectively very siloed very small world scientific communities that are part of the larger research community. And so with that we do a lot [00:55:00] of Outreach to groups search starting with the idealists right people who already want to do these practices are already practicing rigorous research. How can we give them resources and support to work on shifting those Norms in their small world communities and so. Out of like the preprint services that we host or other services that allow groups to form. They can organize around a technology. There's a preprint service that our Unity runs and then drive the change from the basis of that particular technology solution in a bottom-up way and the great part is that to the extent that both of these are effective they become self reinforcing. So a lot of the stakeholder leaders and editor of a journal will say that they are reluctant. They agree with all the things that we trying to pitch to them as ways to improve rigor and [00:56:00] research practices, but they don't they don't have the support of their Community yet, right. They need to have people on board with this right well in we can the bottom. It provides that that backing for that leader to make a change and likewise leaders that are more assertive are willing to sort of take some chances can help to drive attention and awareness in a way that facilitates the bottom-up communities that are fledgling to gain better standing and we're impact so we really think that the combination of the two is essential to get at. True culture change rather than bureaucratic adoption of a process that now someone told me I have to do yeah, which could be totally counterproductive to Scientific efficiency and Innovation as you described. Ben: Yeah, that seems like a really great place to to end. I know you have to get running. So I'm really grateful. [00:57:00] This is this has been amazing and thank you so much. Yeah, my pleasure.
Julie Yoo is the co-founder of Kyruus, a medical technology company that is the developer of ProviderMatch. One of the most frustrating things about the healthcare system is the tendency for patients to be sent to the wrong type of doctor for their health issue. The industry term for this problem is patient access paradox. ProviderMatch is software that directs patients to the proper medical specialist for their specific needs. During today’s episode, Julie and I discuss the components that make ProviderMatch an effective tool. Some of the topics we touch on are: How ProviderMatch has changed the customer service side of healthcare. How ProviderMatch helps combat physician burnout. The 3 major user bases served by the application. The 3 types of tests Kyruus uses to test new and upgraded product features. The 3 levels of analytics that Kyruus uses to measure RIO and value. Resources and Links: Kyruus Kyruus on Facebook Kyruus on LinkedIn Kyruus on Twitter Julie Yoo on Twitter Julie Yoo on LinkedIn Thank you for joining us for today’s episode of Experiencing Data. Keep coming back for more episodes with great conversations about the world through the lens of analytics and design. Episode Transcript Brian: All right so we have Julie Yoo on the podcast today from Kyruus which is based out of Boston. Julie, welcome to the podcast. How’s it going? Julie: Good, thanks Brian. Thank you so much for having me. Brian: I’m excited for you to share some of your backgrounds with our listeners. You’re currently chief product officer at Kyruus. We did some work together several years back as I recall. This is actually news to me, I don’t know this—you’re in the healthcare space and you oversee product and strategy for the company and hospitals. When we all call and we want to schedule an appointment with a doctor, a lot of us get a referral from a friend or whatever and we call them and it’s difficult to get an appointment. Reality, the hospitals often have tons of supply on their end that’s not getting used and those doctors or service providers may be fully qualified to help out those patients if only the people on the scheduling side could help match the patients up with the service provider. Is that basically what your main software, the ProviderMatch software, does? Julie: Yeah absolutely. We’re solving what we’ve coined as the patient access paradox which is that fundamental mismatch between patient demands being told to wait multiple weeks or even months to get an appointment. We all assume that that’s because every slot is booked up solid in whatever market we’re in. But it turns out that on the hospital side of things and the whole system side of things, that typically our customers are operating at anywhere from as low as 70% to 80% capacity utilization. One thing I’ll qualify there, it’s not necessarily just empty slots that are going out completely unused which is certainly an issue. But what we also focus on in best utilizing your resources for the unique expertise and skills that they bring to the table. What we also focus on is are you getting to the right doctor the first time, and that’s from a clinical lens. There’s tons of subspecialties in medicine and we want to make sure you’re getting to the right specialist. Or subspecialist or even within primary care there can be variants in terms of what people focus on. Also level of care which is if you have certain types of conditions, oftentimes part of the reason why you have to wait so long is that you’re sent immediately to a very scarce specialist resource who tends to be harder to book with, has more limited time. Whereas that condition may actually be treatable by a lower acuity provider. Anything from a generalist to primary care provider, maybe even a nurse practitioner, or even a walk-in clinic. This day and age, we see a lot more activity in terms of retail clinics and walk-in care. We look across that entire spectrum of possible options to interpretation and ensure that the patient is getting routed to the most effective place in the most efficient and possible way. Brian: That’s pretty cool. I didn’t realize there is so much missed—I mean obviously the specialists wants to see them. I have any arm problem, I need to go to the best arm doctor in the world kind of thing. We didn’t know that there was so tax, like 70% to 80% under utilization rate is pretty interesting. So why don’t you tell me about your background. I know you studied pre medicine at MIT and you have an MBA from Harvard, is that correct? And you went to MIT Sloan. You have quite a background. What do you do at Kyruus yourself, and can you tell us about your background a little bit? Julie: Yeah, absolutely. It’s blasphemy that you just said that I went to Harvard MBA. I went to MIT for my MBA. Actually, I came to MIT as an undergrad thinking that I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up. I started out as a biology major doing pre med. I’m happy to be in school during the initial original dot-com boom back in the late ’90s and actually got influenced to get computer science and fell in love with it. Just the problem solving aspects of it, and I love coding and building things from nothing. I ended up actually majoring in computer science while also finishing up my premed exam requirement. My first job out of college was actually as a software engineer so I totally focused on the technical side of that track. Always, however, maintaining my personal interests in the intersection of healthcare and technology. The first several years of my career was software engineering. I worked at a company called Endeca Technologies here in Boston which I think is pretty well-known locally. They were an enterprise search technology initially focused and I think probably best known for their work in the ecommerce space. We powered the online search catalog for the major ecommerce companies across the country and even the world. I cut my fuse there and then ultimately figured out that I love being customer facing, I was kind of intrigued by the business side of things. I migrated more into product and eventually now today, I’m more of a product manager is kind of where I would identify myself. Also at the same time about six years since my career at Endeca, that was really when the federal government started pouring resources into the digitization of healthcare and that was really when I had a lightbulb moment myself around the opportunity within healthcare to apply software and technology and data to improve efficiencies as we were talking about earlier but also […] simple outcomes, of course. And so I actually made a career change by way of grad school which is how I ended up at MIT Sloan. The Harvard component is that I did a dual degree program that was a collaboration between Harvard and MIT. By way of that, I got exposure to both the business side as well as the clinical side. The Harvard-MIT HST program is the collaboration between Harvard Medical School and MIT Proper. I did my masters with that program. I initially actually focused on personalized medicine, something that’s completely unrelated to what we do here at Kyruus but it was intuitively an area where I can apply my data analytics and software expertise given that […] where software was being applied at scale in the healthcare and life sciences area. The first couple of companies that I did were in that area of genomics and genetic sequencing and personalized medicine. I had a couple of companies that I worked with there, especially the first employee of both companies on the product side, and both of those companies eventually got acquired. The second company was acquired in 2010, that was when myself and my current cofounder Graham Gardner decided to get together and go after the opportunity that Kyruus has focused on around patient access. I was the founding chief product officer at Kyruus. I wrote the first version of the product with my own two hands and have shaped the road map, user engagement, definitely own design as part of the product management function and have now as the company has scaled moved into more of a strategy role. Really focused on three to five years direction of the business, new market segment, how do we fit into the broader technology ecosystem within the digital health space but really have my anchoring and foundation in product. Brian: Cool. Thanks for sharing that background. You mentioned in there that you own the design as part of your role in product at Kyruus. If I recall correctly with ProviderMatch, the primary end users tend to be people that are scheduling appointments which may include some people with medical background like the nurse managers I believe and you’re trying to provide them with the tool that lets them take in patient requests or things like language of the provider, gender of the provider, location of the provider and obviously dates of availability. Then they are able to type in a condition like skin rash or something and then the scheduler is able to provide them with a response like, “We have these four people available on Tuesday from 11:00 to 3:00, they’re all great, here’s where they went to school.” Is that still what it is and can you tell me about how do you go about designing that experience and how do you guys know if you’re doing a good job besides the fact that the checks clear and they keep renewing. How do you guys evaluate and design for that? Julie: Yeah. You do remember correctly that one of our major user bases is the patient after call center agent who is a front line staff member whose job is to answer the phone all day every day and help patients get matched to the right doctor and then book an appointment. That was our flagship product called ProviderMatch for access centers that we launched over five years ago at this point. That remains a major user constituent that we serve. Since then, we’ve expanded our product portfolio just to make it a little bit more complicated. We actually now I would say have three major users that we serve in addition to that. One being the call center agent that you described, another actually being the patient or the consumer, him or herself. We actually have launched a patient facing product called ProviderMatch for Consumers several years ago at this point, but the idea there is to enable us consumers to self-serve. We have a white label product that our customers will embed in their websites or their mobile apps. They’re kind of public facing digital storefront, so to speak. That allows for us to do our own research on who might be the best provider for me based on my preferences and my criteria. And then also facilitate on my scheduling, being able to actually book an appointment physically online. That’s the second user-base that we serve. Then a third major user-base is actually the physicians and the providers themselves and this has become a very powerful leverage point for us to be able to engage these organizations at scale and really provide a strong value proposition back to the physicians who I would say, traditionally in the digital health world, are sometimes viewed as optical. A lot of companies struggle to really engage with those providers and expect the value proposition that’s big enough to get those individuals to buy in, let alone to actually use product. You may recall originally my philosophy around ProviderMatch was we need to design a product that can be deployed and go live and drive value without any reliance on physicians doing anything in our product. The primary reason for that is that physicians are extremely busy. I think the strategy to depend on the physician to come out of whatever their core workflow is, take away from the time that they’re spending with a patient to learn a new thing and/or using a different app than what is core to their clinical mission through observing the patient. We actually started with that philosophy, but as we matured and as we were demonstrating great outcomes, we were able to kind of pivot into a much more explicit physician engagement approach. Today, they are actually the majority of our users, technically speaking, in terms of the number of users who are accessing our products, that’s another dimension to it. As you can imagine, each of those user bases is extremely different. We could go on and on and I’m happy to go in whatever direction would make sense but we have a pretty distinct framework that we use for each one of those user-bases. Yes, we serve them all through the same uniform platform and there are certain elements of consistencies that we want to drive across user experience across those three user-bases. But as you can imagine, the use cases, the stories, the scenarios that we’re addressing within each of those products can be quite […]. Brian: Can you tell us a little bit about how you design for these different constituencies, if you have like a recent anecdote about maybe a project you guys did and how do you keep all this simple and keep the scheduling time as minimal as possible which I assume would be the goal here, so that the maximum time is spent on patient care? How do you design for those experiences? How do you move through that? Julie: I think just the basic thing we start is just a crisp definition of the actual user personas and certainly each of those user sets is using our product for a very different purpose. Take the call center agent for instance, when they answer the phone, the person on the other end of the phone clearly already has some intention of taking some action because they’ve gone through the work of dialing the member, waiting for someone to answer, and clearly are looking to get served. A lot of message that around that user base is efficiency. You’ve got only a few seconds to capture the attention of that customer and essentially convert them. One of the ways that we define the job of the call center agent that might be distinct from the other users is their primary goal is conversion. They need to drive yields from every 10 calls that come in with a patient looking to get an appointment. We want the number of booked appointments that come out of that to actually be 10. Some of the sort of sad state of affairs in the healthcare industry is that many of the organizations that we engage with are starting at conversion rates as low as 20% meaning every 10 patient that call in, trying to get an appointment, maybe only 2 of them will leave that call with an actual booked appointment in hand. There’s a ton of sort of depth around how do we drive that use case for that user base, which is distinct from the consumer. The consumer, I may just be doing research and I might be early in my funnel, in my patient journey and not yet ready to book an appointment when I’m engaging with ProviderMatch. It might not even be me, I might be doing some research on behalf of someone else or certainly I might be coming with an intention to book. I would say a big challenge that we’re still chipping away at and have tons to learn is how do you effectively segment those user stories and scenarios and serve all those user sets and narrative through a single product. That is a different set of problems. Whereas physicians, on the other hand, the primary goal for them to come into our solution is to optimize the configuration of rules engines that determine which patients get referred or scheduled with them. That’s much more of a personal experience in a lot of ways because the physician is looking to us, our products, to help describe to the world what it is that they do and under what circumstances should a patient be sent to me. That sort of elicits a whole different emotional experience in some ways that relies heavily on an empathy for the perspective of that physician and really a kind of, I would say, caution around making too many assumptions about what that individual is looking to accomplish or how they want to express their clinical expertise through our product. There’s a whole, again, another set of narratives around that piece Just that mere definition, hopefully it paints the picture of just the complexity that results from having to serve such user set. We do have different team that focus on different user experiences as well and that ability to have individuals specialize in certain areas just gives us a lot of depth around how we’re able focus and describe a lot of insight into those varied populations versus kind of diluting it by having teams spread across those areas. Those are some of the types of framework that we use to be able to effectively address those user populations. Brian: Do you have either your designers and/or the product managers, it sounds like you have them assigned to each of the different products that focus on the different personas, do they do any type of interviews or any type of research activities with these, I’m curious, you can like learn anything, have any cool nuggets of stuff that maybe you would have found out through the design process about talking to a doctor, like, “I would never type in that I’m an expert at this even though I totally am because X,” or… Julie: Yeah. Brian: …did you find any nuggets that are kind of interesting? Julie: Yeah, absolutely we do, I would say, three major types of testing. One is we actually are privileged to have lots of folks who are either physicians or ex-hospital administrators at our company, so we have in house team that can serve as sort of test users for a lot of our new concepts, where we do kind of an internal testing when we’re developing new ideas or get designs. That’s one way we do it. We also obviously use external testers as well, whether it be sites like usertesting.com or other service that allow you to recruit ad hoc users and test various concepts. We’ve got a lot of that kind of work as well. We also go observe our users at our customer site and we’ve done a combination of both observation of actual call center agent-type users within their dedicated setting, but also direct consumer research, we’ll giveaway Starbucks cards to regular people off the street who are willing to kind of sit down and give us feedback. All of that is a source of data into our process. So many stories of things were just completely eye opening. Everything from, I mentioned earlier, the emotion that gets elicited when you are working with a physician to try to define what their referral protocols are. Imagine sitting down with an engineer and designing a routing protocol for determining what project they get assigned to and just how personal of an experience that would be. That’s kind of the same lens that we observe and experience with the physician in a period of time where you may have read this or heard this, but certainly in healthcare, one of the major topics and stories that has a lot of buzz right now is physician burnout. We live and breathe it every single day with our users where physicians are really burned out and their job has become less about direct patient care and much more about administrative tasks and tracking of data and submission of billing information, things of that sort. Part of the line that we have to navigate is how do we introduce our solution which we believe has such a strong correlation with less burn out sensation and the ability to actually focus on the types of cases that you want to focus on and leverage your many years of training for the thing that you’re uniquely qualified to do. How do we do that in this context where people have no mental space and energy left to take on new products and new applications in the workforce, a new task. I think the emotional aspect of the finishing engagement piece is definitely something that I distinctly remember from so many of those conversations. And then I think it’s also form a consumer lens, when I think about the patients, I think we’re doing a big role. A part of our role at Kyruus I believe is to really educate market about how to think about doctor appointment booking. I think too often, consumers think that whatever appointment they can get soonest is the best option for them. Obviously, they don’t necessarily realize the downstream negative impact of making a choice to go see one kind of doctor who is available tomorrow versus waiting maybe a few days or maybe a couple of weeks to see the doctor who might be better qualified for you from a clinical end. That’s part of what our product is about, the core philosophy of our solution is, yes, get the patient in efficiently and quickly as possible but never at the expense of getting them to the right clinical provider. That’s another piece that I see come out in droves when we’re doing user-testing is, “Why can’t I just book this one that is the soonest,” before in the workflow two steps ago and just kind of explaining, how do we present that in the user experience has been a big challenge for us. But certainly something that is a primary goal for our product. Brian: Do you find with the service that you provide that’s more doctor facing especially on where they—it sounds like they have to input a bunch of preferences which then enables them to receive more qualified bookings into their calendar so to speak. Is it hard? One of the things I talk about in my list a lot is the need to go out and have direct one-on-one conversations with the people that are going to use your solutions. Especially with analytics products where lots of data—as the data grows, the complexity tends to go up. What one of the problems that enterprise that companies have is access to the actual, not the buyers of these platforms, maybe you’re selling into a CTO or something like that in a hospital network but they’re probably not the ones that are going to be using the interfaces and it’s hard to get access. Do you have that problem and do you have any ways that you’ve worked around to entice them to participate in research? Julie: Absolutely, that is absolutely a challenge for any company in our space with positions in particular at the audience. Even frankly with our call center agents because they have such a real time job that any interruption during the day while they’re on call to answer the phone can be viewed as engagement. Yes, we absolutely deal with that. We have the benefit of a—my cofounder’s position, our CEO, we happen to have a very rich network of physicians who are friendly to Kyruus and are certainly willing to take time out of their day to come tell us what it’s like on the other side and obviously their feedback on our product. We are very careful always to balance the types of physicians. There are physicians who work in organizations like Mass General here in Boston that are highly specialized, highly academic focused, probably have a big focus on research and are really on the leading edge of novel innovative medical treatment paradigm versus many of our clients who are not that and who are just regular old community based hospitals that kind of deal with the general population and are not necessarily seeing the most […] but have to serve millions of consumers and patients who have very basic needs. We’re always careful to balance the type of physicians that we talk to and get feedback from across those various settings. We also, over time I would say, have taken a much more prescriptive approach with our customers around physician engagement. Certainly has to be the case from the first launch that we were tip-toeing around the clinical leadership and didn’t want to bother the folks who were kind of on the clinical frontline. That became a challenge for us to really configure and validate the data within our platform to make sure that we’re driving the right outcome. Now, fast forward many years later, we actually have as part of our implementation playbook a requirement to engage with the clinical side of the business. That was a hard cultural transition to make both internally and with our customers. But now that we have so much data which we can probably talk about but, we have data that shows the benefit of doing that. Not only just data but oftentimes qualitative narrative plays a big role and just getting people to buy into that paradigm. We pretty explicitly sort of I wouldn’t say forcefully but you know, it’s highly recommend to our customers that Kyruus is employed as part of the acquisition process and directly talks to physicians. We’ve taken a pretty hard line on that and it certainly benefited us. Brian: So like when they sign a deal, there’s actually something in the agreement about your right to access their providers to make the service work and that type of thing? Julie: Not contractual at all, it’s part of our implementation playbook is what I’ll call it. Where we lay out here are the four tracks of implementation that we need to accomplish and X number of months. One of them is just purely technical data integration, things of that sort. One might be how do we design our workflow, one might be around analytics and then one is actually physician engagement. It’s really just part of our implementation methodology. Just like almost kind of a consulting mindset. When you hire a consulting firm, they’ve got their recommended way of doing things and you sort of assume that in order to get the best outcomes, you want to follow their playbook. That’s kind of the approach that we’ve used with our acquisition process. Brian: I see. That’s really interesting. I like that idea of encouraging it from the outset as part of a product company. I think that’s a really great idea to bake into your product if you’re on premise deployment type of situation where there’s some kind of set up process and you guys obviously have to go through some level of customization probably with every new hospital network that you guys bring onboard. Julie: We like to say configuration, not customization. But yes, absolutely. Brian: Oh okay. And you mentioned analytics at the end. I actually did want to jump into that. So obviously if you guys are selling this product on—you’re almost like a market maker. You’re bringing supply and demand, you’re optimizing supply and demand. What type of data, or interfaces, or maybe it’s APIs of the hospital. But I imagine they want to know what their ROI is for purchasing these systems. Do you have some type of reporting or analytics dashboard that helps the administrator? Who would be those users and tell me what some of their use cases might be if you indeed have something like that. Julie: Absolutely. Analytics is critical to the value narrative and ROI of our products. We actually do have a webpage in our analytics product, provide and match analytics that comes with our platform. There’s a number of ways by which we deploy it. So first of all, a user, an end user who has the appropriate level of authorization can just log into their browser window and see the analytics dashboard at any point of any day. We’ve obviously optimized it. We have a set of canned reports that we offer out of the box to represent the KPIs that we’ve designed as the leading indicator for the different products that we have. That’s one major component of it. We have a framework where we think about three levels of analytics. One is what I call reflective analytic which is kind of the most basic reporting where we’re sort of almost leading back to the organization what kinds of activity are flowing through our products. It is literally demand and supply. Meaning how many requests for this kind of appointment came in in the last week and then bumping that up against your provider network supply side so to speak saying did you have a sufficient supply to serve that need and what kinds of gaps do you have in that network. That’s kind of the most basic reflective analytics. One level up from that is what we call impact metrics that say okay, of the 1,000 calls that you got for interpolation related services last week, what percentage of them converted into an actual booked appointment? What percentage didn’t convert and what was the outcome of those calls, why weren’t you able to serve those needs? How many new patients were you able to acquire through your web based find a physician application that’s powered by ProviderMatch and how many accomplished customers returns to you, were loyal to you by coming back to you and booking a follow-up appointment. So those are some of the types of impact metrics that are kind of a level up from that requested data but demonstrates some kind of business outcome that our product is associated with. And then the third tier is ROI, true ROI, financial ROI that says, okay, so relative to baseline historically before you can click ProviderMatch, you were able to utilize X percent of your scheduled resources. You had X number patient appointment that were booked in an X period of time of this distribution across primary care and specialty care. There’s actually a benchmark dollar amount that are out there that are well accepted that represents the top line value of each booked appointment. So maybe your specialist cases are worth $2,000 and your primary care is worth $1,000 multiply out the volume that have come through ProviderMatch relative to baseline and determine what did you get for the money that you invested in our product. That obviously is a bit of a holy grail where you’re able to demonstrate what did you get back for how much you spent on Kyruus and obviously if you are willing to invest more. Those are kind of the three levels that we describe. The first two tend to be really self service. You can log in to that web page dashboard, see it, believe it, move on. We have an account management team that has a more of a high touch engagement model with that third tier where we go to the C-level executive team essentially and present that back in an actual face to face meeting on a quarterly basis because there’s a tremendous amount of depth, obviously a tremendous amount of assumption and business context that you need to be wrapped around the presentation of that kind of data. We make sure that we’re doing that in a fairly high touch way versus some of our more self service analytics report. Brian: That’s really interesting about how you called it reflective analytics and kind of moves up the value chain almost in terms of being able to quantify ROI for the investment. Is there a way to tell whether or not any ends that… I totally get hospitals there’s a financial side to healthcare. Obviously it’s a huge financial part of healthcare but in terms of improving patient lives and quality of healthcare and all of that, is there any way to quantify or measure from your service that healthcare is improving or it is that kind of implied from assuming more booked appointments with more qualified. We assume they got better. Is there any way to that you guys can provide that insight or is it too difficult? Julie: Yeah, we have a couple of ways to think about it. First of all, clinical quality measurement is something that we as a society have yet to crack fully. There is no silver bullet. If anything, there are way too many quality standards out there and not yet what I would call a systematic standard for measuring the impact of a good intervention from a clinical quality lens. We look at it from one of two ways. One is definitely a derivative by way of getting you two different doctors at first time in a timely fashion, we’re avoiding A, just making sure that you’re getting the care that you need, first of all and B, if you were to not get that care at a timely manner typically […] the delayed care can have a very detrimental impact in terms of the overall health of the patient. That’s more kind of a derivative way of qualitative learning, one way to think about it. The actual thing that we are looking to quantify and measure and we actually have a couple of academic studies that we published on this topic that were a proof of concept of sorts, what needles we can move. A big part of what we focus on is focus. If you are an orthopedic surgeon and yes you’ve been trained in 40 different type of things and could technically see a lot of different type of patients, you actually might be best to see a certain handful of those things. Maybe five types of procedures that you’re sort of more uniquely qualified to focus on. If you’re not using a system like ProviderMatch, let’s say that you’ll get referred something from that bigger bucket is pretty hard because you booked the orthopedic surgeon. They assume that you can see any of these type of cases and they end up getting pretty varied spectrum of a type of referral. By way of using ProviderMatch, we’re able to deterministically narrow the focus of what gets sent to that physician. There are many studies that show two things. One is if a physician has more experience around a certain procedure type, then they tend to be better in terms of outcome, mortality and morbidity than physicians with less experience, kind of the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 iteration type rule. So lots of studies show that. The second thing is let’s say you and I, Brian, are both orthopedic surgeons and I do 50 hip replacement surgeries a year. That’s my practice but you do 80 hip replacement surgeries a year but you also do 30 knee replacements and 20 of some other type of procedure. Even though you do more hip replacements than me, the data shows that I’m still going to be the higher quality surgeon because I’m focused on just that procedure. That’s what is our clinical holy grail we call it where through the use of ProviderMatch, we demonstrate that we are allowing physicians to not only drive volume around certain areas but also focus more specifically on the areas that they are uniquely qualified to serve and therefore drive better outcomes. Brian: I could see how you guys could derive that. Someone’s spending all of their time doing their kind of specialization area obviously. They’re probably building more expertise on that. Do you have any advice for other product managers of data products or analytics practitioners in terms of leveraging design to bring more value to your own business, your organization, your customers. Have you seen any positive change that’s come out of a particular design activity that you might have done that you’re like, “I would fully recommend doing this,” or, “I think that’s a really good fit for the product.” Any comments on that? Julie: Sure. I think there’s obviously tons of topics like the ones that I described that you can certainly use on a day-to-day to do design and kind of execute the process. But I think the more global statement I would make is that your focus on design has to be genuine and the only thing […] as the founding head of product, I’ve always looked at design as a critical element of why our product is going to be differentiated and more successful in the market. Part of how I know that that worked out and then played out is that our customers, we do an NPS survey with our customers periodically. The number of comments that we get back that say, “Your solution is the easiest to use that we’ve ever used in this area.” “The design is so simple. That’s what gets us to use the product and stay using the product.” We get that kind of feedback every day. I think oftentimes, I talk to a bunch of product leaders so technically there’s other companies. If that’s not coming from the top, if that’s not a genuine thing and a belief that the person at the top of the totem pole doesn’t have, then I think oftentimes design becomes something that […] and it’s harder in that scenario to make design not just an element of what’s being done but really a core part of the engineering process. That’s kind of the advice I would give. Design shouldn’t be another thing, it should be part of the actual engineering process. Easier said than done but literally, if we think about our teams and how we design some teams in addition to having obviously your engineers, your POs, your project managers, your medreps, a design lead is a required element at each of those teams. That makes it a sticky and fundamental part of the day-to-day process versus someone who calls in as a consultant. Oftentimes after the fact which is kind of the […] after a lot of the fundamental thinking has already been done versus having that person be just part of that core team that’s doing the thinking from day one. That’s kind of how it’s played out with that. That said, I would say it’s a constant struggle when you’re an organization that’s growing rapidly, that has limited resources that has 100 priorities, making sure that you are always emphasizing the value of design which is sometimes very hard to measure in quantitative terms. It’s always a challenge. But I think if you do have a leader who believes in the power of design and that you have properties that make it a core component of how you execute, that you’re much better set up to do that than otherwise. Brian: Yeah. I think there’s some good stuff there. Most of the clients that I work with, you can usually tell from the investment and enthusiasm and importance that’s placed on the discipline at the top how well it’s going to impact, or how much if at all it’s going to impact even if they have a large amount of staff if those staff aren’t properly engaged in the process, they’re not inserted at the right time, they’re not working upstream with business stakeholders to kind of… I always see this, helping to visualize and put the right experience in to reflect the intent of the product manager and the business. It’s the execution, even though it’s a strategic role in a way, it’s executing that vision for engineering so that they build the right stuff. If they’re not deployed properly, then at best, you’re back to maybe painting the pick or doing kind of surface level changes and that can then obviously trick all the way down to your downstream stakeholder like the data that comes out the other end and how useful are those analytics about ROI and stuff at the end. I think some people in the analytics space are still kind of learning. I kind of get this feeling in the data and analytics industry that we talk about data visualization a lot but not necessarily about user experience and what the ROI that good design can bring. You tend to talk about just UI level details but not necessarily the strategic side of aligning the products from the needs of the users and the business to kind of get both of those positive outcomes. Because obviously, if the business is successful, you can then pump more money back into investing in a better product and experience. It’s kind of a win-win for everyone if you have that buy in from the top. Julie: Yeah, exactly. We have the benefit of selling into typically what’s labeled as patient experience budget. More and more health systems these days are realizing that historically they’ve been super optimized for physicians. If you look at the example that I always use is if you go to any traditional hospital website that’s not using a product like ProviderMatch, the first question that they typically ask you as a patient is what department do you need to see and how are you as a consumer supposed to know whether or not you’re supposed to go to cardiology versus pulmonology versus neurology. It’s kind of ridiculous that we put that burden on the patient. Now, organizations are really thinking we can’t do that anymore. We can’t get away with that, consumers expect more because of the bar that has been raised during their experiences in other industries. For better or for worse we always say, “Why is it so easy to book a multi-leg international complex flight using just my thumb and 30 seconds on a mobile app, but it’s so hard to get a primary care doctor appointment in healthcare? “That’s something that our customers are recognizing. Because of that, everyone in our company has had some experience with that. We all have empathy with what difficulty and challenge exist around historical software booking process. That’s really where… it’s not coming out of like what are the pixels and what color are the buttons and what does the UI look like but what does that entire experience that can be emotional and you might have some diagnosis and some crazy disease and be fearful and anxious while you’re going through the experience. We always try to coach our team to remember what it’s like to be on the outside of the table when you’re […] your workflow and whatnot. But yeah, we again have the benefit of being in a space that I think everyone understands and has to some extent experience. You know the bad side of what does it feel like if it’s done poorly so that there’s a lot more kind of fundamental motivation at a higher level than just the UI. Brian: Yeah. You guys have that benefit. I think a lot of people probably don’t get that as much where it’s almost like you’re developing a consumer product in that sense where you can relate them. Like what movie should I go see and checkout and what theatres do I pick and all of that with the whole staff. Everyone at some point is going to go see a doctor so you can empathize with the scheduling process. For listeners that aren’t in that situation where maybe you’re working on something very esoteric or maybe it’s a complete B2B thing where your staff haven’t worked in that industry and don’t know that pain, it’s even more important to go get that one-on-one face time. Especially getting your engineers and designers to talk to these people and kind of start to develop that empathy. It really can change the way they approach their work. That’s cool that you guys are in that space where everyone can probably relate to the pain of the hassle around picking […]. I hate that stuff when it’s like, “Go talk to this department.” I don’t care what department it’s in, I just need to get this thing done and I want to know what the results were of this test and I don’t know who to call, it’s your problem. Julie: Exactly. Brian: Well, cool. This has been super fun. It’s been great to catch up with you and hear what you guys are doing at Kyruus. Can you tell people where they can learn more about you and what you guys are doing? Julie: Absolutely. We’ve got a great website with a ton of resources and videos and white papers and case studies and what not around what we do as a company, kyruus.com. We have a pretty big presence on social, on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn. Follow us there. And then me personally, I think Twitter is probably the best place for folks to follow along with what I’m up to. I’m @julesyoo on Twitter. Brian: All right, I’ll put that in the show notes, the link to your Twitter account and also over to Kyruus. Julie, thanks for coming on the show. It’s been great to catch up with you and I hope we get to cross paths soon. Julie: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Brian. It was good to chat.
