Podcast appearances and mentions of david let

It's not always easy to get information from clients. If you're in a situation where you have good relationships with your clients, but you're struggling to get the information you need from them, there are very specific things that you can do that will help you to accomplish that a lot faster and a lot more organically. It'll just feel better when you're doing it right, and they'll be a lot more likely to help you with it. David: Hi, and welcome back. In today's episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist, and I will be discussing getting information out of clients. Welcome back, Kevin. Kevin: Hey, welcome back to you too. I'm really excited to talk about this because let's be honest, like we're all very conscious of the fact that everyone wants our information, so it's a bit of a struggle sometimes. David: Yeah, it really is. And when we're looking at trying to extract information from clients, sometimes it's like trying to pull teeth. Or trying to get the information that we need to either advance the sale or to be able to get an order completed and that sort of thing. And it can definitely be challenging. Kevin: Yeah, no doubt. How much of it do you think is how people ask for the information? Instead of saying like, give me this. Is it better to kind of think about it in more of a storytelling narrative kind of way to pull things out? David: That's a great question. I think a lot of it depends on your personality and the way that you communicate with people. Many salespeople, many of the best salespeople, I think are natural storytellers. You ask them what time it is and it starts with a story. Right? So... Kevin: Well, it all started back when I was eight. David: Let's talk about time, shall we? Kevin: Yeah. David: Yeah, so I think it can take that form. I think there are also situations, a lot of times, where we know what we need to get from them, and sometimes if we're just going for it all the time, that can come across as a little too pushy in some ways. So I think there's a natural give and take that needs to happen, so that people can feel engaged with us. If they feel engaged in the conversation, if they feel that we're listening to them, paying attention to what they need, and that's woven in with getting the next piece of information that I need without coming across like an interrogator. Like I'm going to shine a light on you. It's like the third degree in the cop movies. Right? If it feels like that, they're gone. But when you're able to just engage them and let them know that you care about getting them a result, then they're a lot more likely to be free with the information. Kevin: Obviously at the front end of a sales cycle, it's more basic information and it keeps going, getting more detailed as things go on. Should people change their approach as they go on from first contacting someone to maybe having a warm or even hot lead? David: Definitely, and I think you raised exactly the right point there, which is that it does generally start out more general and then it gets more and more specific as you're getting down to it. Sometimes salespeople will lead with things like, what's your budget? Right? Which is kind of intrusive, right? Kevin: Yeah. That's the one, right? David: You don't need to ask me about my budget if I'm not buying anything from you, right? Kevin: Yeah, yeah. What's your budget? What's your timeline? Right? Isn't that what everybody always says first? David: Yeah. And that's not the kind of thing that generally needs to come first. Initially, what needs to happen is they need to feel some sort of connection. They need to have a clear idea of what you do, how you can help them, and all that sort of thing. So I think a lot of times, in the early stages of a relationship when we're first meeting a prospect, it is information gathering from us, but it's about trying to find out what they need, what they're looking for,

L'Équipe d'Un Board Game Presque Parfait se livre une bataille sans merci dans le sous-bois en incarnant les animaux les plus cutes et les plus surnois du monde du jeu de société, dans une partie du jeu favori du Professeur Board Game: Root! On reçoit Sam du podcast Board Game Duel pour discuter avec nous, et on vous parle aussi de nos dernières expériences ludiques.0:00:00 - Générique;0:00:30 - Introduction;0:04:35 - Retour sur le dernier épisode;0:06:40 - Tour de table de David (Let's Go to Japan);0:16:30 - Tour de table de Pierre-Marc (Pollen + Life in Reterra);0:21:55 - Tour de table de Sam (Rolling Realms Redux);0:28:20 - Aidez moi avec mon Barrage;0:36:20 - Tour de table de David (Windmill Valley);0:43:25 - Tour de table de Pierre-Marc (Next Staton: Paris);0:50:00 - Tour de table de Sam (Salon AQIJJ - The LOTR: Duel for Middle-earth - Festival (2024);0:56:50 - Tour de table de David (Fall of Lumen);1:20:25 - Minipisode Solo: Warp's Edge;1:36:50 - Interlude;1:37:20 - Root!;3:23:20 - Conclusion.Forest Rhythm by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Artist: http://audionautix.com/Supportez-nous sur Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/professeurboardgameVisitez notre commanditaire premium Lillojeux:596 boul. Perron, Maria, QCBoutique en ligne: https://www.lillojeux.ca/Page Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lillojeuxYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVdrvh7UHAz0Q95s1o_MHyQ