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.
Hello and welcome to episode 35 of HCS Pro Talk! This week, we got a LOT of rosters to go over, Will and I played through Fireteam Raven, and there a plenty of news stories to cover. Along with the Gamebattles 2K tournaments, the Pro Battle League season 3 keeps going strong as we have a ton of series to cover. For the main topic of this episode, we discuss why organizations are leaving competitive Halo. Oh yeah, and you get a little Josh ranty rant somewhere in this episode. Thank you for the listening and as always, links to everything that is talked about in the episode is below for your viewing pleasure, along with timestamps for the first time! Jacksonville https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4YcrVmPTcE Timestamps RosterMainia 2:05 Wills Adventures within the Haloverse/Fireteam Raven 12:14 News 25:03 News (competitive) 31:38 News (PBL) 33:44 Scrims 43:37 Tournaments 46:47 Main Topic 56:53 Shoutouts and more 1:22:04 Roster Mania! LATAM Mini Magics Noble Scyler MagicButtons Atzo CL Esports Bullet Desecrates BMXCARLOGAMBINO Legolaz New Team Method Vystrel Proxxys Member XX Angsuka LilSayayin Lofty Deidara Tactical V2 MyName Carpe RDEspace Murder Nexus New Roster Lord Plancarte Endels Dybala Express ExcessiveNinja Liiah Iraul Kanade Assassins of Gods Cabo Tola LaloSaulHudson Loqi Australia/New Zealand Esto Reaver Kill Switch Venom Inferno TeaEssDub YungWilcox Jimbob Monza Bald Yes Daddy Deth Square OhGraham Alejo Colt Mafoka AtzoQ Matron KillerDad Jingle EU WeVicious Censure Dezire Outkaste DeadeyeFred Niel the Doctor Alexeer Ninjaaaaaaaa TheWarriorONiel Rudimentary North America LuxGaming (IS FUCKING BACK!) SickStory Boamx Valkyrie Ryno Pro Battle League St. Louis Sentinels Information coming next week Columbus Origin Information coming next week Nashville Outlaws Gold Star BR Vetra Josue BobettaFetta Dream Rival Kansas City Lightning Bunnies Waddles Vulcan Hclic PopeBum Austin Royals Rammy Munoz Galaxy SnxwNinja Dallas Stampede In Reality Mist Ninjitsu Dynamics Just Improve Spinks Jinx Article Boamx Orlando Force Swish Dallay Common Pilez New York Titans Danoxide Eccentrikk Rob The Turtle Obnoxiuz Toronto Sabres Kourages Primacy Stress Xman San Jose Edge Dark Scorch LD50 Negative PeanutButter Philadelphia Forge Jesse Siao Slinky Sorrell SuperCC Denver Rangers Cratos Naded Not a Monk Suspector Houston Vipers Claytron Mauler Knedlz Mynx Titann DMV Knights Agent Menke Jaxx Ryno Cortex Minnesota Predators Floppie HerSideGuysBack MKoski88 Veronikuhhh Anaheim Pirates Str8 Sick TuSick Commonly Steady Might Alberta Bears Haloette SilosTheVillain Chilled Zai7sev Wills Adventures Within the Haloverse Time to see if Will played more Halo?!?!? Halo: Fireteam Raven thoughts and impressions Trevor’s Thoughts First of all, had a lot of fun. I enjoyed the action, non stop, the visuals, and the moments with master Chief. I wish the music was a little louder, or there was a way to drown out the exterior noise. Gameplay wise, my gun and reticle we're very unsynced, felt way behind, not sure if everyone else had that problem. Also, sometimes hard to tell which character is attacking you, especially with banshees. The turrets and rocket parts were my favorite, reloading wasn't that fun or intuitive imo. It was a good length, and not terribly expensive. Though I haven't played an arcade game in a long time. I enjoyed it overall, just a few issues, but a lot of fun overall. Too bad the link to waypoint account didn't work. Dom’s Thoughts I wish the QR code reader would've worked to track stats and wished the sound was a bit better as I couldn't hear the dialog much. Could've been due to being in a Dave and Busters, but I haven't had that issue playing something like Time Crisis. Time Crisis isn't even in a capsule either! Speaking of odd things, why they chose purple as a character color is beyond me. It was hard to spot my reticle at times when your fighting the purple covenant. Minor complaint, but still an odd choice considering all the colors they could've chose. Gameplay wise, the plasma pistol section of the game was puzzling. Nobody wants to nor enjoys maining with that gun and it's not really a gun meant for arcade shooters. I only use it to be a dbag online for easy kills and even then, I got a BR to use to get the kill. Otherwise I used it in Halo 2 Legendary campaign a lot. I was fine with the rest of the guns in all honesty. Game got repetitive and dull I'd say between the 3rd and 4th mission. Yes it's a rail shooter, but that's why you put in some good boss battles.This games big boss battles were big hunters, big flood, and a scarab at the end. Meh, meh, yay. And the yay part I've done many times in the other halo games. I mean, I have a rocket launcher with unlimited ammo and a shotgun that shoots like the Spas-12, couldn't we come up with some cooler things to fight too? Weapons were great aside from the plasma pistol. Rocket Launcher made me feel like a bad ass, shotgun was great, and then that turreted, grenade launcher thing at the end as awesome too. Grenades didn't really feel like grenades though. They feel more like a grenade launcher. I say that as it didn't really arc at all and they threw out very quickly as if it shot from a grenade launcher. Master Chief should've learned from Raven Team on how to throw a grenade. Oh and the grunts were way too spongey Congratulations to OG on their TI8 win! News The Making of Halo: Fireteam Raven https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynacIJU2h_w Halo MCC Xbox One X Enhancement Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdCKXQ3R3d0 Halo: Silent Storm Excerpt - By Steve Downes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL8tRXQWlTw Forerunner Slayer Out Now Within Halo 5 https://twitter.com/Halo/status/1032679534670143488 Halo Community Spotlight https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/news/spotlight-august-23-2018 Official Halo Discord Out Now http://discord.gg/Halo Halo MCC Coming to Game Pass on September 1st Including New Update https://twitter.com/Halo/status/1031932355584245760 Halo MCC Update Out Now https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/news/mcc-update News (Competitive) HCS London 2018 Qualified Teams NA Splyce TOX Renegades Reciprocity Trifecta Excelerate Gaming EU Lucid Invictus Radiant Esports Mock-It ANZ Athletico LATAM Berserker Esports HCS London Pool Draw Scheduled for September 4th https://twitter.com/HCS/status/1032724502235369472 Microsoft Store 4v4 Tournaments Scheduled for September 9th https://twitter.com/HCS/status/1032764924236312587 Saint Boswell H3 MLG Settings 2v2 Tournament Announcement - September 2nd https://twitter.com/SaintBoswell/status/1032014824870424576 KMadiffy H3 2v2 Tournament Announcement - September 16th https://twitter.com/Sundaaayz/status/1032156370642984960 Pro Battle League News Roster Lock Set for September 2nd Controversy - Some ‘Pro’ players allowed and what that means for other competitors? Scrim Recap Tuesday, August 21st TOX VS Renegades Series Score 8-7 - TOX Stats - http://halodatahive.com/Scrim/Summary/11898 TOX had one more kill Renegades had 15 more assists TOX had 9 less deaths TOX had 8 more power kills Renegades had 17 more precision kills Renegades had 14 more magnum kills Wednesday, August 22nd Reciprocity VS Excelerate Gaming Series Score 11-3 - Reciprocity Stats - http://halodatahive.com/Scrim/Summary/11899 Thursday, August 23rd Renegades VS Trifecta Series Score 7-0 - Renegades Stats - http://halodatahive.com/Scrim/Summary/11900 Invictus VS Radiant Esports Series Score 12-2 - Invictus Stats - http://halodatahive.com/Scrim/Summary/11902 TOX VS Reciprocity Series Score 9-6 - TOX Stats - http://halodatahive.com/Scrim/Summary/11904 TOX had 12 more kills Reciprocity had 10 more assists TOX had 14 less deaths TOX had 3 more power kills Reciprocity had 10 more precision kills Reciprocity had 14 more magnum kills Friday, August 24th Excelerate Gaming VS Veggies Series Score 10-5 - Excelerate Gaming Stats - http://halodatahive.com/Scrim/Summary/11905 Veggies had 7 more kills Veggies had 41 more assists Veggies had 7 less deaths Excelerate had 26 more power kills Veggies had 13 more precision kills Veggies had 36 more magnum kills Every game was very close but it just appears as though Excelerate were able to close out more than Veggies. TOX VS Elevate Series Score 14-1 - TOX Stats - http://halodatahive.com/Scrim/Summary/11906 Monday, August 27th Invictus VS Mock-it Series Score 10-5 - Invictus Stats - http://halodatahive.com/Scrim/Summary/11915 Tournament Recap Nadestraight Sunday Showdown Halo 5 2v2 Tournament Recap 1st Place Sonny LG SLG Frager 2nd Place Connection ShabbyDagger Shaadyzer Bracket https://bit.ly/2NlCHhC VOD https://www.twitch.tv/nadestraight/video/302150478 The Beach LAN 7 Halo: CE 2v2 Tournament Recap 1st Place JoDick 2nd Place Goats 3rd Place WordBoy Bracket https://challonge.com/dvdyz39u VOD’s https://www.twitch.tv/beachlan Pro Battle League Season 3 Week 1 Results Toronto Sabres VS St. Louis Sentinels Information coming next week Chicago United VS Columbus Origin Information coming next week Nashville Outlaws VS Kansas City Lightning Game 1 - Slayer on The Rig 50-32 - Nashville Game 2 - CTF on Truth 3-0 - Nashville Game 3 - Strongholds on Empire 100-17 - Nashville Series Score 3-0 - Nashville VOD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA0L6RwUwQw Austin Royals VS Dallas Stampede Game 1 - Slayer on The Rig 50-46 - Dallas Game 2 - CTF on Truth 2-1 - Dallas Game 3 - Strongholds on Empire 100-36 - Austin Game 4 - Oddball on Eden 150-139 - Dallas Series Score 3-1 - Dallas VOD https://mixer.com/PBLHalo?vod=50931027 Orlando Force VS New York Titans Game 1 - Slayer on The Rig 50-39 - New York Game 2 - CTF on Truth 3-1 - Orlando Game 3 - Strongholds on Empire 100-55 - New York Game 4 - Oddball on Eden 150-80 - New York Series Score 3-1 - New York VOD https://mixer.com/PBLHalo?vod=50931027 San Jose Edge VS Anaheim Pirates Game 1 - Slayer on The Rig 50-44 - Anaheim Game 2 - CTF on Truth 2-1 - Anaheim Game 3 - Strongholds on Empire 100-16 - San Jose Game 4 - Oddball on Eden (after two resets) 150-121 - Anaheim Series Score 3-1 - Anaheim VOD https://mixer.com/PBLHalo?vod=50952777 Philadelphia Forge VS Orlando Force Game 1 - Slayer on The Rig 50-32 - Philadelphia Game 2 - CTF on Truth 3-1 - Philadelphia Game 3 - Strongholds on Empire 100-96 - Orlando Game 4 - Oddball on Eden (after two resets) 150-124 - Orlando Game 5 - Slayer on Coliseum 46-45 - Philadelphia Series Score 3-2 - Philadelphia VOD https://mixer.com/PBLHalo?vod=51299175 Denver Rangers VS Dallas Stampede Game 1 - Slayer on The Rig 50-45 - Denver Game 2 - CTF on Truth 3-1 - Denver Game 3 - Strongholds on Empire 100-82 - Denver Series Score 3-0 - Denver VOD https://mixer.com/PBLHalo?vod=51299175 https://mixer.com/PBLHalo?vod=51307854 Dallas Stampede VS Houston Vipers Game 1 - Slayer on The Rig 50-38 - Dallas Game 2 - CTF on Truth 3-0 - Dallas Game 3 - Strongholds on Empire 100-17 - Dallas Series Score 3-0 - Dallas VOD https://mixer.com/PBLHalo?vod=51307854 Pro Battle League Season 3 Week 2 Results DMV Knights VS Philadelphia Forge Game 1 - CTF on Coliseum 3-1 - DMV Game 2 - Slayer on Plaza 50-32 - DMV Game 3 - Strongholds on The Rig 100-45 - DMV Series Score 3-0 - DMV VOD https://mixer.com/PBLHalo?vod=51929397 Denver Rangers VS Nashville Outlaws Game 1 - CTF on Coliseum 3-0 - Denver Game 2 - Slayer on Plaza 50-48 - Nashville Game 3 - Strongholds on The Rig 100-37 - Denver Game 4 - CTF on Truth 3-0 - Denver Series Score 3-1 - Denver VOD https://mixer.com/PBLHalo?vod=51929397 Minnesota Predators VS Toronto Sabres Game 1 - CTF on Coliseum 3-1 - Toronto Game 2 - Slayer on Plaza 50-40 - Toronto Game 3 - Strongholds on The Rig 100-99 - Toronto Series Score 3-0 - Toronto VOD https://mixer.com/PBLHalo?vod=51929397 Alberta Bears VS Anaheim Pirates Game 1 - CTF on Coliseum 3-0 - Anaheim Game 2 - Slayer on Plaza 50-19 - Anaheim Game 3 - Strongholds on The Rig 100-3 - Anaheim Series Score 3-0 - Anaheim VOD https://mixer.com/PBLHalo?vod=51929397 LATAM Gamebattles 2K Tournament Recap 1st Place Mini Magics $350 2000 Points 2nd Place CL Esports $150 1200 Points 3rd/4th New Team XX 800 Points 5th/6th/7th/8th Tactical V2 Nexus New Roster Express Assassins of Gods 600 Points Bracket - https://bit.ly/2P9pWHs ANZ Gamebattles 2K Tournament Recap 1st Place Athletico $500 2000 Points 2nd Place CentreLink Gaming $250 1200 Points 3rd/4th TeaEssDub Yes Daddy 800 Points 5th/6th Esto Osprey Gaming Colt Mafoka 600 Points Bracket - https://bit.ly/2wosyJV EU Gamebattles 2K Tournament Recap 1st Place Sigh - Halo 5 (Lucid Gaming) $750 2000 Points 2nd Place SSSQ $250 1200 Points 3rd/4th MockIt Radiant 800 Points 5th/6th/7th/8th Niel The Doctor Invalid Esports WeVicious SkitLite 600 Points Bracket - https://bit.ly/2PAhi5M NA Gamebattles 2K Tournament Recap 1st Place Reciprocity $1,500 2000 Points 2nd Place TOX $500 1200 Points 3rd/4th Renegades Excelerate 800 Points 5th/6th/7th/8th Trifecta Elevate Str8 Rippin Mentality 600 Points Bracket - https://bit.ly/2wpBnD7 Why Are Orgs Leaving Halo? - The Results Community Thoughts Sander I think Halo esports could be big if it was played on pc. Viewership should be a lot higher, I think Halo 5 is very fun to watch and the money is also not to bad. Not enough events, online and offline, look at COD for example, that’s way more interesting. And nobody’s knows what’s happing next year. TS LocoElephante I wish it was halo 2/3 days. but ever since reach, the franchise has been going downhill. with 343 not outwardly seeming to be all in with their commitment to the community and past balancing issues, I can't see why any org would want to take the risk/part in an unknown. Alejandro Pena Sadly Halo doesn't have the reach *pun not intended* it had before. Orgs are there because of advertising money Night Fox Major orgs: The payout/amount of good teams are hard to break into because of buyouts. Plus viewership is pretty low compared to the other big Esports. Minor orgs: They are mostly “orgs” by name and therefore don’t have a lot of money backing them in the first place Also to note: some orgs that leave were fraudulent orgs TLock It just baffles me. Halo had the 2nd biggest payout of money last year for console eSports. Only behind CoD. Halo is now 3rd behind CoD and FIFA. Using this tweet for the info. It also doesn’t help that there’s no “regular season” and barely anything mentioning tournament updates and/or roster announcements from each org on the HCS Twitter. It’s like they reluctantly tweet out out stuff if they get called out. I know Tashi’s heart is in it but can’t same for the other organizers. Seems like every other weekend there’s a cod tourney. Takes 2 months for “consecutive” Halo tourneys. https://twitter.com/Moses_FPS/status/1019733397059588097 ScudPuddle My opinion, I really don’t pay attention to the orgs. Players are constantly changing and it’s hard to have loyalty to an org if your watching from the fringe. I like players, and they just happen to be playing for the same org most of the time. Look at TOX for example, people loved them when they were CLG. When Optic took them over, people didn’t stop cheering for them because they had loyalty to CLG. And people who liked the old optic roster didn’t stop cheering for LOL who eventually became Str8.Then again when Optic left Halo, fans didn’t stop liking the roster.It’s hard to have a loyalty whenever things aren’t regionalized. I like what the PBL is doing with that. But unfortunately, it’s for a game that’s going on 3 years with little innovation from the developer. Brian aka BrianMakesGames I'd be curious to know if Gears of War and Call of Duty see the same situation happening with orgs in their spheres. It'd be cool if we could reach out to a representative from the gears community (maybe a caster?) for comment on this. Also if someone from an org would comment too. Instead of speculation (though the discussion is great) we could maybe get some actual answers. Conversation between Brian and Maze (CEO of Noble Esports) Maze is the CEO of Noble eSports. They currently sponsor teams/players in Rainbow 6: Siege, PUBG, H1Z1, Forza, Madden, Injustice 2, Smash Wii-U, and mroe. They also sponsor a "twitch stream team." Here is their halo eSports page: https://halo.esportspedia.com/Noble_eSports Maze: "Our owner started Noble with a Halo team so he was always connected to the scene. But as an org, there are a bunch of scenes that aren't marketable or valuable business-wise. Halo is a thing of the past to most sponsors/investors eyes so they rather explore new options. Viewership was at a critical state for the new game and it was due to the "optic" effect. That's meaning once optic gaming was out of the tourney then viewers dropped dramatically." Brian: "So despite Halo 5 having $1.4m in prize money across 16 tournaments for only 82 players in 2018 (2nd highest prize pool for console eSports only behind FIFA with $1.7m and nearly 3x the players), there's not enough viewership to justify things for an org?" Maze: "Yeah and another reason is that the player base is not ideal to work with, demanding large salaries without a good ROI%, they have comparatively minimal streaming metrics, social media impressions, etc. Halo adapted the COD mentality unfortunately. Expect the world but don't look at it as a business opportunity through both sides. It's been gimme gimme instead of something that makes sense for the player and the org." Brian: "Meaning that halo and players expect too much of the orgs without helping? What's an example of a game/company that does this well?" Maze: "Halo players want salary without giving back a return of prize winnings, but they don't create content [Youtube, twitter, twitch, etc.] and barely support sponsors of brands. Also fucking roster changes lol." Brian: "Yeah...roster changes seem like a nightmare from a business perspective." Maze: "We almost went back into Halo 8 months ago. But were like, it doesn't make sense for us to. My opinion on how to make that scene better: less events will bring higher viewership and minimize roster changes. For example, Madden this year has only 4 offline open events and the rest are online ladders to qualify to play offline. Same prize money as Halo with minimal risk for orgs plus NFL exposure for brands/sponsors/orgs. Now a days it is about metrics more than placements -- that's how sponsors gauge their interests. Winning is great but only one team wins." 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Special Guests: Brian Douglas and Bex Warner of GitHub. In this episode, the panelists talk about automating GitHub with Probot. The origins of Probot are discussed, as well as making GitHub apps with the GitHub API, automating workflows with Probot, must-have Probots for every repo, and GitHub's V4 GraphQL API. References: Microstates README Probot github.com/integrations/slack github.com/marketplace/pull-reminders platform.github.community/c/integrations probot.github.io/apps/unfurl-links/ probot.github.io/docs/deployment/ probot.github.io/docs/extensions/#scheduler probot.github.io/community This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. TRANSCRIPT: ROBERT: Hello everyone and welcome to Episode 105 of The Frontside Podcast. I'm Robert DeLuca, the director of open source here at the Frontside and I'll be your episode host. Today, we're going to be discussing automating GitHub with Probot with Brian Douglas and Bex Warner. I'm really excited about this topic. The idea of automating GitHub workflows with bots is amazing. This is something that I've been wishing the GitHub have the platform support for since I even started using GitHub for open source. Just being able to have a bot to take care of certain things like somebody doesn't leave enough of a PR description and they open up a PR, you can have a bot that just responds to it and saying, "Can you provide more information?" It's pretty awesome. With me as co-host today is Charles Lowell, who is also a developer here at the Frontside. Hey, Charles. CHARLES: Hey, Robert. ROBERT: Before we get into the discussion, I like to make a tiny little announcement. We've been building a composable and an immutable state container called Microstates. I'm sure Charles can talk about this more at length, then we will in the next podcast episode -- 106, but I would like to make a small announcement that Taras who is an awesome developer here just wrapped up a month's worth of work, creating a new ReadMe to describe the vision of Microstates and what you can do with them and everything about Microstates. If you're interested in that, I highly recommend checking out the ReadMe. I'll drop a link in the show notes for you that are interested. CHARLES: If I can add, it really is [inaudible] because it isn't like any other state management solution out there. ROBERT: No, absolutely not. I've been building something with it in React Native over the weekend of the 4th of July and it's amazing. But enough about that, you'll hear about that next episode. For this episode, I want to talk about Probot with Brian and Bex. Hi are you two doing? BRIAN: I'm well. BEX: I'm good. Thanks for having us. ROBERT: No, thank you for joining. This is really exciting. Like I said in the intro, I've been really excited about this project. I do a good amount of open source, I would say and this has been really helpful in all of our repos. We have, I think like 78 open source repos on the Frontside. We have Microstates, like we just talked about and Big Test and all of those repos use some combination of Probots that people have built and it's really nice, especially with the new Checks API that has just come out. You can integrate Probot into that, right? BEX: Yes. I, actually am currently working on shifting one of our bots from using the commits Statuses API to the Checks API. ROBERT: That's awesome. Before we go too deep into it because I want to come back to that because that sounds really cool and what the integration of that is like and what changes because I'm not even really that familiar with it. I just know it was released. I kind of want to go from the beginning here. Where did Probot come from and can we get a little bit of a history for everybody that might not know what Probot is? BEX: Sure. Probot originally started out as this simple idea to make GitHub scriptable. The original idea was you have a single file in your repository that would be like a JavaScript file and it would essentially spell out how the bot would act on your repository and the goal was to make GitHub apps accessible to people because if you ever look through our GitHub apps documentation, I think it can be a little tough to get started. There's, honestly, a lot of nonsense that you have to go through in order to get set up. For one thing, the way our GitHub app authentication works is it requires a JSON web token followed by using that JSON web token to request an installation access token and that process would be really tough for new people to get started. ROBERT: Yeah, it sounds like it. BEX: Yeah, so Probot was created to abstract all of that away and handle all of that authentication automatically and simply leave you with the payload that you get from listening on web token events and in authenticated GitHub client to make authenticated API requests while authenticating as an app. ROBERT: Cool, so that's where it started like a flat JavaScript file in the root but today, you use like EMO files and a .GitHub folder. How do that kind of progress? BEX: Originally, their use case was much simpler and it quickly became clear that a single JavaScript file in the GitHub repo was not scriptable enough and not easy enough to understand. The goal was to make like an API that could make that JavaScript file really, really easy to customize for every API of GitHub and it quickly became clear that that was not really a feasible thing to do. as time went on, it turned into this way to build Node JS applications and essentially, what the configuration files you're referring to are the way in which we make it customizable because right now, there's no way to be officially supported GitHub apps channels to pass secrets because it means you're a [inaudible] and the owners of GitHub apps, so that was just a way to kind of stop that problem. ROBERT: Gotcha, okay. BEX: The actual code for GitHub apps still lives in a Node JS module basically and the configuration file just specifies how that module runs. ROBERT: Right, so they're deployed like Heroku instances, if you want, like anywhere you can host a node app. BEX: Yup. Heroku, Now, yeah. ROBERT: Interesting. BRIAN: As a reason to that, some explorations of doing serverless deployments for Probot, I think there's a couple of issues of them. I'm not sure if anybody's shipped anything like the way they at but it's pretty much it's possible to. BEX: Just a week ago, we even released a new version in which we update our core from Node JS to TypeScript and now that things are typed, we have big plans for serverless. ROBERT: Nice. That's awesome, so then you'll be able to deploy to a Lambda and off to [inaudible]. BEX: Exactly. CHARLES: Can I actually interject here, as kind of a person who doesn't really know the relationship between GitHub apps and the GitHub marketplace and what exactly a Probot is before we hear the origin story. I would love to hear a very high level view of how this ecosystem fits together. BRIAN: I think a lot of people are pretty familiar with interacting with the GitHub API and OAuth integrations. I think I've just spent a lot of time at different companies previously to GitHub, just like making calls, either to cURL or through Node JS or more recently, [inaudible]. GitHub apps itself are a way to take all the things that you had to do to make an integration to GitHub much easier. It has a lot of cool things like OAuth, scopings, so you no longer have ask for all your repos ask access whenever someone logs in with GitHub and the connection between like, "Now have gone from OAuth to Now to GitHub apps," there was a lot of, as Bex mentioned earlier, ceremony that happens to getting set up with GitHub apps and integrations that Probot is like this tool to speed up the process of getting to the point where you just want to script some automation or some sort of workflow and it gives you all that bullet play for you. I don't know if that was a good high level for you Charles. CHARLES: Yeah. I've kind of witnessed this second hand with Robert installing a bunch of things here, so let's use an example, like you did some sort of automation on our repos, Robert, where when someone files a ticket, there's this workflow that automatically adds a triage label, so that we know that this thing hasn't even been dealt with, so we really need to address that issue. It doesn't need to be as a high priority. It doesn't need to be closed as a duplicate of something. One of the different aspects that you described there, how do they fit in terms of serving this workflow onto the end user? Or was that a good example, even? BRIAN: One of the cool thing about GitHub apps and what Probot does for you is that normally, if you want to add a label to an issue, either you Charles or Robert, would have to be admin or maintainer on the team for the Frontside and you could add labels. But somebody who opens up an issue, doesn't have that ability to have write access to your content, which is adding a label. What a GitHub app does, it actually takes a spot as if you would have another user on your platform, instead of creating a dummy account or a dummy user. Probot is basically building a bot for you to then, give you the ability to add that issue. That's sort of workflow that normally would have to happen through an actual real human could not happen through a bot without taking up a spot of like, "I guess, I probably shouldn't speak so ignorant about our platform and what we actually pay for nowadays for GitHub," but I know we used to have like a limited amount of seats for organization, like that seat no longer has now taken up and now, it could be just be used a bot can do something that normally us would take. ROBERT: Right. You no longer have to create a user to do these things. BRIAN: Correct. BEX: [inaudible] within GitHub. It's sort of built in a way that apps can take a lot of power in your repositories. CHARLES: So then, what is the relationship between Probot and an app? BEX: Probot is essentially the framework for building an app. You can definitely make the equivalent of any Probot app outside of Probot. It abstracts away all of, basically, the horrible parts and leave the easy part. CHARLES: Now, I think I'm ready to participate in this discussion. ROBERT: That was perfect, though. That's a great intro because I actually didn't have a total grasp or understanding of the relationship between GitHub apps and Probots. That's really good. BEX: Yeah. Additionally, going back a second. You mentioned the marketplace before. One thing to note that is that there actually are several Probot apps on the marketplace right now. The marketplace is essentially the home for any larger, usually third-party companies that have made apps and Probot is essentially supporting some of those. ROBERT: Interesting, so then my question would then be, do you know anybody selling their Probots. Does the marketplace charge? I'm going to assume it does. BEX: Yes. ROBERT: Okay. Is there anybody charging for their Probot? BEX: Yes. There is a quite a few, in-fact, charging for it. Recently, a pretty popular example is the GitHub Slack integration, which is if you open new issues, you can have them appear in your Slack channel. That whole application was recently rewritten by GitHub. It was previously owned by Slack and that was built on top of Probot. CHARLES: And I actually remember, we upgraded to that version. It's actually way, way, way better. BEX: I'm glad you feel that way. CHARLES: I didn't know the story behind there. I was like, "Oh, I just got a lot of... Awesome," you know? Although I don't know what's the costing. BEX: Yeah, I think that integration is actually free, so that wasn't the best example. I think it's for open source projects, at the very least. BRIAN: Brandon, one of the maintainers for the Slack integration and work at GitHub, also did a really cool talk at the SlackDev Conference a couple of weeks ago, so if you're interested what were the behind the scenes. That integration is all open source as well, so if you have request or you have features that you would like to add to the Slack integration, you can pop into the repo that hopefully will show up on the show notes because I'm not sure if it's like GitHub/Slack, but I guess we'll find that out in the show notes later on. BEX: It's Integration/Slack. BRIAN: But for an example of a paid app of a non-third party, we're not talking like Travis or Circle or another one with the big names but rather, a solo dev created. It's Pull Reminders, which is on the marketplace as of today and essentially, this gives you reminders of your pull quest, so you can actually ping inside the comments and tell Pull Reminders to say, "Tell me about the pull request like next week because it's Friday and I don't have time to look at this." ROBERT: That's awesome. I've also seen the one that's kind of related, that is like you can set your out of office at GitHub, which is actually kind of a neat concept. BEX: Was that the one where we are already changing that profile photos to have the overlay or the one where is just auto-replying to messages because I've seen a couple of -- ROBERT: I think, it's just auto-replies. BEX: Okay. CHARLES: So, it can change like your profile pictures and really, not just related to repo and history related activities but everything? BEX: Anything that you can access via the GitHub API, you can almost access via GitHub apps. There's a list of end points that I specifically enable for GitHub apps because there's something such as delete a repository that there's basically, a very few circumstances under which you want to give that permission to an app. Also, to things very specific like your profile or your personal page. About a year ago, there was an official internal audit of all of the API endpoints because there are lots of inconsistencies over what was and what wasn't enabled for GitHub apps, so they went there and kind of decided, what endpoints should be enabled and what endpoints actually get enabled. Now, that list is much longer than it was a year ago. Now, it's much more comprehensive. ROBERT: That's awesome and is this for the Rest API and the GraphQL API? BEX: Yes. Probot does support both. The Rest API is the one that specifically had all of these endpoints audited. The GraphQL, since it's a bit newer, we sort of built those and more. ROBERT: Cool. I really like working with the GraphQL API with GitHub. It makes it easier than trying to do a bunch of Rest calls. BRIAN: Yeah, there's a community form, it's like a discourse form that the API team actually manages and sort of pipes in there. Again, going back to like, if there's not something in the Slack integration that you would like to have, the form, that community is actually in there, if there's something not in the GraphQL API, that you would like to see. No promises on shipping it within an x amount of time but if enough people are requesting it obviously, there's going to be some resources [inaudible] at. ROBERT: What do you mean? We're doing open source. It has to be done yesterday. BRIAN: Yeah, exactly. And that form is at Platform.GitHub.Community, just a URL to get there. ROBERT: Awesome, that will be helpful to look through and get some recommendations in there. One of my favorite things I was going to say about the new integration for Slack and GitHub is the fact that I can highlight line numbers, paste that linked in and then it just expands it and the chat in Slack. That is so nice and I use it all the time. BEX: Yeah, I love that they built that feature. Actually, the original feature that was built on GitHub to allow those line expansions in the first place, like on GitHub itself, was actually built last summer by some folks who were also a part of my intern class at GitHub last year. ROBERT: Hey, intern power. That's awesome. BEX: Yeah. ROBERT: Everyone there is doing amazing work. I'm also following along with somebody that is also an intern and it's building a weekly digest program. BEX: Oh, yeah. That's actually a Google Summer of Code student. ROBERT: Oh, interesting. BEX: So, being sponsored through Google Summer of Code by Probot as an open source support. ROBERT: Is there anything more to unpack there? That sounds really interesting. BEX: Essentially, we submitted an application for Google Summer of Code because we thought it'd be a cool way to get more people, more students, a mentorship opportunity for the maintainers, basically and we were honestly overwhelmed. We got like almost 100 applications and it ended up being a huge of a deal but we're -- ROBERT: That's a great problem. BEX: Yeah, definitely a good problem but we were really happy. We, initially wanted to accept more students but Google limited us to only two students, so we have two Google Summer of Code students working on projects and one team of women from Rails Girls Summer of Code working on Probot. ROBERT: That would be awesome. What do they working on? BEX: I'm not sure yet. They actually just started a couple of days ago but the other Google Summer of Code student is working on a background checks API to eventually do sentiment analysis of comment history of someone new to your repository. ROBERT: That's interesting. That sounds like there will be some machine learning in there. I might just throwing out buzzwords? BEX: Most likely, I think they're just using some sentiment analysis API, like the perspective API. I don't think they're actually doing that themselves. ROBERT: Okay. CHARLES: Actually, I have a couple questions. Back on the subject of Probot. How does this square with the classic mode of integration because there was a lot out there? I think the first one that I remember that stuck in my mind was like Travis and I don't know if there had to be like a special relationship between the Travis developers and the GitHub developers, that's like, they was able to make that integration happen so many years ago. I don't know how that happened. I just remember it popped up and I was like, "Woah. This is incredible," and we see kind of the integrations gets more and more rich. For someone who's got, like you mentioned a couple of the big names, is the idea that eventually those would be able to be completely supported is GitHub apps or is it they're always going to be kind of a separate track for kind of the really deep integrations? BRIAN: I wasn't around when Travis first integrated with Lyft GitHub and I think that's a really cool integration and I know they have a very nice sized team that's able to do that. I think if we zoom back out like Probot, the way to get started with Probot is that we have the CLI command, which is to create Probot app. I believe it was intentionally copied off of create React app and the cool thing about create React app and create Probot app is that they abstract all the ceremony and boilerplate to get started really quickly. It was like, what developers or smaller teams can get started with integrating with GitHub apps. I highly doubt that Travis is going to rewrite their entire application with something like create Probot app but they're definitely going to be moving towards the new API calls, which would have been like GitHub apps. Part of the Checks API that we had launched at the end of May, Travis had blog post on how their integration with the Checks API works. They're making, though they have a lot of what Legacy endpoints and a lot of Legacy integrations in the way they integrate with GitHub, they are actively moving towards a GitHub app. I don't know if I could actually comment on their status of where they are today, to be honest but actively, we want all new apps and new integrations to follow the model of being a GitHub app, so that way, out of the box, you have access to all the newer features. You have all the access to all the newer GraphQL endpoints, if you want to use GraphQL and that way, we can serve one market, as opposed to everybody who had a GitHub integration from five or six years ago, that was all piecemeal together and sort of duct tape, like we run move away from duct tape everything together. CHARLES: I see. BEX: I definitely agree that I don't think Travis is going to switch to using Probot anytime soon and I don't think most of the large companies will be doing that but I do think, there will be shift towards GitHub apps in general. For those companies that don't already have the buildings of the GitHub app started, I think that Probot could be, in time to free some of them. BRIAN: In addition to that too, Travis and Circle and all the CI integrations, they're doing a really good job. I think the cool thing about GitHub apps is what you take away all that ceremony of getting your checks to work, now we can start opening up the door of like what's the next sort of CICD thing like? There's another term or another, I guess category of applications that can now be built to improve GitHub. CHARLES: The most amazing thing about having a great platform is the apps that you don't foresee, like it just come completely out of left field and you're like, "Woah. I can't believe that's actually a possibility now." When you have started to see some of those, some Probot or GitHub apps, you're like, "Man, I didn't see that coming. That's awesome." BEX: A hundred percent. I think it's the most exciting part of Probot because I think GitHub as a platform, we all know GitHub is the largest developer platform in the world and I think the idea that developers can build on top of this platform is the most exciting idea right now. I have honestly already seen apps that really excites me. The other day, I saw this app that was definitely not near completion but it was essentially updating and issue a comment box over and over and taking response through like checking a box and then listening on that common edit, in order to specify your coffee order. ROBERT: Woah. BEX: I was like, "Do you want an ice coffee or regular? Do you want milk or sugar and cream?" and it was going one at a time. It didn't actually order you your coffee at the end but it was super exciting to watch that. You're just editing the comment. I had never seen that before. ROBERT: That's pretty slick and that's taking the API pretty far. I'm sure there were some parsing in there and each Webhook response are like, "Was this box edited or not." That interesting. CHARLES: Yeah. Actually, now that we're having this discussion is kind of like changing my mind a little bit. Robert and I were actually talking yesterday about trying to standardize on our release management and our plan was basically to have some software that was going to run inside of our CI provider and have kind of a shared library, just a little ntm package that was shared by all of our repos but I'm thinking now, man, we should really explore doing this as a GitHub app. ROBERT: Yes, please. I've had three ideas that I really want to build out as a Probot. I'm just going to list them off and then we can build them all together and take equity and you know. I'm kidding. But the two that really excite me, that I kind of want to do is one concept that we work on this open source project for our clients and if somebody from the outside that doesn't have commit bits to be able to push to master, it would be really cool if we had a Probot that after it had an approved on the PR, from the maintainer, that the person that open the PR could then tell a Probot say, "This is approved by somebody that manages this project. Can we merge?" and then the Probot would then actually merge. I don't know if that's possible. That's something that I definitely wanted to explore. Then the other one, which is less cool, would just be like if we have a couple branches on some of our projects that we want to continue and we're not ready to put it back into master but we want to continuously run the test suite against it, so the idea there would be to have a Probot that would watch for changes on master and rebase as needed and continue to run the test suite and see where you're at. Those are the two things that I'm really excited about to do with Probot but I just want to automate everything with GitHub now. CHARLES: Right. BEX: Yeah, definitely, that first idea was actually pretty viable. I'm curious to know like how you actually get those commit links -- is that what you called it? ROBERT: Commit bits are more like commit permissions, I guess. BEX: Oh, I see. ROBERT: An outside contributor. CHARLES: Yeah, we want to push responsibility to the person who is the maintainer who can approve it but actually, the way we do it at Frontside is the person who actually is making the change is responsible for merging it. Once you get approval, you still have to hit the go button and that's just going to make sure that you're taking responsibility for saying it's done but that doesn't work for open source because people coming off the internet are going to have the right to push but we would like to give it to them, maybe via an app, if there is a maintainer who's approved it. BEX: Yeah. That's definitely something you can do. I've seen quite a few apps that, essentially add outside collaborators to the repo. Are you familiar with the... I forgot what it is called, like the all contributor section, where you cite everyone in your repo and everything and who's worked on it. There was a GitHub app that would add someone automatically after they merge their first change. CHARLES: That's awesome. ROBERT: I may have seen that on React State Museum but I'm not sure. It's a repo that we've contributed to and it has all the contributors at the bottom. It seemingly just kind of popped up there. BRIAN: There's an app that, I would like to mention too that I'm pretty excited about, that it sounds trivial too and it's almost similar... Not similar but it's sort of related to what you were talking about, Rob, with your first app, which is the WIP bot, which is the work-in-progress bot. This is a pattern of whenever I open a PR and I might not ready for a merge but I want to share my code so I can get feedback earlier on, I'll type in WIP so that append to my title of my PR. What this engineer did was every time you do WIP, it's going to go into the GitHub API and actually block the PR for merging, which is a feature available to GitHub. It's nested in your settings but the cool thing about this it actually blocks the PR for merging, so you don't have to worry about getting your, sort of like show and tell code merging the master without being ready. ROBERT: That's one of the first bots that I installed on all of our repos and then you can correct me if I'm wrong, it didn't always have the ability to block the PR from being merged but with the new Checks API, is that something that was introduced? BEX: Not exactly. The way that blocking of merging works is if you set it as the required status, so you can install any sort of CI on your account and have it not being required and ignore it whenever you feel like it, so it's really up to you to make it required. Otherwise, it just isn't checked and that's true for anyone who uses the Statuses or the Checks API. ROBERT: Okay, so that's a Statuses API. Okay, sorry. BEX: Yes. ROBERT: Also, the cool thing about that that I noticed when that was rolled out was I was now able to pick and choose and use workflows on Circle CI and each workflow is broken out as a different status check. I am now required like linting and the build and the test have to pass for these browsers before it can merge, which is really cool to be able to pick and choose. BEX: Yeah. It's awesome. I know personally on some of my repos, I have a few checks that I just don't require because I know I have to make them pass. ROBERT: Yeah. Speaking specifically about the work-in-progress bot, do you know how that works? It's open source, so I am sure I can go look. I think we want to go make a PR. We had some back and forth about this, Charles. CHARLES: I actually just [inaudible] we disagree. ROBERT: Yes. Charles opened a PR and one of his first commits in the PR had work in progress and the title had work in progress and we have this this Probot on our website and it was a blog post. You know, you make a couple more commits and you're further down, you move the work in progress in the title but the PR were still blocked because the first commit on a PR have work in progress in it. I think if it's the most recent commit or if it's in your PR title with work in progress, it should block but otherwise, it should not and Charles feels differently. CHARLES: I have about six commits and the very first one have WIP in the title or in the commit message and it blocked the whole thing but I kind of felt like it actually made me go back and I had to squash it down to two commits because I actually feel that your commit history should tell the story of the development, not like it should an absolute one-to-one journal of what happens but what you are intending. I actually felt that it could help me out because there's six commits that we're kind of all over the place and just kind of slapdash together have made me kind of go back, rethink it and tell a coherent story. I think it did me a service but it was not obvious. I definitely agree with that but I was like, "Why? Why were you still blocking?" ROBERT: Do I really [inaudible] admin privileges? BEX: I would say, I am friends with the creator of the web app. His name is Gregory Mantis and he is actually got a huge work in progress PR shifting work in progress over to using the Checks API and one of the features that he's using with the Checks API is essentially this mark as now work in progress button that will add the special line, like feel free to merge or something like that into your original PR description at the bottom. If that is there, the work in progress app will no longer be blocking. It's essentially like a hard override and honestly, that's the power at the Checks API versus the Statuses API. That's really exciting. ROBERT: Because I have seen the work in progress bot to get into a weird state, where I did remove the work in progress from the title but it didn't quite update and I'm still blocked. It's okay for me because I have admin privileges but other people on the team maybe not and they might be blocked from something that's actually work in progress. It's a lot like that hard override will be probably pretty helpful. BEX: Yeah, definitely. I think sometimes, there's some confusion with that just because of the way what perks work on GitHub and the way our pages are rendered, that you may need to refresh the page before you actually see it take effect. ROBERT: Right, yeah. Overall though, I love that bot. I go weekly, probably to the Probot apps listing and just go shopping. BEX: Wow. I'm actually the person who approves all the Probot apps to the listings so that's pretty motivating there. ROBERT: It's really nice. I am not even joking when I say shopping, I go through and I open up a bunch of tabs, I read through them, "Oh, this could be useful," that kind of thing. BEX: The first app you mentioned, which was like the one that requests more info is actually one that I built, so that was kind of funny. I guess you got that from the Probot apps too. ROBERT: Yup. That one, we definitely use on a couple of our organizations and repos. It has yelled at me a couple of times because of a blank PR. BEX: It yells at me all the time. I think I get yelled at more than people who are actually doing it wrong. ROBERT: I'm a little embarrassed like, "I should do better. I need to set an example." BEX: Definitely. ROBERT: Cool. I'm curious what both of your favorite Probot app is. This ought to be interesting. BRIAN: The app that I'm really impressed with so far, that I actually only use on a junk project at the moment, is the weekly digest one and it's mainly because I built something for this in my previous role at the company but then we shift it, which is basically go through every single repo. I worked at a company called Netlify previously and we had way too many repos to maintain... Oh, sorry, to keep track of and I was moving further and further away from the backend at the time so I was unable to keep up to date with all that was changing. I built a Lambda to watch Webhooks and then give me a digest of what was shipped like issues and PRs closed. It was way over-engineered and I never actually shipped that to actually make it work. But then the weekly digesting came out maybe a couple of weeks ago and it blew me away because I was like, "This is exactly what I needed," and I was trying to make it overly complicated through like a Lambda and like a bunch of Webhooks and this person, with only a few weeks, has the scaffolding of what I needed. That's the one thing I'm pretty excited about. It was already mentioned earlier too, as well. BEX: I guess, I would say one of my favorite ones is the unfurl a link app. I think that one it so simple but so nice. I don't know. I think having that unfurl link preview is just beautiful. Essentially what it does is it listens on issue comment creation or pull request comment creation or issues your pull request or whatever and read through the text or whatever was that issue or pull request and looks for links and then, essentially unfurls them so you can get a really nice preview of what you're going to. I think that's really beautiful and just so simple. ROBERT: Yeah. I love that one too. I have that added to all of our repos. BEX: It's so much nicer. Why would you not unfurl your links when you could unfurl your links? ROBERT: Exactly. CHARLES: I actually have a question. I think it's been touched on, probably at least twice throughout the conversation. I want to actually create a Probot, how do I actually go about deploying it? What does that look like? What does it look like to deploy and maintain it? BEX: We have a page on our docs about deployment and essentially the TL;DR is you can deploy it on any normal cloud hosting service that you wanted to deploy it. There are a few things you need to specify. For example, GitHub gives you a private key that you need to create your JWT and that private key means to be passed into your hosting service however you do that and then, there's a few bits of information that need to be pass in. We have pretty intense docs about it. Honestly, I'm not a deployment person. I usually try to let other people do that and I have never had a problem going through our docs and just getting it working immediately. BRIAN: It's also mentioned that there are examples like Heroku and Now and a couple of other ones. If you have a service that you already like, it's possible it's already in the docs, like steps to how to get that deployed. BEX: Yup and any other services are more than welcome to be added to the docs. Pull request are welcome. ROBERT: Sweet. It sounds like we need to set up a hack date to create a Probot, Charles. CHARLES: Seriously, my mind is brewing. ROBERT: I guess it's not directly related to GraphQL but there's something that I've always wanted to build. For prior history to everybody [inaudible], then the podcast, Brian and I used to work at a company called IZEA and one of the things that we built and I worked on a lot was we would create a collect metrics on people's social accounts that they're connected and do that and graph it over time. This idea came from when I was building up that feature all the way back in 2013, I want to graph the change in GitHub stars. Is there an API available for me to see like weekly GitHub stars or is that something that I still have to manually store and track? BEX: There's definitely an API endpoint to get the amount of stars and I don't see why you couldn't just do that on weekly basis and compare but I don't think there's any track that change API. ROBERT: Gotcha, like a history of it. I could do this by just stealing and looking at what the weekly digest Probot is doing because there is a change in stars section in there. I was just curious if there was now an API that was available. BRIAN: Yeah, that's more unlikely. I'm going to say no without looking at all the reference documentation. I think as far as that database, it's something you'd probably have to collect on your own but it's also a good candidate for a GitHub app, where you build a service that you can actually track stars once you've installed it and then if you want to monetize it, you can actually pay for private repo or whatever stuff like that, if you wanted to. But it sounds like a great opportunity to see this in the GitHub/Probot listings. BEX: I actually just look this app really quick in our docs because I was curious but apparently, you can receive the star creation timestamps. That could be doable through timestamp usage. ROBERT: Oh, and then I just kind of loop through back and build your graph in there. BEX: Yeah. ROBERT: Interesting. All right. Well, [inaudible] I was going to do today. BEX: Yeah. But I think it's exciting to bot the weekly digest and then what you could extract from that into stargazing is that Probot scheduler, which is essentially this all Probot extension we made that triggers a Webhook on a scheduled time period because right now, the way GitHub apps works are so centered around Webhooks. It can be difficult to find a way to trigger an action on something outside of a Webhook, like on a schedule basis. ROBERT: Yeah, that would be really helpful. I can definitely see how that would be a problem, if it's very, very central to reacting to Webhooks and events that happen on the system. BEX: Exactly. ROBERT: You're just hoping that somebody comes through and creates an event at a specific time. CHARLES: Can I ask you a question about, it's definitely on topic of extending GitHub but currently, just a question about, where the line is between what you can and cannot extend? You mentioned, for example in the rewrite of the WIP bot, being able to throw out a big button that says override this merge. Are there any plans to be able to actually extend the UI in novel ways? Everything there right now is happening with API calls, with I assume, UI elements that are related but the UI elements are static. If someone wants to put a novel piece of the UI, that button is going to require an extension of the GitHub UI by GitHub itself. Are there any plans to be able to, I know it's a dangerous waters, perhaps at a limited fashion at first but maybe more so, add different interactions and the actual application. BEX: I think this is actually the most exciting future of GitHub as a platform. In the past, GitHub APIs have only specifically supporting things that you can do through the command line or you can do through GitHub's UI itself. The Checks API introduced the very first non-integration specific UI element essentially and the merge button that I was referring to in WIP is exactly that. It's essentially this button that you can change the text of it to be whatever you want and you can listen on that action and then you can do as an integration or an app, anything that you want based on that. I think that's the most exciting direction for GitHub. Because if you look at Slack, Slack is a platform that has sort of really impressive integrations in that response. Your apps on Slack can really do all of these things, use custom UI elements, so I think the most exciting features for GitHub as a platform is all of this customization and giving the power to the apps. ROBERT: Yeah, that sounds an awesome way to be able to extend GitHub without having to try and throw the feature on to GitHub developers. BEX: Exactly. I feel that a lot of the struggle right now is that there aren't these nice ways of communicating via apps because I feel lot of the apps and bots end up just commenting on issues and pull requests and taking up a ton of screen real estate as a result and I just think that that's not the way that bot should ideally interact with the GitHub platform. They should have their own space to exist and that's the feature I'm most excited for. CHARLES: Yeah. I can think of having like progress bars for CI checks and your various appointments. It's too exciting. I'm glad. That's definitely the response I was hoping to hear. BEX: Yeah. We're excited for it too. ROBERT: Basically, you all have a massive community of a bunch of developers that would want to do this and are willing to get their hands dirty on it. Enabling that community is probably the root of all Probot is about. That's super awesome. BEX: Yup. CHARLES: That's a good place to end, because gosh, it's going to be so exciting to have the millions of developers on the planet, just like surgeon to the APIs that you're developing. BRIAN: One thing to add to that too, about the whole million developers, there's a number that's been thrown out from Stack Overflow and also, some other people who are saying like there's 50 million developers, there's 24 million developers. As far as GitHub, our public user number is 28 million, the cool thing about Probot and GitHub apps is that there's a good chance that all those people that are using GitHub today are not actually developers. They're like PMs or designers and what's really cool about this, like having interactions with that kind of platform in this way is that you can now enable all the non-developers to be able to interact with your GitHub repos and start bringing more designers and PMs onto to the GitHub platform to interact with the developers. ROBERT: That is an interesting point. That is awesome and something that I'm always looking for is a different ways to collaborate with non-developers on my team because... I don't know, developers tend to think everything is always centered around code but it's not. The shifting at work that are awesome, needs a lot of collaboration from non-devs and non-dev skills. That would be really interesting to see. I'm excited for that to play out. BRIAN: Yeah. There's a blog post that was published a month ago, I think about where the design team, design system teams rather, built the integration to Figma to update their icons effectively. I just posted that in the chat to look into but they also built this as a Probot app as well. ROBERT: That is awesome. BEX: Yeah, that one is super exciting. You would have the app comment, the diff between what the old icon versus what the new icon look like and it's just such a beautiful design change to be able to see that shift. ROBERT: Man, I'm happy that this is happening. The future seems super bright. Where can we direct people to get resources to contribute, to get involved and start really going at this? BEX: Basically, Probot.GitHub.io has all the Probot stuff, /app has all the listings for apps you can install today, /docs is where the docs are, if you want to get started and hopefully from there, we link up to the necessary things that you need to do. BRIAN: Also, what I mentioned too via Probot Slack channel, there's a Slack channel as well and they do a weekly call. I think, it's weekly or bi-weekly call to actually chat with the Probot community. If you have questions, you can actually bring your questions to the team. BEX: Yeah, we call it 'Office Hours' and it's once a week and it's under our community page, where we also have a link to our Slack. We have a link to another podcast we run and basically, how to get involved in the Probot community. ROBERT: Those are really helpful resources. I do remember seeing that Office Hours. It's on Thursdays, right? BEX: Yes. ROBERT: I was going to drop in for one and then, I actually forgot. Actually, it might be going on as we talk right now in this podcast. BEX: It starts in half an hour, I think. ROBERT: That's awesome. Cool. Well, thank you Brian and Bex for having a conversation about Probot. This is really awesome. Is there anything that you would like to plug for yourselves? How people can get in contact with you? BRIAN: Yeah, I am BdougieYO on Twitter. Everything you need to know about me is there and I am happy to say hello. I'm also helping with the GitHub developer program, which is sort of getting a soon-to-be announced rebranding. If you go to Develop.GitHub.com/Program and you want to have more conversation about the API and GitHub apps on the GitHub side, you can go there to sign up. BEX: And I am HiImBexo on Twitter. You can ping me in any Probot stuff. I'd be happy to look at any Probot code. I've been looking at it for a while now so I'm happy to do that. ROBERT: That's awesome. Thank you all for having a conversation with us. This was really fun. I'm so excited about everything you can do with Probot. This is a really fun project. I'm happy that this is happening and I will make a Probot in the future. CHARLES: I'm looking forward too. Robert has been excited for quite some time and he definitely talks a lot about it and now, I have some insight as to what -- ROBERT: It's happening, I'm telling you. Well. Thank you for being here and we are the Frontside. We build UI that you can stake your future on. We are specializing in JavaScript. We can build anything that you want throw at us. We do functional programming, React testing, Vue, anything in JavaScript, we specialize in. As always if you want to suggest anything for us to have on the podcast or talk about, you can reach out to us at Contact@Frontside.io and like I teased earlier in the podcast, next episode is going to be all about Microstates, the immutable and functional state container, composable model system that we've been building, it's controls as a brainchild for the past two years. That is next episode and I'm really excited about that. It's a really fun API and expressive to build models with. Thank you, Mandy for producing our podcast and we'll see you next episode.
So the big question is this, how do you become financially free in today's world where you can do what you love doing, spend time with the ones you love and provide for your family without being chained and selling your soul to a nine to five corporate America job without having to sacrifice going out to eat so you can pay off the debt faster. The question isn't, how do you save more? The question is, how do you make more without spending more time? That is the question and this podcast as the answers. My name is Ryan Enk and this is Cash Flow Dad Life Ryan: All right. What's up everybody? This is Ryan with cashflow dad life and I'm stoked today to bring to you the cash flow Ninja of the world right now, Brian page. And the reason I call them that is because he has made over $300,000 in just six months using a huge new real estate investment strategy in the short term rental market using AIRBNB's. Brian, are you there? Brian: Yes, I am. What's going on? I've never been called the cashflow Ninja before. Okay. Ryan: No, it kind of has a nice ring to it, doesn't, it does. Just remember you heard it from me first. I might have to, might have to copyright that Brian, but so he calls the strategy the BNB formula and basically what it is is you can get started with this on a shoestring budget even with very little money because you don't have to actually own the properties. You can make. Quit your job type of money in just a few months... You can automate the business to make it passive and work on just a laptop or a cell phone for just four hours a week or less. And you could get started with no credit. Did I miss anything there? Brian: Yeah, no, it sounds too good to be true. I'll have to have to preface it because it sounds, it does sound amazing, but um, but I, I, yeah, basically what I've done is I've taught other people to do is, is pretty exciting. I'm very excited to talk about it. Ryan: And you've gotten some great results from a lot of the people that you've been teaching too. And that's kind of the premise of our podcast and our program is we want to provide people with passive income type opportunities so that they can be financially free. And that's one of the things that are really like about this is that you can kind of automate the business now. Nothing is entirely passive, but you've gotten it down to an art on how to basically minimize your time. So that is generally a passive business. Brian: Well, you want me to jump into it and kind of give the overview on what it is? Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. But real quick, how I kind of stumbled across this was a, I actually, because I'm a real estate investor, I see all these things in my facebook feed and uh, the BNB formula kind of popped up and I'm. And I thought that I was a pretty smart, right? So I bought this vacation rental property on the water in New Orleans is the $750,000 property and I got the owner to be the bank to me and he accepted $60,000 down, which is less than 10 percent. Uh, and it came fully furnished, so I just thought I was a genius and the first year I made $80,000 rental income in the short term rental market. So then I saw your thing pop up on the newsfeed on facebook and um, and so I went through, I watched the Webinar and end up getting the course and then I realized, wow, I'm a complete moron. I could have done this without putting $60,000 down. I could have just done this and you know, started cash flowing on it right away without that risk of ownership. And even if I wanted to be an owner, there's ways to do that --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/cashflow-dadlife/support
[paypal-donation] Happy New Year. I'm your host of Gospel Tangents, Rick Bennett. We're counting down the Top 20 Moments that were most surprising moments in 2017 here on Gospel Tangents. I've learned a lot over this year. 1. Let's start with some scoops! Paul Reeve told me he participated in writing the Gospel Topics Essay on Race and the Priesthood at LDS.org. Unfortunately, I had some camera problems, but the audio worked just fine. This is still my most downloaded moment of 2017! GT: Very good. Now I want to ask you another question. I'm hoping you'll answer. I've heard rumors, and that's all they are is rumors that you played a role in compiling that essay [Race and the Priesthood]. Do you have any response to that? Paul laughs: I did help with the essay. Yeah, Yeah. GT: So was it, can you describe your role? Paul: Well the Church History Department invited me to write an extended essay. It ended up being about 55 pages long with footnotes and everything like I would produce as an academic essay. Once they were satisfied with that it was sent up the line, several layers of approval process and then the Church History Department actually boiled down that longer essay to what got posted online so I had no say over what got posted online, what eventually appeared as Race and the Priesthood, but it was a condensed version of the longer piece that I produced for them. 2. What other scholars participated? I asked a similar question to Dr. Brian Hales regarding the polygamy essays Brian: Yeah, I gave them a very long essay, and then maybe a couple of years later they sent me the Gospel Topics essay that was similar to what we have today. I went through it all. I think we had one other meeting in the interim, maybe two. I just went through and made recommendations on it, and every recommendation I recommended in the text they accepted. There were some outside comments that I made some recommendations they did not, but they were very generous to allow me to do that. They do quote from the trilogy a number of times and an article I wrote was also referenced. GT: So that took a few years for that whole process to go through? Brian: Yeah, you know originally they were thinking of doing long answer, medium answer, short answer. That was the first thing that was asked of me on the topic of polyandry. Then I just sent them some general stuff, and I don't know how many iterations it went through there. Again I was excited to contribute to that. I only looked at the Nauvoo material. I know they had Kathryn Daines help out, and Kathleen Flake I think also are the other two that did the input on plural marriage. I hope they don't mind me saying that but they wanted outsiders to critique it. 3. That wasn't all. Ugo Perego was involved in the Book of Mormon essay Ugo: Yeah I helped writing that… it wasn't only me. I actually took the lead on the project of writing that. I wrote a much more extensive paper which has been published as well in the Interpreter, the online Mormon journal. It's about 40 pages long and then from that the Church condensed it down to what is the in Gospel Topics today. 4. Since we're on the Book of Mormon, we had some interesting conversations. David Rosenvall had an interesting theory on how Asian DNA ended up in America. David: our hypothesis is that you have at least everyone that came over with Jared and his brother who dispersed for thousands of years, and if you assume that there are some that didn't come across the ocean who were also related to them, who may have been a big part of how Asia became, there's a good chance that the people of North America and the people of Asia are going to have the same DNA. The difference is they used boats to get them across and maybe the Bering Sea but at least the boats according to the Book of Mormon. So I always say DNA is the best evidence that the Book of Mormon is true because in there is...