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There is a lot of glass in public and commercial spaces, and the pro AV and digital signage industries have been applying all kinds of technologies to turn things like windows and dividers into part-time or full-time displays. In most cases, those jobs have come with compromises. There are films that might start curling at the corners, or discolouring. Mesh systems that look pretty good from the front, but terrible from the rear. And most recently, super-thin foils that need to be adhered to one side of glass panes. So what if the LED display was actually part of architectural-grade glass? That's the premise of a company called Clear Motion Glass - a Pennsylvania-based technology start-up that comes at the business from the angle of commercial glass. Clear Motion is a spin-out from William Penn Performance Glass, which has for many years been making and supplying laminated and tempered glass for commercial buildings. Unlike other products on the market, Clear Motion's LED displays are sandwiched inside sheets of laminated safety glass - so when a building goes up or is being retrofitted, the glass panels that go in are also active, highly-transparent displays. I had a good chat with Todd Stahl, a glass industry veteran who runs both the established and start-up businesses. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David: Todd, thank you for joining me.  Todd Stahl: Hey Dave. Yeah, I appreciate you having us on. It's going to be a pleasure to talk about some LED glass with you.  David: Yeah, tell me about the company. I saw you guys at DSE back in December. You were busy almost the whole time. So I didn't really have the time or the chance to have any kind of a detailed LED conversation, but I know that the company has not been around that long, but it's grown out of a pretty well-established “performance glass company.” Todd Stahl: Yeah. A little bit about the history there. So, at Clear Motion Glass, we're making the LEDs inside of the glass. I came across the LED glass around June of 2022, so I've had it for just about two years. The parent company is William Penn Performance Glass, and that's another company I started in 2011. We deal with high-end architectural Glass.  So, a cliffnote version: We go to the top architects in the country, and they're like, “Hey, who are you designing for?” And they'll say to us, “Hey, we want some really cool glass to go in the elevators for the Empire State Building.” So we got into the architectural space with glass, and actually, we'll William Penn, who was just voted one of the top 50 glass producers in North of North America. So something that we're definitely pretty proud of around here.  Then I came across LED glass around 2022, I thought it was one of the coolest things I've ever seen put inside a glass, and I wanted to be a part of it. David: So when you say you came across it, what do you mean by that?  Todd Stahl: So, there's another product in glass, another glass product that's been around, I'm going to say right around since 2000. It's a glass that goes frosted to clear from the turn of a switch, Switchable glass. So there's a company called Smart Film Blinds, and they were an applied film company that would actually take that, what we would call switch glass, but they just took the film and applied it to existing glass, and it was owned by Alan and Tracy Ackerman, and then they had this connection with LED Glass they weren't quite sure what to do with it. They knew it was really cool. And it had a chance to be really something big, but they were more of a film company, and then he and I got introduced, through a need that we had for some smart film, the switchable film, and then eventually we had a partnership for a while. Then we decided basically that I'll stick with the glass part, what I'm best at, and he'll stick with the film part, which was what they were best with. But that's how I got introduced to it, right around two years ago.  David: What you're marketing now is Clear Motion Glass. Is that your own product or are you reselling somebody else's manufactured product?  Todd Stahl: We have partners overseas, such as a company called Filmbase. That's where we get the actual LED grid or LED mesh. We bring that to my facility in York, Pennsylvania, which is in the south-central Pennsylvania area, we're 20 minutes south of Hershey, close to Harrisburg, and then we actually fabricate everything as a finished panel here. So we'll make the glass, we'll get the interlayer components. We have a laminating machine that actually works by pulling a vacuum and heating it up to certain temperatures. After that, it comes out, and we have a clear LED glass display.  David: So laminated glass is something that's been around forever. So this is just basically sandwiching the mesh in between sheets of laminated glass?  Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. We're definitely making a sandwich component. We start with a piece of glass, say that's your component number one. Then, we start with the inner layer materials.  In a case like this, we use a couple of different techniques, but we use EVA, which is ethyl vinyl acetate. Then we'll actually put the LED mesh grid on top of that, then we put another piece of EVA, then we go with the finished component of the sandwich, another piece of glass, and we stick them in an oven, we run a certain cycle, and about four hours later, we have a laminated piece of glass, exactly how you described. It's a sandwich makeup for sure.  David: Was there a lot of R&D work involved in it? Because I would imagine if you're putting an LED mesh inside of an oven, then going to a very high temperature and all that, I'm thinking if I didn't know much about this stuff, I'd be wondering, what's all that heat going to do to this thing? Todd Stahl: Yeah. You know, we have to make sure that it can withstand certain temperatures, obviously, and if you don't heat, and just in general, if you don't get laminated glass hot enough, it doesn't bond, it does not bond correctly. What you have to achieve is cross-linking and cross-linking is basically the interlayer material to the glass itself, and that happens at a temperature of around 110 degrees Celsius, so it's not getting hot enough to cook a Turkey in there, so we're not really dealing with extremes. I think a lot of people might think when you're actually making glass out of what we call a batch, you know that's where the glass is heated up to 2000 degrees and you're really dealing with some extreme temperatures. It's not quite the same extremes at all when you're dealing with laminated glass.  