This week we welcome to the show Brian MacKenzie. He is a human performance and movement specialist. He is the innovator of the endurance, strength and conditioning paradigm. He has studied performance and movement since 2001 with altitude, hypoxia, breathing mechanics & methods, along with heat and cold exposure. He has spent a lot of his time training and understanding in and around the water, and desert. He has participated in Ironman (Canada 2004), and has run the Western States 100 and the Angeles Crest 100 mile endurance runs. He co-authored the books Power Speed Endurance, and The New York Times Best Seller UnBreakable Runner. Questions we ask in this episode: When it comes to training, I’ve heard you say quality vs quantity and methods are many, principles are few, please explain? What areas of exercise modalities would you encourage the weekend warrior who wants a rounded approach to their health, movement and longevity? You free dived with Great White Sharks. Why? Where does your passion for breathwork come from? You're currently collaborating with Stanford University's Neuroscience Dept. on how breath can influence our 'state', what have you discovered? I was intrigued by your book Unplugged, what can the reader expect from this? And this week, our fantastic guest is Brian Mackenzie, who is a human performance and movement specialist. Not only that, he's a top bloke and a lot of fun and just got a stack of wisdom and experience behind him, so it was great to have him on the show today. He's studied performance and movement since 2001 with altitude, hypoxia, breathing mechanics, methods along with heat and cold exposure as well. And we also dive into his more recent project, The Art of Breath, which of course I'm pretty passionate about as well. We even get into his book, Unplugged, and why he recently free-dived without a cage with great white sharks as well, which just blew my mind. So it's all in there. I don't care what you do. There's nuggets of wisdom for everyone in this podcast, and I have no doubt you're going to enjoy. And I also want to mention, don't forget guys, we are offering all the podcast listeners a 15% discount on any of our 180 Nutrition products at the moment. All you have to do is go back to the shopping cart and enter the discount code 180 podcast and you can receive a 15% discount. [00:01:30] Yeah, what I will mention as well is check out our new organic hemp blend protein as well, guys. It is phenomenal. We literally just launched it this week, and the laws have been changing around hemp. We've been excited to bring this protein to the marketplace as well, cause it's an all plant-based protein, and personally, I'm in love with it at the moment. Anyway, you can check that out as well, and the discount code applies for that too. Anyway, let's go over to Brian McKenzie. Enjoy! [00:02:00] Hi, this is Guy Lawrence. I'm joined with Stuart Cook, as always. Good morning, Stu. Stu Hello mate! Guy And our awesome guest today is Brian Mackenzie. Brian, welcome to the show, dude. Brian Thanks for having me, boys. Pleasure. Guy It's been a long time coming. Your name has popped up on different views and podcasts over the last 12 months at least. So it's like oh, we gotta get Brian on the show. So yeah, very appreciative of your time, mate. Brian Yeah, absolutely. Guy So we have a question we ask everyone when we kick off, and that is, "If a stranger stopped you on the street and asked you what you did for a living, what would you say? Brian I don't know. Stu Don't speak to strangers. Brian [00:03:30] Yeah. Literally I'd say, "I don't know." I could equate doing yard work to that's part of my job or working out, that's part of my job, or screwing around with breathing or screwing around with a kettlebell or whatever, or walking my dogs. That's part of work, you know? It literally is, because I'm trying to understand things, connect dots, and make things happen in a way that ... you know I've been able to ... I do believe I'm fortunate, but I do believe that I've kept something that a lot of people just really ditch and think that they gotta get in, like "I gotta get a job," which I understand that. I've played that game, but I've remained curious enough to be able to develop things that have allowed me to do what it is I really want to do. http://180nutrition.com.au/180-tv/brian-mackenzie-interview/
If you own a tablet or iPad, you've probably shopped for a case for it. And if you bought a case for it, did you ever run across beautiful leather cases that looked like books? If so, you and I have the same taste. Pad & Quill makes those luxurious cases. Our guest today is Brian Holmes, President, and owner of Pad & Quill. He started the business in 2010 with his wife, Kari. It was a desire to create exceptionally crafted luxury accessories (rather than profits) that motivated Holmes when he chose to start the business with a budget of just over $1,000. Pad and Quill is the tale of a shop formed with bookbinders, carpenters, a painter and a working mom coming together to create beautiful handmade iPad/iPhone cases, leather bags, and other dry goods. In this episode, we dive into his seven-year journey in ecommerce and discover what he's learned along the way. — Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast via Email Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast on iTunes Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast on Stitcher Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast via RSS Join The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook Group Work with Kurt — Learn: How Pad & Quill got started Their direct approach to launching the brand Why you should embrace your passion The advantage of lifetime warranties How to Brian pitches the press The golden rule that governs Brian's marketing Why he moved from Magento to Shopify Plus And his advice for entrepreneurs Links Mentioned: PadAndQuill - Use coupon code BHAPPY10 to get 10% off any product Shopify Plus Free Guide I want to send you a sample chapter of Ecommerce Bootcamp, absolutely free. Tell me where to send your sample at ecommerce-bootcamp.com Transcript Kurt: Hello, and welcome back to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I'm your host, Kurt Elster, recording from Ethercycle headquarters; about 10 minutes from O'Hare Airport, if you're familiar. And today I'm talking to a wonderful, seven year-old eCommerce store owner. Well, the store is seven years old. The owner is not seven years old, I should say, I should be specific. But we've got this app called Crowdfunder, and it's not the easiest thing to install if you're not familiar with HTML. So people ask me, "Hey Kurt, can you install this thing for me?" And I say, "Yes, of course." And in doing that, I always get to check out some interesting stores. And in this case, I said, gee this seems ... I was looking at a store, it was called Pad & Quill, and I thought, this seems awfully familiar. So I went and I searched through my email, and sure enough, I had bought an iPad case from Pad & Quill in 2011. So I reached out, and I acted like, this seemed familiar because it is familiar; I used to have your case on my first gen iPad, and I would love to hear your story. This looks like a fascinating brand, they were in the process of moving to Shopify Plus. So I wanted to hear that story. So joining me today, is Brian Holmes, who is the President/Owner of Pad & Quill. He started in 2010 with his wife, Kari. Prior to running Pad & Quill, he's a Tradesman for over 16 years; we'll find out in what. He and Kari have been married for almost 27 years. Congratulations! It is so much easier to do this with a supportive family, and doing it with family helps. But Brian, thank you for joining us. Brian: Kurt, thank you for having us on. I appreciate it, having me on. My only question is, you've only boughten one case since 2011, Kurt. What's goin on? Kurt: (laughs) Let's see, I had- Brian: (laughs) Kurt: So for the longest time I just had the standard iPad case on there. And then one of my kids dropped it on the kitchen tile floor like two or three years ago, and we have not had an iPad since. Someday. Brian: Ah. Kurt: Someday I'll get around to buying another iPad. Brian: Yes. Well, you're right I'm not seven years old, I'm almost 50, but I've been doing this for seven years. That is correct. Kurt: Very good. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: For our listeners, what is Pad & Quill? Brian: So, Pad & Quill is a, we are a luxury accessory maker. So we design and craft luxury goods for tech and play. That's kinda what we like to say. They're durable goods. They're artisan made. Those four words are very important to us. We don't wanna make anything that is going to fade away within a year and breakdown, et cetera. So all of our products come with longer warranties, and we want them to be very well made, as far as what we call good art. So when we make a product, to us, it should be both beautiful and functional. Cause you can have a lot of products out there that are really nice to look at, but they don't last, or they're really, really functional, but they're just ugly. So what we're trying to do is create these kind of beautiful leather bags, iPad cases, MacBook cases, things like that, that are unique, but also provide a function, provide a utility and are durable. They last a long time. So that's kinda been our focus. We're a typical company, that when we started, we started one place, and ended up somewhere else. That's very common in startup stories, that the products you started with aren't always the products you end up making five years later. Kurt: So somewhere along your line you had to pivot. Going back to the beginning, how did you start Pad & Quill? Brian: Yeah. Kurt: And what was your first product? Brian: Yeah. So we started with $1,200, and I- Kurt: Very good. Brian: I painted my web designer's deck. Kurt: (laughs) Brian: She painted it ... She still works with us, she's still a consultant, Kathy. She made our website. She coded it on ... I can't even remember where it was coded, what platform; think it was WordPress. And we started an original ... She built it all, all I knew is that I had seen a product out in San Francisco by a company called DODOcase. Kurt: DODOcase, another Shopify store. Brian: Yeah, they made a wood and book case, and I saw what they were doing. And I thought, my word, we could do this, but we could more than what they're doing. We could do, like, MacBook cases, and iPhone cases, and all kinds of stuff. So that kinda was the inspiration. So we took the $1,200, I paid a photographer far less than he deserved; he still works with me today. Now he's making money, but he knew we didn't have a lot so he gave me a deal. We built four prototypes, and we put up the site, it was in late June of 2010, and just started reaching out to the press saying, "Hey, we've got these products. They're on pre-order, they'll deliver in six weeks." You know, basically, help us fund this, in many ways. Reached out to everyone you could think of. Some Wired, I was talking to Walt Mossberg at The Wall Street Journal, who turned me down, of course. Kurt: (laughs) Brian: But what happened was, we got picked up by a couple people. So Gadget Lab picked us up at Wired, and then someone at Gizmodo wrote about us; and it started to pick up. Sales started coming in, and what had happened is, it was really born of not an idea that I had been thinking about. It was born out of a passion of a product I already saw, that I liked, which was the iPad and then the book bindery style case. And it just, kinda like, came together one evening. I was just like, "Wait a minute, we could do this. And we could do this better." You know, cause typical entrepreneurs think they can always do it better. So I was thinking, we can do this better, or different. Kurt: So when you saw that original DODOcase- Brian: Yeah. Kurt: You saw an iPad, [inaudible 00:05:50] and you saw ... And at that time, that was very early; I don't know if that was the first gen or second gen iPad at that point. Brian: First gen, first gen. Kurt: First gen, okay. So very early on. When you first held an iPad, it did have kind of a magical quality to it, where it's like, it's just this big, solid glass display that I can poke at. Brian: Right. Kurt: And at that time, apps had really ... Like, a lot of them had these very novel interfaces; it was pretty exciting. Brian: It was. Kurt: Back six years ago, it seems like forever ago, and now we don't think twice about it. But it was exciting. And then you had seen, you're right, DODOcase in San Francisco who was using traditional book ... Really, I mean, they were making cases using just traditional book binding- Brian: Techniques, yeah. Kurt: Techniques. Brian: Yep. Kurt: And you're right, in the typical, the entrepreneurial mindset, you said, "I love both of these. Why can't I do this? Why not me?" Brian: Yeah. Kurt: That's often how businesses start. Why not me? Brian: Yeah, and it didn't have, necessarily, a logic behind it. It had an opportunity, is what was seen. But here's the interesting thing, what happened was, is that as Kari and I started working on these products, all of a sudden there was something that connected for both of us; which was, these devices by Apple are beautifully designed, made of aluminum and glass, steel, gorgeous, gorgeous finishes, but they lacked warmth. Kurt: Yeah, they're ultra modern, which- Brian: Yeah, they're ultra modern Kurt: Can often make them feel cold. Brian: Which is fine, but we love, and that's a huge passion of ours, is that we love traditional materials. So it wasn't just book bindery, and that's why after the first two years of selling I ... I mean, we shipped about 3,000 iPad cases out of my basement window- Kurt: Hmm Brian: In the first nine months of the business. So what we were doing is we were having a bindery in Minneapolis make the books. And we were having a CNC Maker make the wood, and they were putting it together for us. And then we would take it to our basement and do some finishing touches, and ship them. So, we continued our press push. We constantly were reaching out to the press, coming out with new products. So we were in a never-ending cycle of creating new things. So we created a book-style case for a MacBook Air, which was very unique to the market, and that got us a lot of pickup. We just kept working through all these different products. We did stuff for the Kindle, at that time. This again, back in 2010 when the Kindle was pretty popular. Yeah, and then after about 3,000 or 4,000 products, my wife was like, "I want the basement back." Kurt: (laughs) Brian: So that's pretty much what happened. So we found a spot in Northeast Minneapolis, which is kind of an arts community area of Minneapolis, in downtown. We found a little spot there, and that's where we've been since. So, we've been there since I think May of 2011. Kurt: Did you, at all, have a background in business, entrepreneurship, manufacturing? Did you have any unfair advantage or skills that you think played a part in the success? Or at least, did you just have so much hubris you said, "You know, I think I could do this and then figure it out." Brian: Yeah, it's interesting you said unfair, cause that's an interesting term; that it's unfair. I mean, I know what you mean, like did I have something that I could leverage, that other people wouldn't typically have. Here's the thing, I had been a painting contractor. So I had done wall painting, like, house painting. I'd done that for 16 years. We had four kids. I didn't wanna be a painter for the rest of my life. And then the last five years of my trades work, and this was my own company, and I had a couple guys working for me, we were pretty small. In the last five years, I got into more artistic designs. So I was doing a lot of artisan finishes on walls and design work. Kurt: Like French plaster, and that kinda thing. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: Okay. Brian: Exactly. Kurt: Cool. Brian: And Venetian plasters, all that stuff. And what was interesting was, I really enjoyed that part of it. I, then, got my four year degree. In those last five years, I got my four year degree at night, in Psychology, ironically. I had never finished my four year. I went and got it, never used it. Think I decided at the end of my Psychology degree that I couldn't listen to people that long. Kurt: (laughs) Brian: So I ended up not doing anything with that, but I took a job with a small tech startup; cause I wanted to get out of painting. I didn't feel like I was using my skills the way I wanted to. So I took a risk and jumped into a small startup, which failed. It failed in about 18 months. It was a tech startup with a guy here locally, he was an inventor. It went poorly. What happened was, is that, the idea for Pad & Quill, the idea for me ... Like, I didn't have any manufacturing background. But my time, those 18 months in that startup, taught me almost a Master's level about here's how you'd operationalize a product; here's all the things you would need to make a product happen. And so, I think Pad & Quill was kinda like, a culmination of multiple life experience; running a painting company, being part of a small startup. It just kinda all came together, and I thought I could do this, and here's how I'd do it. And as I've moved further away, I'm realizing I love design. You know, I have no background in actual design. I have no background in product design. It was very much self-taught, but it's following ... I'm good at reading what people want to see in the markets, and then kind of taking it and putting my own flavor to it. Kurt: Okay. So early on you started with, it starts with your passion, and it sounds like you have a passion for product design, which is great. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: It's so much easier to run a business when it's exciting to you, versus I'm just going to do this because it will sell. That's such a struggle; and some people have the discipline to do it. I think it just makes life harder. Brian: It does. Kurt: Certainly easier if you enjoy the product. So you created this ... How many products did you launch with, like, within the first 12 months? Brian: Two. Oh, in 12 months, probably- Kurt: So you started with two. Brian: Started with two, and then we added some Kindle, and then some MacBook products. So they- Kurt: And they're all variations on ... They're essentially the same product in different form factors. Brian: Exactly. It was the same product on the same theme. So then, in 2011, the iPad 2 came out, so that was a big lift for us; and we became a competitor to DODOcase. And there was another company, I believe called Portenzo, out there at the time; and Treegloo. There was a few other competitors doing what we were doing. But here's what happened, and this was a huge shift for us, in 2012, so I'm a good two years in, I was noticing that these books were falling apart. So what was happening is, these books were made in traditional book bindery techniques, using really good book material; but they were falling apart. And I was like, they look beautiful, but they don't last. And I was realizing this is a ... You know, people love our product, they love our design, but I don't love that they don't last. And if you're cynical you could say, well that just means people will come back and buy another one. And my comment to that is, no, it means people will be disaffected by your brand. Kurt: I agree. Brian: They'll say your stuff isn't gonna last. Kurt: The brands I've seen where the product is incredibly durable, where they're comfortable in giving, like, really outlandish warranties on it because it's so durable; those are the brands where people, they don't have to worry about it falling apart and someone buying another one because people like it so much, they recommend it and they often will buy multiples. Brian: Right. Kurt: A good example would be, oh there's a Reddit group, I think, called Buy It For Life, where people just recommend products that they think will last a lifetime. Brian: Oh, funny. Kurt: Yeah. Off the top of my head ... And some are leather goods. But often times we see Saddleback Leather's bags mentioned, Beltman leather gun belts, which a gun belt- Brian: Okay. Kurt: Just turns out, it's a very stiff belt. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: I'm wearing one right now; it's a client. Brian: (laughs) Kurt: Yeah, those are great. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: What's the other one? Another good example. Oh, we use Everest bands as an example; they make watch straps for Rolex, but out of this unreal durable rubber. We had a review where someone said that they run it through an autoclave on a weekly basis, and the thing's fine. Brian: Yeah, yeah. Kurt: And it doesn't hurt their sales, people buy multiple products. So, no, I'm with you. Brian: And so what happened is, in 2011, I said that's it. It was late 2011, I said we have gotta shift to leather. We've just gotta shift, cause this is not a sustainable ... We're doing the eCommerce thing well. You know, by the way, we're not buying any ads from Google for the first three years. We are existing purely on reaching out to the press with new products. Any press that'll listen to us, and you know, if you have something kind of sexy, they'll write about it. Kurt: So that's a- Brian: And that would bring in sales. Kurt: Alright, that is an excellent point. But it's so difficult. Brian: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Kurt: Early on, the only marketing you were doing were two things, PR and these continuous launch cycles. Brian: Yep. Kurt: So you're coming out. You end up, kinda trapped in a thing where you're always launching new products; and that could be good, or it can be a struggle. Brian: Yeah, it's a little of both. Kurt: It's a little of both. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: But it gives you a reason to keep reaching out to the press. And once, I think, you've gotten over that initial hurdle where they're interested in you, and you start developing relationships, it helps. Brian: Right. Kurt: But what do you think goes into, like, what makes a good press pitch? Cause this is so difficult. Brian: Yeah. This is a good question. This is a good question. Two things, be real. You know, don't sit there and try to ... Don't talk to a press person like you're not pitching them; you are pitching them. But, with that said, be brief. Okay. Brevity is the soul of wit, is a famous saying. I love that saying; it's very true. Be very brief in your communication. Send a big fat image to the press. Make sure you're taking some photography of your product that looks nice. Pay a photographer friend, if you're just starting out, to maybe give you a hand. Because good imagery goes a long ways in a writer's mind, because in the end, what they're looking for is, are you offering me something my readers would care about? Is this interesting to my readers? Cause if it's interesting, yeah I'll write about it. I'll mention it. I'll tweet about it. So, be brief, be very real, just be open. Say, "Hey we're just starting out. We're a family business." That's what we used to say. Our pitch was, "Hey this is Brian from Pad & Quill. We're a small family business here, in Minneapolis. We've got these beautiful new iPad cases we're just releasing. Here's some images. Thanks for any considerations, if you'd cover us." I still say that same email, what I just said to you just now, today. Kurt: Hmm. Brian: I still email that exact same way, today, when I'm emailing Wired. Kurt: I'm sure it works. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: I am on the receiving end of so many awful pitch emails, and outreach emails. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: That when one comes through where it's like, alright, it's not a giant wall of text. It's concise, it's to the point, it tells me what the advantage to me and my audience is, and it's not trying to trick me, or in any way mislead me. It's saying, hey, this is who I am, this is what I can offer you or your audience, and if you wanna know more information, here's next ups. Brian: Right. Kurt: And it's genuine and real. Brian: It is, and I think that, that has a huge benefit. Again, it's that whole idea of, are you serving people? So I come from the place of serving my customers. I serve my customers, then I'll be able to create an income for myself and my family. If I serve my vendors by creating a customer base, then my vendors will be loyal to me, and continue to make products on time; because they know that I have a loyal customer base. If I'm going to the press, am I operating from a place of service? How am I serving the press person? Not using, serving. There's a huge difference between those two. Because in serving someone, you're saying, how can I help your column to be more interesting? Would this be a way to do it? And the press person may say, "No, this is not of interest to me right now," and that's fine. But it's better to come from that perspective, more of humility, than to come from, "You know, you should cover this. We have a lot of customers. You should cover our products, they last forever." Kurt: (laughs) Brian: That doesn't go very far with the press. It's funny, I wanna finish that pivot because you brought up a company I wanna kinda tie you into. So, in 2012, we wanted to move to leather goods. I wanted to get into more leather cases. I wanted to make an iPhone case. We were making them, at the time, out of traditional book bindery material. They'd last, honestly, about nine months. We were charging, like, $50, and I'm thinking, that's too much money for somethin that falls apart. You know? How do we do this? So I started reaching out to leather manufacturing companies, and I came across a company called Saddleback Leather Company. Kurt: Very good. Brian: And I hit up their PR guy, and I said, "Hey, I wanna do manufacturing." And they said no. And on the third time, I kept coming back, they gave in. So, all of our, the majority, I shouldn't say all, but the majority of our leather goods are made by Saddleback's manufacturing. So, Dave Munson's a good friend of mine, that developed over the last four years from all this. So it's funny you brought up Saddleback, cause I was like, "Yep, that's our people." Kurt: Right. Brian: And that's the thing is that, what I knew I needed, I don't wanna make just a beautiful item, I have to make something that lasts and is durable. And we have been so thrilled to be working with Saddleback's team. They have a plant in Mexico that we use, and it's just phenomenal, they treat their people really well. I've been there, I've seen what they do. It's just a fantastic company to work with. Yeah, so that's who we use for all our leather. So that happened in 2012, and we launched this little leather wallet case with them; and it was partly made here, actually. Some of it was made here, some of it was made in Mexico. It was all brought to St. Paul and assembled, and that took off in 2012. We had a huge, huge sales cycle, our biggest year ever in 2012; at that time. Kurt: This is just a leather wallet? This was your- Brian: Yeah, it was basically, like, a leather wallet case with our wood frame. We had our unique wood frame attached to all leather, so it was really durable. And that started in 2012, it was featured in the New York Times in 2013. We had a big year in 2013 and 14 because of it. Yeah, iPhone cases were real good to us in the first three years. And then, in 2013, 14 is when we started developing our lifestyle line. That's when we started bringing in bags, we started creating ... Our first bag launch was in late 2013. Kurt: I'm admiring your Classic Journeyman leather wallet on your website. I gotta- Brian: Oh yeah. Kurt: Pick up one of these. Oh, and it even comes in different colors. Brian: Oh yeah. Kurt: Oh that chest- Brian: Yeah, if that Chestnut looks familiar, you've seen it at Saddleback Leather. And I have no problem promoting Saddleback, cause honestly, it's a great company. Dave and I are different designer styles, definitely, but he makes great bags. He makes great bags. Kurt: Yeah, I see right on here. It says, "30 day, money back promise, and 10 year leather guarantee." Brian: Yeah. Kurt: So tell me, was it scary to offer this kind of warranty? Brian: Yeah. Yeah, it always is. It was funny cause I had a guy from inc.com, I was doing an interview two years ago, and he asked me, "Why not lifetime warranty? Why 25?" And I thought, it was a good question, and I thought, because lifetime is so cliched; everyone says lifetime. But by putting 25 years, what I'm trying to say is, it's gonna last two and half decades. You're gonna get a lot of use out of it. And by the time they last two and half decades, you're probably gonna want another one anyhow. You know, we'll have new stuff by then. Kurt: Right. Brian: I think we put a year around it because it gives it a definitive, like, wow this is built to really last. Yes, it's built to last. Is it scary? Yeah, it is, because you do have things break. Hardware breaks, stitching fails; it happens from time to time. We repair it and take care of it, but yeah. Put it this way, I don't feel nervous about the quality we're putting out, though. Does that make sense? We got a lot of confidence behind what we're doing. Kurt: Right, if you're confident in it, it shouldn't be scary. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: If you believe in your product, you shouldn't be afraid of it. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: I mean, really, your only fear is will people abuse it? And you're always gonna get someone who does. Brian: Yeah. I mean, we started coming out with ... We found a book bindery material that lasts more than six months. We found one that lasts for years. Now, we put a one year warranty on it, but it'll last. We tell customers, it's a one year warranty, but you'll have it for years. Because we found this really tough buckram, that's really beautiful; it's used in the library of Congress. That's what we wrap our iPad cases in. Kurt: Hmm. Brian: So for us, it's all about the materials. Will they last? So I guess I'm ... No, to answer the question, I'm not too worried because we're trying to use the materials that will last. Kurt: Right. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: So you've got, you're in the process ... Well, probably by the time this airs, maybe, your Shopify store will have launched. Brian: Hard to say. Kurt: Hard to say. Maybe it has, maybe it hasn't. Brian: We actually see a delay coming because of, and you can edit this out if you want, or keep it in, I don't care. We may be unable to switch for at least a month or two because of a new iPad coming out in a few weeks. Kurt: (laughs) Cool. Brian: Because of that, we're gonna have so much lift on the site, we are very hesitant to shift platforms until the sales calm down. Kurt: So what platform are you on now? Brian: Magento. Kurt: And you're switching to Shopify Plus. Tell me- Brian: Thank God. Kurt: (laughs) Alright, so what happened? Why are you doing that? Brian: We were told early on, I had talked to a consulting group, and they said, "Oh, you should be on Magento, it's scalable, you can customize." All true, all true. I call Magento, kinda like, the PC, and Shopify is kinda like a Mac. Kurt: Hmm. Brian: That's how I see the two. I mean, you can do a lot of customization on Shopify, but it's very plug and play friendly. And for the entrepreneur who wants to start a company, the last thing you want, is to be figuring out how many hours you can pay a $150 an hour developer. Because if you have a Magento site, that's what you're doing all the time. You're paying a developer, constantly, for the smallest changes. Kurt: Right. Brian: Whereas, on Shopify, you have app store, you have plugins. We're, of course, with what we're doing, we're paying developers to help us with small projects here and there. But for the most part, it's really a lot easier to assemble a Shopify site. Magento is definitely customizable, but boy, you better have Magento Pro engineers, who are doing all your coding. They have to do all your maintenance, manage all your plugins. If you have conflicts with your plugins, that's up to you to figure it out. Shopify does all that for you. They do that thinking for you. Kurt: Right. Brian: That's something that is a huge benefit to us. We were debating Magento 2.0, last year, or Shopify, and came down on Shopify. Kurt: What was the straw that broke the camel's back, where you said, alright it's time to make the switch? Cause it is not an easy task to change platforms when you've got an existing, running business. Brian: It's not. I think, a couple things. One, we designed this site about three to four years ago, it was starting to feel three to four years old. The current site at padandquill.com if you go there right now, it's three to four years old design. And we're kinda, you know what, we need to make this a little cleaner. We've moved more into a luxury lifestyle brand. We wanna even display more large imagery about our lifestyle and what we do, and what we love. So, that was kinda the impetus to go, okay, what platform do we want it? We were thinking, originally, Magento 2.0, and then we started considering just how much technical work was required; and that's when we reached out to Shopify, and it was a pretty easy sale. Cause we were like, "Sounds good!" I mean, we'd pay a certain fee. We're on Shopify, what's it called? Shopify Plus? Kurt: Shopify Plus. Brian: Yeah, so we're paying a fee, but that's like, I already pay that fee with a developer right now to guarantee 99.9% uptime. Kurt: Right, yeah. Brian: I have to pay someone that right now. Kurt: Yeah. The thing you're trading ... It's interesting to sell, trying to explain the benefits and the value proposition of Shopify Plus to an existing Shopify store owner. They're like, "Alright." You have to figure out, like, what's the problem you're facing, and the Shopify Plus will solve it. Versus when someone is on Magento and they're looking at switching and you go, well you don't worry about, you know, for one flat fee, someone else is gonna manage and you never worry about hosting uptime, updates, security, all of that goes away, and support. Brian: Right. Kurt: And it just becomes a no brainer. Brian: And we've had security issues, just being open with you. We've had some security issues pop up because of outdated plugins. Kurt: Right, and those- Brian: And all kinds of stuff. And it was, like, an outdated plugin in a blog. Kurt: Yeah. Brian: On our Magento site. And someone had gotten in through the back door, and we caught it, fixed it. But it was one of these things where we're like, okay Shopify does all that for us. Kurt: Yeah. I have, literally, never seen a security vulnerability like that happen on Shopify. Whereas, previously we did a lot of WordPress development work, and that was like a constant, constant battle trying to keep those things locked down. Brian: Right. That's the last thing you need to be worrying about. Right? Kurt: Yeah, that's just such an unnecessary- Brian: I mean, that's the last thing. When you're designing products, you're trying to ... Cause what am I? I'm a designer. I'm a salesman. I'm a community developer. Like, we have a family of customers, that's where our focus needs to be. You know? Not on security issues on the site. Cause 98% of our revenue comes from eCommerce, our store. Kurt: Hmm. That's excellent. Brian: Yeah, we are not in wholesale. We're very much like Saddleback; we're eCommerce only. Kurt: So, we're coming to the end of our time together. You have had a long, successful, and wonderful journey over the last seven years. What are some of the things you've learned, that you would go back tell yourself when you were starting out? Brian: Oh, that's a great question. Did I tell you to ask me that question? That's a good one. Kurt: (laughs) No, no. You said what three things have you learned building a brand? Brian: Yeah. I would say this, if you have a product you're making that's starting to sell, and it's selling pretty well and you love making that product, and other products like it ... Whatever the field is, whatever you do, be very careful to not listen to consultants too much. There is wisdom in a host of counselors, there really is. But in the end, your passion has to be from you about what you wanna sell and bring to your customers. So be careful how much you listen to consult ... I did a lot of consultant listening early on, that I wouldn't do now. I would just be who I am. And the more that Kari and I have just been who we are as a couple in this business, the more success we've seen. The more we have followed what other people have told us, "Well, you're getting big now. You really need to think about strategic changes." Those are big disasters. Not disasters, that's a heavy word. Those have not been fruitful. So, be who you are. To the degree that you can do something you love, is a huge blessing, it really is. Not everyone gets that opportunity. Like I said, I was painting for 17 years. I was thankful I was able to bring in an income, but I didn't really enjoy painting. So, where you can match a passion or a desire to income, it's awesome. But it's not ... I don't think it's something you can always do. Does that make sense? Kurt: No, absolutely. Brian: I'm not trying to paint a rosy picture here, because it's pretty hard to do that. Kurt: I think it comes down to having an authentic voice, being true to yourself, being true to your brand. Brian: Yep. Kurt: The hard part is figuring out what that voice and brand are, and then letting that show through. Every time I've been scared to include more of my personality in my marketing and my work, it has always paid off. You know, people like having that authentic voice; and that's what part of the podcast is. Brian: Right. Kurt: I'm myself on the show, and then by the time someone says, "Hey Kurt, could we work together on this?" And we get on the phone, they go, "I feel like I already know you." Yeah, because the whole time, I've been myself, and that's so important. Brian: Right. That is so important. It is so important. Plus, you'll just be happier with yourself, at the end of the day. Cause you've been true to yourself, even if the business doesn't work out. You just don't guarantee that any of these businesses will succeed, right? Kurt: No, absolutely not. It's always a risk. Brian: But in the end of day, if they fail, were you yourself? Were you trying to be yourself? Yeah. Kurt: So, Brian- Brian: A good entrepreneur gets back up and says, "Okay, what can I do next?" Kurt: Yeah, you learn from it, you move on. Brian: Yep. Kurt: And try the next thing. Brian: Yep. Kurt: So Brian, where can people go to learn more about you? Brian: Yeah, so, the best place to learn about us is at www.padandquill.com. So that's our website, click on About Us if you wanna see our story in more detail; that's at the bottom of the page, About Us. You'll see a picture of Kari and I, and there's kind of our story, and kinda what drives us, our passion is very interesting as well. Also, coupon code. We have a coupon code for your listeners. Kurt: Wonderful. Brian: So bhappy. So the letter B, and then happy, H-A-P-P-Y, number 10, just one zero. That's 10% off anything, any product, including bags, leather bags as well. Kurt: And they are beautiful bags. 10%. Brian: Thank you! Thank you. Kurt: Alright, I wrote that down, I will include it in the show notes for folks. Brian: Cool. Kurt: Brian, thank you for everything. I appreciate it. Brian: Yeah, Kurt, thanks so much for having us on, and wish you best with your success on your podcast. Kurt: Thank you. That's all for us today at The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode. So please, join our Facebook group, The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders, and let me know. Or sign up for my newsletter, kurtelster.com, shoot me an email. Either way, you'll be notified whenever a new episode goes live. And of course, if you'd like to work with me on your next Shopify project, you can apply at Ethercycle. Com. As always, thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week.
Welcome to Beyond Prisons: a new podcast examining incarceration in America through an abolitionist lens. In our first episode, hosts Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein introduce the idea behind the podcast, dissect and critique the current conversation around prison reform, and discuss the need for a broader vision for justice that should guide those efforts. What is prison abolition and what would it mean to live in a world without prisons? What's missing from current efforts to reform the criminal justice system? What kind of topics will this podcast cover? We tackle these questions and more in our first episode. Going forward, we will conduct interviews and delve much deeper into the various issues we touch upon in this first episode. So, stay tuned! -- Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein Music & Production: Jared Ware -- Transcript Brian: Hello everybody and welcome to the first episode of Beyond Prisons. I am one of your hosts Brian Sonenstein and I’m joined by my co-host Kim Wilson. How ya doing, Kim? Kim: I’m doing well. Hi Brian, how’s it going? Brian: It’s going alright. I’m excited to be here. I’m glad we’re getting this off the ground. Kim: Yeah, me too. Brian: So what Kim and I are trying to do is something a little bit different. Oh, my dogs are barking in the background. (laughs) Kim: We’re gonna have dogs, we’re gonna have cats. We might have you know, who knows what else is going to show up so I say let’s just roll with it. Brian: I know, it’s fine. Kim and I decided to start this podcast to talk about the issue of prison reform and mass incarceration, and offer some different perspectives than a lot of the things you hear going on in the news right now. So I thought we could introduce ourselves a little bit. Kim, why don’t you go first? Kim: Ok, well, I’ll tell you a little bit about what my motivations were, and I think that will be a nice segway into my intro. But the motivating factor behind me getting on board with this podcast really stems from a place of frustration. I’m frustrated with the policy choices around mass incarceration, around prison specifically, and I’m seeing so many things that are impacting communities that I care about and that many people that I know live in, and I feel like we could be doing something better and so I’m coming at it from that perspective. That said, on a personal level, I’m the mother of two incarcerated men who are serving life in prison without the possibility of parole or at least that was their sentence. My professional and academic interests in incarceration began long before either of them had any encounter with the criminal justice system and I’m thinking of that in a broad sense particularly when we talk about schools and school to prison pipeline, which I’m sure we’re gonna spend quite a bit of time talking about in later episodes. And then I’m also coming at this as an activist who started out very much on board with prison reform and the prison reform movement if you want to call it that, and quickly evolved from that perspective to one of being strongly committed to prison abolition. So that’s a little bit about me, where I’m coming from, and what I’m hoping that this podcast is going to be about. What about you, Brian? Brian: Well, so I am a journalist. I’ve been writing about incarceration and the criminal justice system for about five years now. My work has primarily been to address these issues from the perspective of the people who are most directly impacted by it and that’s how I actually got to know you Kim. I’m also deeply interested in the issue of prison abolition after having been an activist myself for a number of years on a number of issues from drug policy to whistleblowing. I’ve seen a lot of people have interactions with the system and none of them have been good, including friends of mine. I grew up in sort of a blue collar, very small town in New England and saw a lot of people who fell into drugs and other problems, wind up in the system and it just destroyed not only their lives but the lives of their families and friends, and so I just had a growing interest in this. I’m very interested in the topic of reform, I’m also interested in critiquing reform, which is something we talk a lot about here. And we’re also going to try to break away from sort of this large statistical view of incarceration where we’re focusing on numbers. What we’re gonna try to do is bring perspectives from the people who are involved and use those to sort of guide our arguments about what the criminal justice system should be like. So why don’t we talk about like the major narrative around mass incarceration, you know maybe we can start by just critiquing that there. So I don’t know, when you think about mass incarceration , what are some things that jump out to you, like what are the things you know about it? Kim: You know, coming at this from several different points of view and those things have deeply informed where I am today regarding mass incarceration. I think that’s an important thing to talk about because, again, as someone who was trained as a policy analyst, the policy perspective or that school of thought can really be distilled in terms of cost-benefit analysis and I want, as you pointed out, for us to move beyond statistics and to think about the real issues, to dig down deep into the racialized nature of mass incarceration, which is one of the things that jumps out to me. I mean, I think it’s important to address the numbers and to account for those and also to explain what those numbers mean in the context of people’s lives in the context of communities. How do those numbers translate into problems for the people who are behind the numbers, right? So I think that first and foremost addressing the racialized nature of mass incarceration and more broadly what we refer to as the prison industrial complex. That’s one of the main things that I want to talk about and I don’t feel is actually discussed enough in public policy circles. Now, that said, I think that there are public policy institutions that are doing this kind of research and that are publishing reports and white papers and what have you that do address the racialized nature of mass incarceration. But this doesn’t actually seem to make it into the spaces where policy makers are making decisions and that gap right there really frustrates me and it’s something that has frustrated me for a really long time. We know, for example, that Black people are disproportionately represented in the system and what does that mean? You know, what does that mean in terms of communities? And I want to talk about that and to explore that. We know, for example, that in terms of placing this in a global context that the U.S. has one of the largest prison populations in the world. So what does that mean you know and what does that look like on the ground and what does that mean in the context of the politics of today? Because I don’t think that we can really launch a podcast in 2017 and not talk about the current (laughs) political situation in this country. Brian: Right. Kim: If that’s not a source of frustration for people, I don’t know what is and it’s certainly a major source of frustration for me. Then there is the gender component of mass incarceration. We tend to talk about men who are incarcerated and particularly black men. To neglect an oversight of talking about women and how those numbers have grown exponentially over the last decade and a half, and I think that’s an important piece that needs to be addressed as well. So there’s a lot of stuff that I’m thinking about when I’m thinking about mass incarceration. I think that that this is a good place to start. I’m also thinking about mass incarceration in broader terms and this goes to the title of our podcast as well, Beyond Prisons. I want us to imagine what that means. What does it mean to see something beyond prisons? Can we imagine a world not only without prisons but what are some of the creative solutions that we can come up with through these conversations that are going to be I would say not only realistic but that are necessary in light of the fact that we have, what, over six million people under correctional supervision in this country with about two million of those incarcerated? So when we think about, when I’m thinking about incarceration in this country, I’m thinking about it in really broad terms. I’m thinking of policing. I’m thinking of surveillance. I’m thinking of all the various ways, the mechanisms that are used to control certain populations in this country particularly marginalized groups in this country. What about you? Brian: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that on a very basic level, one of the things that I want to do is talk about what we as Americans by and large think prisons do, who goes there, what happens there, and this includes even through the lens of the reform movement. But as activists, when we’re thinking about policy that we could be implementing and if we’re thinking about what comes next after prison, I think one of the most important things that we can do is have conversations that could lead to a cultural shift among people that will lay a stronger foundation for these policies, and I think we can get there. As we know, prisons and the system in general are largely out of the public view. Attempts to, I know this as a journalist and you know this as both a scholar and a parent, but any attempts to get more information about the system or to question actions by officials, you get the silent treatment or worse. I think in order to really lay the groundwork for a lot of this policy, we need to have conversations and clear some things out about punishment, and about crime, and about safety and the role of prisons in all of this, right? And I think that there is this idea that people are criminals instead of people that do things that are against the law or maybe have low moments. I think there’s this idea that when you go away to prison, you deserve harsh treatment and certain things as punishment and there’s no thought that these people are eventually going to get out. They’re going to have to reintegrate into society under even more difficult situations than the average person trying to get a job out there today, when you have this scarlet letter of a conviction hanging over you. What I hope that we can do in addition to all the things that you said that I totally agree with. In addition to getting into the various issues that go on in prison, and at the front end and back end, before people go in and after, I just really want to challenge our assumptions, and I want us to really think about the myriad costs that are associated with decisions that we make with punishment. And even on just a basic and theoretical level, we talk about prison sentences, right. We talk about sentencing reform, but we attach arbitrary years on prison sentences because I mean there really is no science behind a lot of this and it’s just interesting to think a lot of times—I hear people on the left and liberals are always talking about how oh, the Republicans are so anti-science. Well, the truth is that as a society, we have this looming system that is very pseudo-scientific and very anti-scientific in a lot of ways. And so these are the ideas and little things that we want to chip away at. We’re gonna bring guests on to talk about these things and a lot of the things that you and I are going to chat about today. We’re gonna gloss over a lot of things, we’re gonna mention a lot of things, but trust that in coming episodes, we will dig into these issues deeper. So, what else? What else should we talk about here? Kim: Yeah, I mean playing off of those points that you just made about prison, one of the things that I’ve been thinking about as I was preparing for this episode today was something that Angela Davis writes about in ‘Are Prisons Obsolete?’ And she says, ‘stop thinking of prisons as inevitable, ‘ right? We think of the prison as this natural thing, and that we can’t imagine life without it. And I think that our name again captures that, but our approach to what we’re attempting to do with these conversations is to think about what is life without a prison. It’s not some Utopian ideal. It’s not politically naïve to talk about a world without prisons, a society without prisons, and the difficulty that I’ve encountered in my work with people, including a lot of liberals. It’s mostly liberals who I’ve been working with around issues of prison abolition, that any time I say, ‘Ok, imagine a world without prisons? What does that society look like?’ The first thing I hear is, no, no, no, you can’t possibly mean you want to get rid of prisons. And again, this really is super, super frustrating because it’s not even... I’m giving you a magic wand. You can make the world whatever you want it to be, right? It’s like, it’s a theoretical exercise in a lot of ways. And people don’t even want to imagine that world. Brian: Why do you think that is? Like why do you think people—I have my own thoughts on this, obviously, but I’m curious of your thoughts on why people are resistant to the idea of having that radical imagination. Kim: Well I think a lot of people are afraid, right. I think that there’s a lot of fear that they watch these television shows, they see things depicted in the media and presented a certain way, and their fantasy about what someone in prison looks like or is capable of is informed by these things. They don’t necessarily—even if they have an experience with someone who’s been to prison, they tend to have this wall up, like okay, I like the idea of improving conditions for people in prison, but what are you talking about? This is going a little too far. You can’t really be talking about getting rid of prisons. And, I’m like actually I am. So institutions where we put people in cages for long periods of time without any consideration as to what that is doing to someone. It’s a problem. It’s problematic. We need to have, I’m fond of saying, the courage, the backbone, like we need strong backs to be able to say this is wrong, right? And how do we disrupt this system? How do we change this system? How can we make something that is different from what we have now, right? Not just substituting and moving this around or you know they say rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, right? You know, just a couple of days ago, de Blasio, Mayor de Blasio of New York, announced that they’re closing down Rikers and that’s great, and I’m cheering for the fact because Rikers was a really shitty place. It was a horrible place by all accounts and it needed to be closed. However, what he’s proposing is setting up new prisons. So for me, and this is where I have to depart with the reform movement: Substitutes for prison, including other prisons, doesn’t really help the issue. It doesn’t address the social, the economic, the political problems that have created the issues that we have regarding mass incarceration, and I think until we get to that, until we get to that point where we can, I mean, good grief, have a conversation about what a world without prisons could look like. And to move people just a tiny little bit to say ‘ok, what does transforming this society mean? How do we deal with really scary things? Okay, so someone’s committed murder or someone’s being raped. These are horrible things and how do we address the victim’s legitimate concerns here while also addressing what is happening in terms of incarceration that we know doesn’t actually act as a deterrent, right? It doesn’t work, so what do we do about this? We need a better way to approach this and I’m thinking of this podcast and our conversations as a way to explore various approaches to what that landscape would look like. I’m looking at it also in terms of how do we challenge white supremacy as part of this project? I see a lot of talk about prisons and carcerality that want to leave out the race component. And that’s one of the hang-ups I think that we have and that we confront, particularly in the terms of policy making and policy choices that are being made because these policies around prison are meant to appear race neutral, and they’re not. We need to have not only a language but a process by which we can assess, analyze, and understand what racialized carceral system is, and what do we do about that. Brian: I agree. I completely agree. And I think that there is a lot of danger in compartmentalizing reform efforts instead of taking these broader approaches like abolition. My head is spinning. There’s so many things I want to say in response to what you just said. I mean one thing I want to say is that I think that for people who don’t really know what prison abolition is, they’ve never heard of it, or maybe they have somewhat of an idea. I think that one of the helpful ways to think about this too is that there is not going to be a one-size-fits-all solution to prisons, much the same way that much the one-size-fits-all of prisons doesn’t work for the justice system. I think when we’re talking about getting rid of prisons, like you said, we’re not talking about replacing it with a different kind of prison. I really resent a lot of this talk about looking over to Sweden and see how awesome it is to be a prisoner in Sweden. I think that’s totally the wrong way to look at prisons. It’s also a hard conversation, I think, and I wonder if you ever butt up against this, Kim. The needs and the problems are so bad for people who are incarcerated that the needs are very immediate, right? So I’m not sitting here saying we shouldn’t support these reform efforts that look to increase the quality of life of prisoners, because we need to help people right now. But we can’t do that at the expense of a broader vision. I see a lot in these reform efforts of reducing or showing greater leniency toward low level non-violent offenders, but at the same time, we are going to increase penalties and introduce new penalties for violent offenders or for other drug crimes. They talked about introducing a new Fentanyl mandatory minimum sentence in the last criminal justice reform bill. It probably will be added to this one, I assume, with Republicans being in control of legislature. Another thing that I want to say and I’m jumping around a little bit here, but I’m just thinking about your comments, is a lot of times what we see in reform is euphemism, to make it look like things are changing or to modestly or slightly tweak a prisoner’s experience. But the abuse and the fundamental issue of why a certain thing in prison is bad remains the same. So, for example, with solitary confinement, we say that solitary confinement is torture and I think that it is pretty widely accepted now that solitary confinement is torture. And at the same time, the reforms that we get are two extra hours out of your cell per week, and reformers call that a victory. Or only certain groups of people are not allowed to go into solitary confinement, or they opened a new housing unit that is basically solitary confinement in everything but name. So it’s really tricky and that’s another reason why I think it’s important to consider abolition and to take it seriously because a lot of these problems. We are at where we are today because a lot of these politicians have been kicking the can on these issues ever since we had prisons. I mean, Attica, the reform efforts followed Attica. Rebellions have been going on for years and years and years. Things haven’t gotten materially better. I think when we think about abolition, another thing to think about like you were saying, is how do we think about somebody who’s committed an act of murder, an act of rape? How do we think about justice? But it’s also that the prison and the system that we have set up does nothing to sort of head off these things from happening by changing the material conditions and environments, social contexts and racial contexts like you were talking about, that people live in, that limit their options and push them in or silo their paths in life. So it’s not just what can we do differently when someone commits a crime but it’s like how can we invest in communities. All the money we spend on federal, state, and local jails, all that money could be so much better put to use with education, jobs, healthcare in society in ways that would reduce the number of people winding up behind bars. Kim: Absolutely! And I think to your first point regarding reforms and changing things in the immediate and looking to European models of prisons and what not. I think that there is a space for having a comparative analysis as to what other countries are doing that are better than what is happening here in the U.S. and if it improves the conditions of people on the inside, then Ok, great. However, what an abolitionist’s perspective actually does is that it provides a framework for understanding and placing that conditions have to be improved right now, however, the long term goal is not to just sit back and say, yeah, we improved conditions, but how do we not use prisons as an anchor for the problems that are happening in society? How do we or what other things can we use? And you mentioned some of those things: investing in communities, providing healthcare, mental health. Mental health is such a big part of this problem, not criminalizing drugs and seeing that these things don’t actually improve safety or security, but are used as the pretext for increasing the carceral state. I think that one of the things that we’re going to do in upcoming episodes is really delve into what do we mean by prison abolition. Today, I think that we can just give a quick definition of that, a working definition so people have that and to talk a little bit about what we mean when we say prison industrial complex so that we understand the language that’s being used here. Because I think particularly in this day and age, particularly in this political climate that our words matter and our words matter more than they have in the past. So providing clear definitions gives us a place to begin. It may not improve or increase understanding very much, but at least it gives us a place to begin so that we know that we’re talking about this thing over here, and not that thing over there. That said, one of the things I talk about when I talk about prison abolition and again using a lot of Angela Davis’ work, using the work of people from Critical Resistance, as well as Insight, and a number of other groups is to really think about it as a political vision. To think about how prison abolition constitutes a set of long term goals. There are things that we are doing right now, however, the goal is to eliminate and get rid of imprisonment, to get rid of policing and surveillance as the mechanisms that we use to address social problems. I think that’s really the most concrete way of putting it in really simple terms. It sounds easy but once we start unpacking that, I think there is just so much happening in that. So that framework include, for me at least, that framework of abolition is also anti-racist. It is when we talk about gender disparities. We’re including trans’ rights. We’re talking about immigration policy. We’re talking about all of these things that are happening right now and the kinds of policies that are being implemented by this administration that work against an abolitionist framework. I feel a sense of urgency now more than I have I think before. And I think I’ve had a sense of urgency for a long time. I don’t know. What do you think about that? Brian: I totally agree, and I think that we really need to have goals. And I think a lot of what’s happening in the prison reform movement and even just sort of larger on the left, I think you see that it’s a little different when you talk about when you talk about something like single-payer healthcare, for instance. I think we need to have these goals that even if they seem politically unfeasible in this moment, we have to have something to work toward. Like you said, provide a framework for what we’re doing, not only so that we don’t shut off any avenues to fully realize reform or anything like that, but just so that we’re going somewhere with this. This is the work of movements. You know, we might not see this in our lifetime. A lot of people that I talk to about abolition for their first time kind of scoff at you. They’re like, yeah right, there’s no way that would ever happen. The prison is such a fundamental institution in our society that obviously it’s much bigger than any one issue. I think that something that you were touching on or something that it made me think about when you were talking is that if you bring an abolitionist framework to this, it does inform the way you look at other policies and other areas of government and society instead of just sort of being content to fiddle with whatever problems are going on. It makes you want to investigate the root causes more, to question the system more. It also sort of gives you more empathy in a way. I feel like even the worst political foes that I could imagine, I definitely would like to understand more about why they are the way they are. That doesn’t mean I’d excuse their behavior, but just sort of a strategy. I feel so much that political fighting and everything today is like very in the moment and lacks a broader context. So, anyway, I think abolition is something that if there were ever a good time to talk about it, it would be now with things as awful as they are. I feel like we almost have more space to talk about abolition than we might have had a few years ago. Kim: Absolutely! Absolutely! Yeah, I think that one of the things that I wrote down in my notes in my preparation for today had to do with reforms, and one of the things that Angela Davis says is that the idea of reforms doesn’t go beyond the prison. So if all of your solutions begin and end with prisons, then there is really no room for alternatives in that reform model, and that’s the problem that I have as an abolitionist with the reform movement – that all of the solutions maintain these carceral institutions, so whether we’re talking about house arrest or surveillance, parole, probations, what have you, then it’s not really an alternative. You’re trying to give something a different look without doing much about the actual problem and this resonates with people. This is very appealing and again, this is extremely frustrating for me because again, as someone who was trained in policy and public policy research and what have you, the literature really approaches mass incarceration from those perspectives. So when we’re writing policy documents, when they’re doing evaluations of re-entry programs, for example, there are really no alternatives that are being presented that are not carceral alternatives. And that, for me, has been part of the problem for years. That, for me, the ‘Aha’ moment or the lead-up to the ‘Aha’ moment if we can even call it that, came a number of years ago, where it was evident that the further I dug down into re-entry and what was happening in communities was people returning from prison to certain communities. There’s a pattern there and that pattern is repeated over, over and over again across communities in this country. So the policies weren’t working. But it wasn’t enough to just say the policies aren’t working. What is actually happening here? What is informing these policies, and I think that was where I really started to go into the abolitionist literature because the public policy literature doesn’t discuss abolition. It completely neglects it. Abolition is something that, if you’re a political theorist that was talking about abolition from that perspective, and people are writing brilliant things about Foucault and what have you. But that information, that knowledge doesn’t transfer over to the public policy space. So how do we bring these things together? It’s not just political theorists, but philosophers and other people who are doing work on prison abolition, not just theoretical but practical work as well. How do we bring that knowledge to bear on policy choices so that in the choosing because people talk about public policy in sort of a disconnected way in this thing that’s happening somewhere in Washington and in the halls of the State Capitals and what have you, it’s some kind of mysterious process. No. People are making decisions, and those decisions are informed by people’s values, people’s understanding of the problem, etc., etc. And if we’re not attempting to understand that part of it in terms of what’s happening with so many people and disproportionately, black and brown people in this country going to prison, then we’re actually not being honest about trying to address what is happening here. What we’re doing is something else, but it’s not rooted in an honest, intellectual project that is going to give us public policies that improve the conditions for communities and the people that live in those communities. I think that, for me, that’s one of the strengths of an abolitionist’s perspective, and one of the things in my activism and in my scholarship and in my personal life that I have really committed to understanding in a lot of different ways. And I think that it presents a lot of challenges. It’s a difficult task to be an abolitionist. It’s not an easy thing to say that publicly and it’s even more difficult thing if you write about these issues, or facilitating workshops and conversations with people around these things. They always want to talk down to you and tell you that you’re misinformed somehow and that letting people out of prison is just going to run society. I’m like, have you read the paper? I mean, have you looked around? Angela Davis says this all the time: not having any prisons would actually improve things. No alternative would be better than having prisons and that really gets people’s backs up. They can’t handle that. I think to your point earlier about trying to understand where people are coming from with that, I think that’s an important piece of the overall puzzle in conversation here, and I’m looking forward to these conversations as the podcast unfolds and as we get deeper into these things. Brian: Yeah, and I just think one last thing I’ll say on your discussion of policy-making and peoples’, like you were saying, sort of arching their back and a lot of this stuff. I think it speaks to a lot of political incentives that end up shaping reform and that need to change, and hopefully conversations like the ones we’re going to have on this podcast can help change. Because it’s really hard, you have to admit on a certain level that it’s hard for policymakers to go out and maybe put out a reform that would reduce the number of violent offenders in prison because all it takes is one violent offender to make the news to cause a political backlash to that. I think because of that the incentives are so stacked to be harsher, whereas the political gain for showing leniency is so unfortunately low, and I think we need to completely invert that and sort of show politicians and these political figures, including prosecutors. To a certain degree, they’re followers. They’re going to take certain cues from the public in terms of what the public will support and what the public won’t support. So I do see the tide changing a little bit in terms of how people view ‘offenders.’ Obviously, it’s like a very niche group of offenders are given leniency right now, but it’s hopeful in the sense that it could–if we could have these conversations to get people to think differently, we could change those political incentives so that there is less of a risk for a politician to craft a policy or sign on to a policy that would decarcerate and that politicians won’t so strongly overreact to rises in crime and the public doesn’t prioritize the safety of some communities at the expense of others. Kim: Absolutely! And I think that this whole thing about who we let out of prison, and what is an acceptable kind of level of criminality–if we’re aiming for zero crime in society, we’re neglecting the fact that we’re dealing with human beings. So we need to talk about that. We need to address that on the front end and I don’t see where politicians do this very effectively, and I’m sure we’ll certainly critique the politician’s approach to public policy around incarceration and what have you. But we don’t have a world where we will be crime free. That world actually doesn’t exist. So a world without prisons is possible; a world without crime I’m not so sure. So I think that, how would we handle that crime? What constitutes a crime? So we have all sorts of examples currently in the news: defending yourself against a domestic abuser is considered a crime. So that’s a problem. What do we want to do with that? I mean, what we’re really saying to victims of violence is well we don’t care about you if you tried to defend yourself, then you are really the problem. How has that changed anything for that community, for that person, for their family or anything like that? So I think we need to move beyond the surface level analysis that is really popular and talk about the complexities involved with letting people, not just opening the doors and letting people run out of prison. We’re talking about a more thoughtful approach to decarceration, getting rid of cages. We’re talking about, as you mentioned earlier, providing people with healthcare and for me, particularly mental health, and what that would do. We know that there is a large proportion of the incarcerated population that has a documented mental illness. That’s a problem. And if our approach to these issues is basically to just lock them up for some indefinite amount of time, don’t provide them with any kind of counseling or support while they’re incarcerated, that somehow through the isolation and solitary monastic existence that these people are going to have some kind of ‘Aha’ moment, and magically come out being okay. Brian: That’s what I mean. Yeah, when I was saying earlier that I just feel like incarceration is so anti-science. I mean listening to the way you just described it, it sounds ridiculous! And we have at this point mountains of evidence showing how incarceration harms, and I would argue that we have very little evidence suggesting that incarceration as an end in itself works to do anything other than perpetuate misery. So, yeah, sorry I just wanted to chime in here. Kim: No, Absolutely! Brian: Because it always baffles me that we cling to this institution so strongly, but it’s complete pseudo-science the more that you dig into it. Kim: Uh-huh, Absolutely! Absolutely! And I think that’s a valid point and that we need to talk about that more not just on here, but in the context of public policy choices that are being made. Targeting specific groups of people or to put people in prison who have drug problems makes no sense. It makes absolutely no sense. You don’t actually change the conditions for that individual by putting them in prison. Not just putting them in prison, but putting them in a cage and not giving them any kind of assistance. These things don’t happen, like they don’t just fall out of the sky and all of a sudden they walk out of prison and they’re going to magically never use again. And that seems to be the sort of approach towards carcerality here, why reforms are a huge problem because it relies on this notion that if you lock someone up and you take away everything that is meaningful to them, that is of value to them, their ties to the community no matter how strained those are, their ties to their family no matter how difficult that family might be, those are still ties that we are basically cutting off and say, Ok, we’re going to remove you from society, from everything that is near and dear to you, and now we’re expecting you to be ok. So when you come out, you should be ready to conquer the world. And then we set up this system of obstacles for a person who’s returning from prison and into the community, and we say, well you need to follow all these rules. Okay, so you go to prison from a community where most of the people that you know have also gone to prison, but we have laws in this country that prevent the association of people with a felony conviction from associating, so that can get you back into prison. That’s just so ridiculous! Who else would you know? It’s like if your parent went to prison and you’re their child and you also went to prison, we’re basically saying, well mom, dad, aunt, uncle, cousin, whatever the ties are, you can’t be around each other. So now we’re undermining the support system that would be there by making the association a criminal act. It’s like, God! How is this supposed to work? Brian: Yeah, and I think one of the things that we all are going to need to talk about, and it’s going to be hard given just American culture in general, are these limits of individual responsibility. I think, as you were talking about earlier, that a lot of the way carcerality bleeds in, and the punitive structure bleeds into post-release and things like that, and you were talking about drug treatment programs and things like that. You know, even in that situation- let’s take drug treatment programs for instance. A lot of these programs are 12-step programs that are built around the individual basically accepting full responsibility for their actions, making no excuses outside of themselves, and supposedly being able to stay sober with that as their backing. And the truth of it is that there are limits to personal responsibility for somebody like that. I mean, if you live in a context in which drugs are always around, or maybe you have a chronic health issue and that’s how you became addicted to opiods. I mean, taking responsibility like that is just another, it’s like another one of these examples of sort of puritanical anti-science approach. It’s like disproved by incredible amounts of evidence. But we’re going to need to really as Americans dial back our desire to pin 100% total responsibility on people who commit crimes. And I just want to…I think this is a good time to talk about in terms of abolition too, Kim and I’m wondering what your thoughts are on this. When we talk about prison abolition and you said this earlier in a way, we’re not just talking about letting people out of prison. We need to… there still will be accountability after prison, right. There still will be justice. And hopefully, it won’t look like this. So, yeah, I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that. Kim: Yeah, I mean we need to talk about and explore new forms of justice. So the whole theatre that’s associated when someone gets sentenced to a long prison term is one of the problems. I obviously experienced that with my sons and this idea that somehow justice was being served within that context felt so…it’s painful and it’s still painful today. To think back on this and part of what that does is it creates further divisions within communities because we’re all in this together. We’re all in this together, and like you said, the American ethos of individual responsibility and resiliency and this kind of ‘you can do it, and I built it myself…and I didn’t need any help, and it’s not my responsibility to take care of you, etc., etc.,’ which is at the core of American society. People really really believe that, uncritically believe that. They don’t examine what they say around resiliency and individual responsibility at all, and we have medical models that are informed by this perspective. A lot of this probation and parole are informed by this perspective. A lot of re-entry programs are based on these perspectives, and the need to rely on personal transformation strategies as the preferred approach to dealing with crime and to dealing with people’s problems. Because I think we conflate that. We make people their problems. We don’t separate the two. We don’t say, Ok this person has a problem…we say, these people are a problem. So drug users are a problem, not wait a minute, let’s think about what is actually happening here. And as you pointed out, we’re living in a really un-scientific time. The lack of critical thinking around these things or the willingness to approach this from a scientifically informed perspective is another huge issue that we’re probably going to talk about in one way or another throughout every conversation that we have because it’s there. It’s part of every single issue, and to lay blame at an individual’s feet is…one of the things that I say quite a bit is that when we individualize, we moralize. It makes it really easy to moralize. We do a lot of finger wagging and we can say, oh you need to get your act together, you need to stop doing drugs, you need to stop doing this, and we’re very much invested in this notion of choice; that an individual chose this path as opposed to this other path. And when we do that, what we’re doing is obscuring the fact that there are conditions and that there is a system in place that perpetuates these conditions that can strain your choices. So if you can’t eat because you don’t have a job and because you can’t go to your mama’s house because of whatever reason or because there are federal policies that prevent you from crashing on her couch because she lives in HUD housing or something ridiculous like that. And you’re back on the street. I mean, what would you do? Because I think about that quite often and I would do whatever I need to do to eat. I would do whatever I needed to do to survive, and I live in L.A. I have been in supermarkets out here where I’ve seen people arrested who are hungry. They’re coming in and they’re stealing a loaf of bread or something small like that, and the police are called because that is the system that we have. Instead of the manager just giving them the damn loaf of bread and keeping it moving, it’s like…No, we have to call the police. Now you have another set of problems there. I think that part of our…part of what I’m hoping we’ll do is to unpack that a little bit more in a more critical way, and bring people on as guests who can discuss these issues in a really well informed way to get us to think about this stuff beyond the superficial, beyond this sort of knee-jerk reaction to petty crime. But, that said, I also feel that we need to talk about violent crime, and that without the conversation or a set of conversations about violent criminals that we would be doing a disservice to what we’re saying we want to do with this podcast. I think that we need to address what happens when the unthinkable happens, and how do we deal with that and how do we address that? How can communities come together and what does a justice model look like that says, ok, well we need to talk about that more… We need to address the fears that people have and discuss ways that someone who has committed a really horrific crime can be held accountable. It doesn’t produce more harm. It doesn’t perpetuate the pain that already exists because I don’t think, in speaking from my own experience…the pain doesn’t go away. The pain when something horrible happens in your family with crime …that pain doesn’t leave. It doesn’t get better with time. It is just as fresh today as it was the day that it happened, and I think that is something that for me, on a personal level, that I want to talk about more and to bring in families that have been impacted in these ways by crime on both sides. I think that’s an important conversation to have, and something that in transformative justice circles and restorative justice circles has been happening for a lot of years, and there are ways to approach those conversations. But we can’t do that until we talk about accountability. But if accountability is happening in very narrow terms of ‘lock them up and throw away the key’, that doesn’t cohere with an abolitionist perspective, and as you can see, there is a lot to talk about. Brian: There is. Kim: There is no shortage of topics here. I think we barely scratched the surface today. I’m excited about what we can do with this podcast. I don’t know. Do you have any additional thoughts? Brian: There’s just one more thing that I wanted to bring up, and I am curious what you think about this, too. I think a lot of times when people bring up these arguments somebody might say to you, Well, Kim, what about the victims? What about the people who the crimes are perpetrated against? Don’t you think that deserve our empathy too? I don’t know what you would say. I would say our system is not designed at all right now to really empower victims in any meaningful way outside of punishment. I think prosecutors by and large aren’t really interested in what a victim would like to do. I wrote about earlier this year that the vast majority of crime victims, including violent crime victims would prefer rehabilitation over incarceration. There’s a lot of myths that, I would also say that maybe people wouldn’t be victims if we didn’t have incarceration and were addressing these root causes. That was really the last thing that I want to bring up. I’m just thinking about some of the things that might come to your mind when you’re thinking about prison abolition for the first time, sort of these ingrained defenses that we have as Americans against imagining a world without prisons. Like you said, a lot of this, we will be digging in very deeply on all these subjects with guests, and I’m very, very excited. So, yeah, we want to know what questions you have. You can email me at brian@shadowproof.com. We would be happy to take tips from people and hear how people react to the show and a lot of ideas that we have. Honestly, I want to hear what sort of problems people have with a lot of these ideas because I think that a lot of these conversations are going to be really uncomfortable for a lot of people. They’re gonna be really difficult. We’re going to be talking about violence, and sexual offenses and things like this that we react to in a certain way. But we need to have these conversations if we’re really going to make a meaningful impact on this issue. What about you, Kim? Do you have any final thoughts? Kim: Yeah, I think that there are a number of victims groups around the country that have been very outspoken against things like the death penalty, and I’ve been working with some groups, some people in Delaware around this as well, whose families have been the victims of violent crimes. And it’s a difficult conversation, but I can tell you that from my own experience, talking with these families, they have been out front of the death penalty abolition movement, and they have said things not in their name, like you can’t kill someone because you lost someone in their name. And this notion of state sanctioned violence as a way to mete out justice is deeply problematic for a lot of people, not just on a moral level because they do think that it’s wrong, but in terms of what this actually does. What does this actually do? It doesn’t feel good, but then again, I think that the people who are best able to talk about this issue are the victims. I don’t want to speak for anyone. If anything, another goal that I have for this podcast is really to amplify and marginalize people’s voices, and to let people speak for themselves rather than talking over them or for them. You’ll hear me say a lot, I’m speaking for myself, because I think that needs to be clear that I’m not talking for other folks here. I think that in general, I look forward to hearing what people have to say. I think that these are courageous conversations that we need to have, that they’re going to require us to have really strong backs to address. We’ll certainly give people trigger warnings around certain issues. There might be a trigger warning around the entire podcast. I mean, I don’t even know. That includes just as much for my own benefit as for anybody else’s because this isn’t easy. I’m on board with this project because it gives me a way to sort of channel this energy that I have and to bring this work to a much bigger audience, and to include a lot more people in this conversation. Before I forget, if people want to contact me, I’m at wilsonk68@gmail.com and I look forward to hearing about what people have to say and if they want to chime in, and if they want to have ideas for future topics. Certainly, I’m open to these things. Hate mail you can send somewhere else. I’m not interested in the hate mail and the abusive nonsense that I’m sure we’re going to get as a result of putting ourselves out there on these issues. It’s been, this has been great. I enjoyed this conversation. I think it was a lot easier than I thought, huh. Brian: Yeah, I know seriously. I’m really glad to be doing this with you Kim so thank you very much and thank you everybody for listening. We will have another episode out soon. You can subscribe to us on Itunes Beyond Prisons and stay tuned for our next episode. Thank you so much.
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
Seth: Today I have the good fortune to be interviewing a very interesting business. We've got Brian Wright with us today from FA Bean Counters Dot Com. Brian, thank you so much for joining us today, and if you could introduce who you've got with you, that would be great. Brian: Yeah, thanks for having me. With me I have my co-founder, both in business and in life, Kitrina Wright, my wife. Kitrina: Hello. Seth: Hi. Mr. and Mrs. Wright. All right. I'm sure you guys get that a lot. Brian: Yes, we do. I got a lot of mileage out of that in high school with all my friends' moms. Seth: Ah, I won't take the bait on that one. How did you get started in terms of FA Bean, how did you get started in the industry, and then how did you get to FA Bean Counters? Brian: Sure. Well, I am a certified financial planner by trade, so I've been in the industry 10 plus years, working first in the banking industry and then I moved over to fee-only financial planning, working with high network clients. Then a couple of years ago, I left my job-job, where I worked for a boss-boss, and started my own firm, my own financial planning firm. Along the way, and I'm rewinding back 10 years when I started in the industry, my wife had started her own accounting practice at that time. I was working at a firm. She went out on her own, kind of started at 0 clients, and over the last 10 years has been building an accounting practice. Fast forward back to 2 years ago, I left my firm, kind of joined forces with her, started our own financial advisory practice. She had a 10 year old plus accounting practice, doing accounting, bookkeeping. She's a CPA, so those are her skill sets, accounting, tax, bookkeeping. We went into business doing the financial planning, startup for a financial planning firm. Well, during that process, we met up and we were introduced to a very influential thought leader in our industry by the name of Michael Kitces, and got to know him pretty well, he and Alan Moore as well. They're both co-founders of XY Planning Network, which is a professional network for like-minded, very tech focused financial planners all over the country, all over the world I guess, international, some members. We were introduced to them, got to know them pretty well. We are a member of that network, XY Planning Network, and just in that friendship, they approached us really and said, "Hey. There's a need in our industry for outsource bookkeeping for financial advisors. We see a huge opportunity. This is a skill set that a financial planner, although financial planners are very smart people, accounting and bookkeeping, double entry bookkeeping, debits-credits, not in the wheelhouse of most financial advisors. This is something that they could easily outsource. It's something they shouldn't be spending their time on. It's not revenue generating. They should be spending every waking moment with clients or working on clients, or trying to find clients. Bookkeeping is something they could easily outsource, and there is no one out there in the marketplace that's targeting financial advisors. There are a number of virtual bookkeepers out there, yes, but we have a lot of moving parts in our industry with compliance and things like that." They said, "We see a huge opportunity for an accounting practice targeting specifically financial advisors." He was like, "We want to launch this accounting practice. The problem is we don't know anything about running an accounting practice. Fortunately, Brian and Kitrinado." That's kind of how Bean Counters came along, just partnering with an uber-influential thought leader in a particular niche, and it was an easy question for us to answer, and easy decision to make, certainly, partnering with someone of the caliber and influential level of Michael. That's what we did last summer. Last summer we launched, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
非常感谢热心听众,文稿精英小分队的成员【吉祥三宝-郭新燕-Maggie】和【大声-屠清音-Helen】对本文稿的贡献!几乎100%的正确率,赞一个! 赠人玫瑰,手有余香。想为文稿做贡献的童鞋请微博私信联系@CRI罗煜。我们撒花欢迎你的加入! 听写完的文稿都会由主持人们负责Check,然后发布给小伙伴们。同时,通过对比,也可以学习到很多有用的单词和短语呢!希望大家能够加入我们,让圆桌能够陪伴更多小伙伴们的成长!Heyang: Mysterious crop circles, so called “麦田怪圈”, provoke puzzlement, delight and intrigue for many people. Now in a village in Nanjing, dragon-shaped patterns have been flattened in a wheat field by local villagers. It is said that poisonous weed killers have been used to create this pattern. For what purpose? Well, to attract tourists. And does this end justify the means is my ultimate question. But guys, tell me more about the story.Brian: Interesting question there. But about the story: as you mentioned, these dragon-shaped patterns going on in this village over by Nanjing, one of them is two dragons playing with a ball.Heyang: Dragon ball!Brian: Oh yes, that’s what I Luo Yu: Is it a ball or should it be a pearl?Brian: A pearl, well, something…Heyang: Dragon pearl!Brian: I’m not sure if you can tell the difference when it is a pattern in the field there. But anyway auspicious symbol in China, cool staff there, but apparently they used herbicides. Another thing is if you look from the sky, you can also see an imposing imperial robe with dragons which, again, looks cool, but again looks like weed killers were used to turn some of the wheat - the green wheat - yellow, which is not so cool.Luo Yu: Right, I think it’s quite a good thing. For one thing, the village can obviously upgrade the local economy because previously those farmers rely heavily on husbandry, on stock-breeding, but now they can turn to tourism sector. And because of the ripple effect it can bring to the village, actually you will see probably more visitors will come in to the village to see this either imperial robe or the two-dragons-playing-with-the-ball images, and they probably will stay in either hotels or hostels, and, you know, spend money there. So, generally, it is a very good idea for the local village.Heyang: I think you make a really good case for it. But, Luo Yu, do you honestly think that tourists will want to go to this place just to see these crop circle things?Luo Yu: That’s my concern as well because nowadays the drones have become very popular already, right? You can see these beautiful pictures meticulously photographed by those drones through aerial images. And to that extent, there’s not any need for you to go to the scene yourself, right?Brian: There, there’s that. But there’re environmental concerns. But those aside for the moment, like we’re talking here, how sustainable is this? I mean, to me it feels like kind of a gimmick. For most people, I feel like no, you’re not gonna go there. And again, you know, if it was like a real tourist attraction that had like, that was really interesting, you had some value there, that’s one thing. But the idea, you know, okay, let’s try, everybody let’s try and have our town become a tourist spot whatever. That’s, I don’t think that’s a good idea, I don’t think it’s sustainable, I don’t think it’s gonna work.Heyang: Well, there you go. The other side of the story.Luo Yu: Right. Definitely. Whether it is sustainable, I think it needs some time for us to see whether it can pan out. But probably this village is becoming smart enough to create more wheat images in the future.Brian: I guess if it became really famous for having like just really exquisite patterns and doing like a world-class job whatever, a national class job, yeah, maybe you could do that. But that’s not likely what’s gonna happen here because that kind of staff doesn’t happen, you know, on accident there. I feel like it’s hard to get to that level where it’s really worthy of tourists seeing. And again, not to mention the environmental concerns.Luo Yu: They should have invited some craftsmen into the village to do the job. But environmental concern definitely is one thing.Heyang: Okay, sure. And I think, what about the conventional farming bit? What about these fields used to plant wheat and other grain and all kinds of staff? Is abandoning that and going for tourism a good idea here?Brian: I would say no. I mean not there’s tons of money in farming, but if you look at, again, just these farmers themselves, I don’t think it’s a very sustainable move like, if they had some, again, really “wow” kind of tourist attraction, then yeah, that might be a smart move. But if it’s just this sort of thing they’re planning on, you know, giving up farming just ‘cause they made some crop circles that, you know, people in other places could do just as easily, no, that’s not a smart business move.Luo Yu: Maybe you don’t think it’s a “wow”, but for a lot of people it’s a “wow”. Different people have different standards and criteria for “wow”, right?Brian: That is true, but you...Heyang: I haven’t heard so many WOWs in one conversation ever, that’s the WOW factor of that part.Brian: Yeah, yeah.Luo Yu: If you talk about conventional farming, come on, it only costs those farmers 80,000 yuan, which is not that much. It’s only about 12,300 US dollars. At the same time, they get...Brian: That’s US dollars, we are in China.Luo Yu: Well, but they get compensation. And if they can really upgrade from husbandry to tourism sector, that’s a very good sign.Brian: If it was good tourism, but I don’t think it is. And also, they’ve compensated by who, the local government? Wouldn’t it be better to put that money in a place where you might get a better overturn on your investment? A more...Luo Yu: What sort of investment? If they rely on money, they can never get enough money.Brian: Well, if the problem is only relying on farming, then they may look to diversify. But I’m not sure that tourism, by doing something that could be replicated by other people, is the best way to do it.Heyang: And the local official has been saying that it’s up to the farmers to decide whether they want to go for conventional farming which is not earning people a lot or go for other ways to earn money like tourism. I think that statement alone, itself, I don’t have anything to say against it. But look at the way that China has developed in the last two decades. Can we reject to the statement that we’ve developed so fast at the expense of the environment?Brian: At the expense of many things besides that too.Heyang: There you go. So here’s my other question, gentlemen. What about the environment? Is this causing harm to the environment? Are we doing exactly the same evil thing again?Luo Yu: I don’t think it’s an evil thing, because according to the...Heyang: Just dramatize, to sensationalize and people, our listeners tuned in...Luo Yu: No, I don’t sensationalize. Because according to the village authority. This village has been saying that previously they didn’t want to use herbicides. Why they used herbicides? Because some of the farmers didn’t know about the planting very well, so there was an accident that has happened, that’s why they have to use herbicides to create the images.Brian: Yeah, but they didn’t have to do this in the first place. And herbicides are not good, so there’s the dread damage to that. There’s the damage that, the fact, well there’s the crops have been wasted, and then maybe that will cause other problems that will not seen directly, maybe indirect problems there. And also if you want to talk about evil and doing bad to the environment, you can take a look at Miyazaki movies. He has very good ones that show that the evils of harming the environment.Heyang: Hmm.Luo Yu: Don’t dramatize it. I think you know, at least those people should give it a try. Come on. It shows their passion as well as wisdom to trying to develop themselves, upgrading their economy.Brian: Ok, I agree with that sentiment that, you know, there should be innovative and creative ways to get better, especially when it’s just agriculture, which is not a big money maker. But I think there are better ways, I mean, not that the farmers can decide this themselves, but if the local government wanted to do it, maybe they could turn it into a special economic zone or a free trade zone or something.Luo Yu: No, that’s not very easy to establish an industrial park or economic zone. Brian: It is not easy. Luo Yu: At the same time, you don’t know about local situation, maybe this is just a normal village that doesn’t have abundant tourism resources. And they want to create some of the resources themselves from scratch. What’s wrong about this?
【特别感谢热心听友黄善鋆帮忙听写本篇文稿】Heyang: The imperial princess, Oh No, it’s not the imperial princess, it’s actually the imperial doctress or 女医明妃传. The TV drama has been lambasted by viewers because of the validity of prescription medicines used in the drama. Are people making a fuss out of nothing or are these TV shows too far off from real practice?I know this is probably not the usual show that you guys would check out but because we are professionals, and I’m sure that you’ve looked at some of it. Do you think that the prescribed Traditional Chinese Medicine doesn’t really make sense in this show? Brian: I would say yes, because Traditional Chinese Medicine doesn’t make sense in lot of ways, but within Traditional Chinese Medicine, contrary to what some people online seem to think, it does seem that it’s largely correct actually.Liu Yan: Well, I think there so much controversy, mainly because some of the prescriptions sound pretty out there. Let’s just say, for example, there is this liquid mixture of fingernails, bird poop and earthworms used as some sort of medicine to treat a fever, just a fever. So of course, if you are one of those lazy people, who just like to watch TV shows but not actually do research, you would certainly think, Oh, this is nonsense.Brian: That’s what Weibo and Twitter, and all of these were invented for, for just spouting off your mouth without doing any thinking or research.Heyang: Yes, that’s just a wonderful example that Liu Yan just gave us. It turned out that Traditional Chinese Medicine doctors, specialists have been employed to consult and confirm with this prescription used on the show. And apparently a lot of these are kind of real, but it’s not like one hundred percent accurate to how you would, you know, perform the procedure on a patient for example. But is it really, something that we should worry about that these procedures used in TV shows are just not professional enough?Brian: Well, it bothers some people obviously. But it’s not just this sort of thing. It’s is this TV show or movie accurately portraying this relatively narrow or specialized or professional field in the right way? And a lot of the time, I know Hollywood doesn’t do things accurately. And much of it is to make things more dramatic. Sometimes this is just in the air, coz they haven’t done the research or they don’t care to do it well. But a lot of time it’s for drama, and if it’s for drama, that makes a certain amount of sense but I guess it depends on what you are looking for as a viewer. And for most people, they probably wouldn’t care too much. I would say if it is in an egregious era such that they wouldn’t just happen in reality, or that is just it would actually affect things in the plot or whatever, then yea, that’s a problem, but minor things. Nay.Liu Yan: I can definitely understand why some people are so being such sticklers. Because to them, maybe staying true to the facts is a very important factor to decide whether this is quality entertainment. But in general, I think after all this is just entertainment and you needn’t be too serious about details. However you can never underestimate the power of popular TV shows and things like that. What if people actually watch this and take it as truth and then imitate this practice?Heyang: Yes, I think that’s a legitimate question. But can I please bring to your attention that on any TV show, especially this procedural kind of or TV shows that portray a particular profession, they have, in the beginning of every episode, there is this disclaimer that all fictional characters, or you know, coincidence if something does happen if you just copy us, you know those kind of things. I mean, would people, honestly, do this like replicate what happens on the shows? Brian: Yes, absolutely!Heyang: What are these people thinking?Brian: Well that’s the question. But that doesn’t mean that’s not gonna happen. If you can think of something happening however ridiculous it might be, someone will do it somewhere online. Liu Yan: And also you have to remember that a lot of people are actually watching this type of TV shows on the Internet. So if you watch those shows on Tencent for example, you can actually set the setting so you start from the actual dialogue instead of the opening disclaimer and theme song and things like that. So I doubt that a lot of people don’t see what you have just mentioned.Brian: I think even if they see this disclaimer, it’s not gonna make a huge difference.Heyang: That’s so interesting especially with today’s topic 女医明妃传. Coz I actually went through a lot of those criticism posts, it’s just got ignorance written all over. As average viewers like myself who know very little about traditional TCM and then when I see a show like this, I have a question mark in my head and because of my lack of knowledge, when I saw a bird poop and all kinds of poop and stuff, and then you are like how could that be true? And you automatically think this doesn’t seem right, but then you know these traditional Chinese medicine doctors have come out and said, well sometimes we use these things and it’s the combination of which that can sometimes have very good effects on people.Brian: Supposedly. Heyang: Well, yeah, you are the person who can arrive at your own decision and judgment on such things. It just turned out that so many netizens like myself, I suppose, we don’t know if we think we’ve been smart and we make all these comments when you just don’t know, isn’t this a lesson for people that although the Internet is a free space for all kinds of comments, but shouldn’t you at least think twice what you were saying, at least do a little bit of research before making these statements?Brian: Yeah, I mean like a certain presidential candidate in the US, you have the right to be wrong, utterly and horribly wrong, but you should really think before you speak or tweet or microblog or whatever.Liu Yan: I have a feeling that certain candidate is a running joke on this show and people are enjoying it including Heyang especially.Heyang: Yes, the squirrel on his head? Liu Yan: Oh, it reminds me of that Chinese saying 这样真的好吗?Heyang: 很好啊. I won’t say anything wrong with it until I get a lawyer’s letter from him.
Heyang: Toothache can be a real joy killer, especially when a delicious meal is laid in front of you. Experts are saying dental health has been neglected by Chinese people for years. Is having bad teeth a long-time headache for many Chinese people? I think I should direct the question to Luoyu first. Do you agree with a statement as such that Chinese people have bad teeth and it’s a bit of headache?Luoyu: I tend to agree. I actually remember the story you told me the other day in the morning. We had a lovely discussion. You said…Heyang: What? I was involved? I don’t think I was there, but, Okay, carry on.Brian: Maybe it was lovely for one party, but not for the other.Heyang: You are so sharp. Some stuff should be left unsaid. Luoyu: You said you are on a subway car, and all of the sudden there is a man standing next to you showing his butter-colored teeth as well as the bad breath from him…Heyang: Yeah, it’s terrible, terrible experience. It was only when I noticed that guy standing next to me had really bad odor…I think he had Chinese chives the night before, amongst seafood and stuff and it was terrible. So I looked at him at the corner of my eye, and I realized he had bad teeth as well. Okay, why are we talking about this? Sorry if I’ve disgusted you.Luoyu: Right, actually that’s an indication that generally speaking Chinese people don’t pay enough attention to their dental care. I also have two surveys to back up my argument. The very first survey is this Oral health epidemiology survey. This latest survey shows that about 80% to 97% of Chinese people have periodontal diseases to some extent. In Chinese, that’s牙周疾病. It seems that almost everyone in China has the problem. And another survey has actually shown even more staggering numbers. That Chinese preventive medicine society estimated that nearly 500 million people in China, mostly in rural areas, never brush their teeth. Brian: That is shocking! That is shocking to me. I hope that’s not true. I know obviously Chinese people are not in the most ideal condition for dental health. But over a third of Chinese people don’t brush their teeth? Er, I hope not. Heyang: You are overwhelmed by that figure.Brian: It is. That’s a ton of people. Heyang: I think there is a difference in life style because it hasn’t really been brought to their attention. Brian: This consciousness.Heyang: yes, (this consciousness) that you need to brush your teeth. I’m really curious then are there people that don’t brush their teeth and their teeth are still Okay? That could be the case too!Brian: Yeah, it is probably the case. It seems to me this is kind of like mental health in a certain way. China is by no means the only place with this issue, but obviously you know regular health, if you get sick, you know you need to do something about it because it is bothering you. But say with dental health, mental health, it’s just not as obvious and there’s not this idea or this consciousness about it. So people are less likely to do as many preventative measures as well as going to get care when you need it. Heyang: Yeah, and just add one small personal observation when it comes to bad teeth in China, actually I talked to some of our colleagues in the office. Our small circle seem to agree that in China it is rather common for someone who’s only in their fifties, they already have teeth that’s like falling out. That’s not an uncommon problem. But if you do a comparison, let’s say, with some developed countries, or countries with a culture that look after their teeth more attentively, then you don’t see this happening as much. So guys, why do you think there is this problem that we don’t look after our teeth?Luoyu: Consciousness is definitely one thing. And sometimes I think the Chinese people lack the basic knowledge of how to protect their teeth. For example, when we pick up the brushes, we don’t know which one is the best brush for you. Do you know, Brian? Brian: Well, I know in the US…Luoyu: When it comes to the stiffness of the bristle.Brian: Well, I don’t know exactly. What I would do in the U.S., there is an American Dental Association, which I believe does a good job, and they have their seal on certain toothbrushes. Some cheap like 99 cents toothbrush, that’s probably not as good. But admittedly, another thing you see in the U.S., is like mechanical toothbrushes.Heyang: yeah, I think a lack of awareness, being aware that this is being a big deal is a big problem here as in our culture there seems to be the saying about “Having toothache is not a disease, but when the tooth actually aches, it can kill you.” So it should be considered as a disease too, right?Brian: Right. I feel like a lot people don’t pay much attention to their teeth unless it hurts whereas what probably you should do is treating your teeth like your body. Check it at least once a year. Luoyu: I have some advice as well. For one thing, if you really have those crooked teeth at an early age probably you need a dental brace procedure.Brian: Related to both what Luoyu said and what I said is you have to have money or more often insurance. If you don’t have health insurance that covers this, then you are not as likely to do that and afford it.Heyang: Yes, and also I think here is the place that parents have a big role to play as I know sometimes bad teeth or crooked teeth have been passed on from generation to generation. But that is not a general case, I think. Parents need to tell their kids that especially when your teeth change, that’s when you need to pay more attention to the kid’s teeth and make sure that they are growing in a really straight fashion. Brian: And floss daily Heyang: Okay, and visit your dentist.
【特别感谢热心听友吕欣欣帮忙听写本篇文稿】Heyang: In Chengdu, an underage girl had plastic surgery, without the consent of her parents. She also owed the hospital over 10 thousand Yuan for her surgery. How could this have happened in the first place?So guys, here is a story that’s a little bit complicated here. Could you please unpack the story for me?Brian: I will attempt to. So we have Xiao Zhen here who is a 17-year-old girl, not feeling so great about the way she looks. So she decides, “oh, I’ll have some micro plastic surgery on my face to make things better”, so this was last November. And it cost over 12000 yuan in Chengdu there. And she didn’t have that much money. She’s a student. So what she does is rather than talking to her parents at all about this which seems like she did not do, she goes to a friend who’s over 18 and says, “hey, can you help me apply for a loan here?” So her friend applies for the loan. And then she uses that there and goes all behind her parents’ back.Luoyu: Well, is it really she asked some of her friends to lend her the money?Brian: She asked her friend to apply for the loan, for her, not to lend her the money.Luoyu: I think the hospital basically arranged everything for this. I mean, basically for the very first time when the 17 year-old girl consulted with the hospital staff, the person, the staff refused her to take the surgery because she got to know that this girl is only 17 years old. And for the very second time, she didn’t tell this member she was 17. Yet this staff from the hospital told her that if you lack financial means, we can definitely help you with it by borrowing some money from the loan companies.Heyang: So the hospital directed this girl to the loan company (Luoyu: Yes), and get the financial side of things sorted out so the underage girl can have plastic surgery. Is this the story? (Luoyu: Yes) Right. Who is at a greater fault here? I mean, we’ve got at least 4 parties in play here, right? The girl herself, her parents who’s like completely out of the picture until they wanted to get compensation, and there’s the hospital and loan company, who’s at fault here?Brian: Well, who’s at fault versus who’s at greater fault because I think we can say that all of them are at fault to some degree. But to me I think the greatest would be the hospital. Because she’s under 18, she should not be allowed to do this at all and it happened. And not only that, they helped point her to this loan company for this huge loan which she was gonna take on on her own as a student with no income. And again she couldn&`&t get the loan. She was not supposed to get the loan being under 18 there. So the hospital has done several bad things here on top of the girl who was foolish in multiple ways. But it’s really the hospital enabled her. There’s supposed to be restrictions and you know, following the rules so that when young people who are not as fully developed, wanna do something that’s not very wise, they’re stopped from doing that. And the hospital is the one who didn’t stop her, and they’re at biggest fault.Luoyu: Well, the hospital doesn&`&t have any reason to stop the 17-year-old girl to…Brain: She’s 17. Of course they have a reason. She’s not supposed to be getting about it.Luoyu: But come on, I mean, the purpose for the hospital is to gain profit especially the hospital in a private sector. And when we’re talking about this, I mean, the verification process doesn’t even exist in this hospital. The loan applicant is not the one who received the surgery. So I think the whole industry should be standardized, maybe?Brain: There’s a fair point there but I would say, hospitals I mean, yeah they’re for profit, but there’re rules, too, man.Heyang: Yeah there’re rules and Luoyu thinks the hospital is right along all this time?Luoyu: No no no I don&`&t think it’s all right.Brian: Not as much.Heyang: We have some listeners who have a very strong opinion about underage girl who got a loan to get plastic surgery without the consent of her parents’ story. As Qiang says, I think it is the girl herself that is fully responsible here and her parents are at fault that they did not pay attention or enough attention to this girl’s demand or, you know. I think Qiang thinks that for someone who so desperately wants plastic surgery, the parents should educate and console her a bit more and he doesn’t really agree with it. And Han says the girl is responsible for this. She should let her…Okay here comes the interesting bit. She should let her parents know that having a pretty face is a really good investment nowadays. And…(Luoyu: Which I agree with.)But everybody’s entitled. They have their own opinion.(Brian: True. True.) And we will attack Luoyu after I finish reading this post. And Han also says she should ask her parents to pay for it. I don&`&t think there’s a law saying that parent involvement is necessary for underage people to go to the hospital to have a surgery. And to my knowledge this is actually incorrect, Han. Guys, do you have anything to add here?Brian: Yeah, that is the case. So the hospital cannot refuse patients if they’re under 18. There’s no law says that. But there is a regulation that says they have to be accompanied by parents and they need their signature there. So if the girl had been with her parents and done all this, the hospital would not have been wrong in doing that, right? She wasn’t with her parents so this is one of many wrongs on the hospital there. And so a lot of it is enforcement of these rules cos we have all these rules here the hospital should have been following. And again the morality of this young person and this is why we have these to protect young people who don’t know what they’re doing as much. And the hospital didn’t follow them. It didn’t force its rules. Therefore they are at greatest fault.Luoyu: That’s why I say that this industry, the whole industry should be regulated to prevent some of the loopholes here. And if you look at the loan company in the hospital, basically hospital arranged everything, every little bit of this loan, and they’re on the same boat to be part of this black market or interest chains together to make money because this hospital is a private hospital as the nature of the private entity is profit driven, right? So they have to make money. If you don&`&t impose them with the further regulations, they’re gonna do this anyway.Brian: Right, right, it is not just regulation, but stronger regulation and enforcement as with many things, enforcement is the key to a lot of things here.
非常感谢热心听众【Koey Shum-沈贝妮】对本文稿的贡献Brian: Kind of. But I think actually I don't know if it is last year or the year before maybe was the year when Feng Xiaogang was directing and he with other people were joking and he was joking that the thing to do nowadays isn’t actually to watch spring festival gala as so much it is to watch and tucao and to criticize at the same time. That is actually the highlight of the evening to criticize it. I think that is some truths to a lot of people.Heyang: Same kind of mentality here maybe. Luo Yu?Luo Yu: I think a lot of people nowadays treat CCTV spring festival gala as a background music or back scene of the family re-union. So actually not so many people are watching it. But I think this idea I mean releasing this monkey mascot at this time is probably a very perfect idea by those CCTV marketing team.Heyang:Why?Luo Yu: Releasing the mascot at this time you know it attracted a lot of people’s attention, creating a lot of media hype, and people’s attention have been drawn upon.Brian:OK. See here is the thing. Attention is good when you were not well known. Everybody know CCTV. If you have a TV or something in this country you probably know of them. They don't need the attention. So any news is good news or any press is good press, if you are not well known. If you are well known like they are and you have bad press how is that gonna help them?Luo Yu: No! Just what they concern about this TV industry is just rating, audience rating. And we have this ugly mascot to be played on CCTV gala.Heyang: And people want to watch it?Luo Yu: People are curious.Brian: Actually it maybe kind of in a counter-intuitive way. People are interested in going there to like, mock it, like ‘ahh, see look at our horrible mascot. They just going there for like to watch what they might think is a ugliness or whatever. So maybe there is sort of counter-intuitive kind of backlash to watch this kind of thing.Heyang: Yeah, and I think these days because of people’s sentiment has really changed towards these maga shows. Now people are just sort of saying, well we want to make fun of it. Any why not join in this party of mockery and I think this is part of this self-deprecating humor of Chinese people as well. And I mean sometimes when you see something that is just not meeting your expectation and why not have a field day and just make fun of it and don't feel bad about it? When people are joining in into something it create this snow-balling effect that at first I didn't care about this. And then so many of you guys have been mocking it and I felt a little bit left out. And I thought why not I would join in as well. So I guess there are some people who are kind of thinking in the similar ways as I am.Brian:Yeah, obviously, heck, we wouldn’t be here for that. But it’s kind of like 看热闹, you know everybody is talking about it so you would just go in and add your opinion to add to your own sense.Luo Yu: Yeah.Heyang:Yeah, and in fact that the spring festival gala people have created a mascot. And this is the second one in history, right? It might show, that first of all they want a lot of promotion so creating a special mascot for this yearly event and also maybe just showing that we are CCTV we are a maga place, but we are cute. Can you kind of like us a little bit more?Brian:I think that was the idea and if this is the second mascot, ok, I guess this makes more sense if this was only the second mascot they have done there, because again the original drawing looked good. I am not gonna say this is ugly, it doesn't stand out to me a lot. Perhaps it has to do with, ehh, when I see this, this reminds me of the computer generated animation you see like TV shows and movie theater and there are so many different types of animated things. And none of them strikes me as being very good. At the same time, I have seen a lot of great hand-drawing cartoons and other things. So clearly there is that skill. Occasionally, what was it? The monkey king movie this summer, that was actually pretty good. The animation there. So clearly, there is this animation talent but this, to me looks very computer-generated stuff like whatever those two bears are, that to me just looks ugly and apparently this is kind of a trend here they havn’t gone over.Luo Yu:I am just wondering why didn't CCTV invite the production team from the Monkey King, the film, to create this animation, the 3D version of this Kang Kang. Probably it’ll be very lovely much more.Brian:Yeah, it certainly it might have come out with a better result. But probably they don’t wanna steal their design per se. I think this is supposed to be like, the monkey king belongs to everybody and I will do our own. This is the Monkey King but we will do our own Monkey and they did it, I guess.Heyang:Yeah, and our wechat listener Romantic, she is a designer herself and she offered a piece of insight. She said when the original creator comes up with this brilliant idea and how that’s been translated into an actual product. It’s kind like an product design. That’s a different stage of this whole styling process you need have more investment into that part too. And what’s happened here supposedly, is maybe the relevant, ok, just the CCTV, they didn't really put enough attention to that last part of the designing process. And you need somebody equally as good to create, to finalize that mascot product to make everybody happy but that's the other part of the story. It's impossible to make everybody happy.Brian:It is. But I think they could have done a better job than this.Heyang:Yes, I agree.Brian:It’s like a good idea but poor execution, as both of you have said.Luo Yu:At least CCTV should have talked to Mr. Han Meilin about the design of the 3D version.Heyang:Well, it depends on the contract.Brian:Yeah, it depends. But certainly there are things they could have done better which they appeared not to have done.
ternet commentator has suggested setting a 7-year validity period of marriage certificate on his weibo account, which he believes can solve a lot of social problems. His words have sparked several severe criticism online. Could marriage certificate have a validity certificate like other certificates? 近日,某网络评论员在微博上提出一种大胆而令人惊叹的声音:结婚证应设置一个7年有效期,到期自动离婚,这样一来,许多社会问题就会迎刃而解。这一言论引起了网友大肆的口诛笔伐。结婚证是否应该像其他证件一样设定有效期呢? Laiming: So who is this guy? What he’s proposing? Brian: Well, his name is Lu Guoping (鲁国平) and he is a column writer and internet commentator lives in Shanghai. He has done lots of essays on various newspapers, journals, and what-not. For quite a while, he does ads, news interviewing, editing, all kinds of different stuff there. So he gets this idea perhaps in lowering the divorce rate which has been increasing in recent years and says “Well, how about when you get married, instead of just a lifetime sort of thing is kind of the intent you think, let’s just kept it seven years so that you kind have to either you renew it or it’s up and thanks for the good time.” Laiming: What's the point behind this? What are the grounds that he uses to support his idea? What good could come of the marriage that comes with the 7-year warranty? Brian: Well, again, if were concerned about divorce rates, and if you have a contract that just expires, and that doesn’t count as a divorce. If people are doing this, then that would lead to fewer divorces. Whether or not that actually matters or is it a good thing in anyway, it’s a separate question. But that is one part of it. The other point he makes is that a lot of marriages don’t work well. And rather than having to kind of torment people by forcing them to just continue that throughout their whole lives, it kind of gives them a way out and stops the suffering itself. Laiming: Isn’t that the purpose of divorce? Brian: But divorce is often a messy sort of a complicated process. If you do like this, it’s like OK, we don’t have to go through any actual things, we just have to wait out the time. Laiming: So we don’t have to fight for our kids, we don’t have to fight for the properties. Brain: Exactly. Perfect, isn’t it? Luo Yu: I think, you know, even for those people who want to get divorce, 7 years might be too long for them to terminate their contract. Laiming: Why wait for 7 years then they can get a divorce? Luo Yu: I think this gentleman, Mr. Lu Guoping, is trying to make some media hype there. And all of his arguments don’t hold water. For example, he said this probably will lower the divorce rate. But if the couples end up in divorcing, this is divorce anyway. What’s the meaning of lowering the so-called divorce rate? Laiming: Well, I guess his point is instead of having couples fight and decide to have a divorce, we’re going to separate them before they have the chance to fight for a divorce. Brian: Exactly, because again, if it happens, let’s say, most couples who are gonna to have a divorce, they divorce after 8 years, whatever reasons. Then this actually might be a beneficial thing if there were tons of people who were following that pattern. There’s no real reason, I think, to suggest that. I’m wondering because there’s a famous phrase which I think came from the movie called The 7-Year Itch, I’m wondering if this is where he got his idea, because as you just mentioned when we talked earlier, why would people go to 7 years? There’re a lot of people who get divorce even don’t make it to five years, or even three years. Laiming: Yeah, what a torment for them to wait for two more years! Shame. Luo Yu: And consider about the wedding vow, it will be very ridiculous if we implement this 7-year contract. Because in the wedding vow, it says for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. Laiming: In a 7-year do we part. Luo Yu: In the future, until 7 years, the certificate expires, do we part. It will be very ridiculous. Brian: It would be. Luo Yu: And some people even said this will promote economic growth. Come on, how can you… Brian: Well, I think the argument there was, OK, weddings, these big ceremonies, maybe you have divorce ceremonies as well, and those cost money. So if you have a new wedding, every, let’s say, ten years, then you’re spending more money, right? Luo Yu: And probably, Brian, you have to buy a new apartment, then a new car. Brian: I see there you go. In that Chinese situation, it’s even better. Because, you know, if you have one from your first marriage, that’s not good enough. This would stimulate consumption so much. It’ll be perfect. Luoyu: But what if you’ve already generated or produced so many babies, and you have a bunch of mother-in-laws and father-in-laws together with you.Brian: Well, again, you need to spend more money to keep them happy thus increase consumption. Clearly this is economic goal here.Laiming: One more strong argument coming from this Lu Guoping is that he believes the kids will enjoy more care and love because there will be more step mothers and step fathers.Brian: That is an interesting idea. I would say it would be better to have a lot of parents than to have just one, regardless who they are exactly.Laiming: Then we should go back to the prehistoryBrian: There is that idea. I think there probably is a study showing kids who have to travel back and forth between various household, especially when it is not just two, but maybe more than that…Laiming: What a wonderful opportunity to see the world!Brian: Yeah, see the world, see dysfunction experience, instability, as a kid when you are supposed to have a good upbringing. It’s not ideal.Laiming: What doesn’t kill you make you stronger.Brian: Maybe not for kids.Luoyu: I think now in China getting married or getting divorced have become so much easier than before. You just go to the civil office there, you have a stamp on your certificate and you both get married or you both get divorced. I think when it comes to marriage, the couple should have thought about it very prudently and thoughtfully, otherwise you guys shouldn’t have got married in the first place. As we have made this procedure so much easier, I mean, the husband doesn’t have any financial burden. Like in other countries like Holland, after divorce, if one side lacks sufficient basic living resources, the other side will have the duty to pay alimony.Brian: Alimony, yes, that’s a common thing in the U.S.. Oftentimes, if you get divorced, the man has to pay the woman a good bit of money, especially if there is a kid there. But it is easy to get divorced in the U.S.. But it is easier to live together beforehand also which is kind of like this trial marriage, which is somewhat going on here. Even if we agree with some of these goals here, I’m not sure that has any practical effect.Laiming: You two gentlemen have marvelously given some very diplomatic comments on this new story. I want to make it personal. You guys haven’t got married yet. How do you feel about having this choice?Brian: Well personally, I don’t feel any interest. I think people should be allowed in general to do what they want. I think as some of us have said here, if you are not ready to go the full distance, if you only want to do seven years, why are you getting married.Laiming: Luoyu, I have to question you.Luoyu: My perspective is quite simple. I take marriage very very seriously.Laiming: Which is why you are not married yet.Luoyu: Yes.Brian: That’s a good thing. You need to be serious. You need to make sure you have the right person beforehand. Don’t rush into it.
Episode 108: Directing the Middle School Musical Brian Borowka teaches a grade 8 musical theatre class which culminates in a production. He passes on his tips for directing a middle school musical, the challenges for casting an entire class and, his favourite/least favourite experience. Show Notes Roshambo by Brian Borowka Episode Transcript Welcome to TFP – The Theatrefolk Podcast – the place to be for Drama teachers, Drama students, and theatre educators everywhere. I'm Lindsay Price, resident playwright for Theatrefolk. Hello, I hope you're well. Thanks for listening. Welcome to Episode 108. You can find all the links at theatrefolk.com/episode108. So, today, all theatre – middle school theatre – we're talking the middle school musical and a super fun middle school play. Let's do it! Lindsay: All right. Hello everybody! I am thrilled today to be talking to Brian Borowka. Hello, Brian. Brian: Hi there, Lindsay: So, Brian is one of our Theatrefolk playwrights. He has written a wonderful, delicious play called Roshambo and we're going to get into Roshambo and what on earth Roshambo means because, when I first got the play, I had to look it up and it was one of those moments, Brian, because I'm a word freak and so, when I see a strange word and then it's actually something that is related to something I already know, well, you just made my day. Little things amuse me, I think. Brian: It's a great word! I love the title. I'm glad that it means what it means. Lindsay: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally! All right So, now that all of you are in suspense. We're going to ignore that for a little while because what we want to start out with is, where are you in the world, Brian? Brian: I am in Greenwich, Connecticut, USA. Lindsay: And you have a very sort of unique story, I think, in that you have taught both middle school and high school. Is it middle school and high school in the same school? Brian: Yeah, it's in the same schoool. Lindsay: Ah! Brian: It works out really well, you know. It's actually the school itself goes all the way from elementary all the way up through high school, all on the same campus. Lindsay: Do you like that? Do you like having all those grades in the same area? Brian: Yeah, I think it's great. I think it's great especially because there are a lot of teachers like me that get to work across disciplines so I work with some of the high school kids, I work with some of the middle school kids, and a lot of other teachers do the same. So, the kids now that I'm teaching in high school, a lot of them I have directed since they were in fifth grade which is kind of nice. Lindsay: And how is that? That must be really good for creating community and sort of relationships with students? Brian: Yeah, absolutely, especially since the school – Greenwich Academy – it's just a fantastic school. Everybody is very supportive. Everybody really works together well. It's definitely a school that works and that happens a lot. I mean, you really get to develop strong bonds with the kids because you kind of work with them in so many different ways and we're all kind of together on a relatively small campus so it has a really community feeling to it. Lindsay: Why did you decide to go into teaching Drama? Brian: Well, a lot of it is, you know, I did a lot of acting when I was a student. I did a lot of writing when I was a student and, in college, I studied playwriting and I studied theatre and sort of one of my first jobs after college was being an actor in a touring children's theatre troop and I just loved kind of putting on shows for kids and seeing how excited kids got when you did shows for them and did anything theatrical for them so that kind of first got the bug in my mind about, well, maybe I can actually do something that's a job that's related to my love of theatre and playwriting without having to worry about being a working actor ne...