David: So tell me what performance glass is, and what high-end performance glass is because I don't know the glass world terribly well.  Todd Stahl: Yeah, sure. So, so what William Penn performance glass is the performance name kind of all started because our glass looks great and it, but it's an all safety rated glass. So that's kind of the performance part of the glass. So, if you're looking at our glass, say that's used for glass handrails, that's a very specific glass that's chosen to withstand the certain load requirements of a structural application, and typically most of our handrails are tempered, and laminated glass. So there are two ways on this planet to make a piece of glass safety-rated. You either temper it or you laminate it. We happen to do both of those things in a lot of our projects, and it's kind of funny like obviously safety-rated glass is strong, but the only thing that's really taken into consideration when you're referring to safety glass are you automatically assume it's going to break and what happens when it breaks, right? So with tempered glass, you put a lot of stress on the glass itself through a heating and cooling process, and whenever that glass breaks, it breaks into small panels that would not be able to potentially cause a life-threatening wound, and then you have the exact opposite with laminated where if a rock hits your car, if that's ever happened to you the rock doesn't come through and the pieces of the glass, the shards don't come through, they stay together. So you got those two things to the requirements when you're thinking about what is safety rated glass.  David: With the Clear Motion product, is it an indoor product only, an outdoor facing product, or what are the use cases?  Todd Stahl: So what's really cool about our LED glass is that almost wherever you're using architectural glass right now, you can now use our LED displays. So it can be used in exterior applications, a building facade, glass canopies, and railings that may be exterior. All of the components are kind of encapsulated inside that glass, and that glass is making a nice, really safe, cozy home for the LED display inside of it. David: And it's bright enough that it can be on a glass curtain wall like an auto dealer?  Todd Stahl: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the really cool applications for it. In fact, you had mentioned at the trade show and boy, were we busy? I think I was just talking about this yesterday. We scanned around 450 people in that short show. Our voices were a little strained by the end of the evening. So, the brightness of our display at the show, Dave, was only running around 4%, and I thought that was one of the more amazing things about the product because it was still kind of bright at 4%. Later we started bringing that up because a few potential clients wanted to see it at 50-60% brightness. So yeah, you can totally use this as an exterior sign and get whatever brightness you need. I think some of the products are well over 10,000 nits depending on the needs, and I think one actually lasted up to 15,000 nits, so plenty bright for the outside.  David: Yeah, once you get to 3,500, you're good.  Todd Stahl: Yeah, exactly. David: On transparency. I see on your website that it says there is up to 90 percent transparency.  Todd Stahl: Yeah, so when you get to some of the pixel pitches that are viewed from say, a distance of around a hundred feet, I think the pixel pitch at a 20, I believe that one may allow up to 90 percent of light to come through. It's really cool. I mean, you have this really great display, and then you're just getting all this, and you're not cutting off any spaces so if you have a traditional LED display, you can only view that from one side and I think that's kind of what's really amazing about this product and a lot of times when you're looking at the product, you don't even realize that it's transparent until the image would say it's rotating from one image to the next. And you're like, Oh, wow, that's clear, there are people behind there. So I think, yeah, it's really cool in that application.  David: From what I saw, because it's this mesh material, with super thin wiring in between each of the LED lights.  The challenge I've had with a lot of trans or “transparent products” is that they look good from the front side, particularly at a distance, but when you look at the back end of the things, there's a mesh, like a metallic mesh or something like that, a grid system that kind of makes it look like crap. Todd Stahl: Yeah. With a lot of the applied films that have been out there before, and there's not a whole lot of them, but there are a few, certainly from that backside, it doesn't look at all like the front, and the same thing, with the LED actual metal meshes, again, they look phenomenal from the front, and you get behind, and you're like, man, what am I looking at here? So with our product, what's really cool about that is you get a little bit of the halo effect, from the image that's playing on it, that you can see from, say, the view side of the glass, and then you get a slight reflection off of that front piece of glass that kind of bounces back through. So you see a little bit of a glow or a halo in the background, but it is not an eyesore, and it looks pretty good. You can see out, and you have a very clear picture of the people that you're looking through or whatever object you would be doing from the back of the product. It looks really good. It's a good look from the backside.  David: Yeah, there are numerous products out there that now do this kind of foil mesh effect, and you have to adhere it to the inside of a sheet of glass, which is all fine and everything else, but it doesn't look that good from the inside, does it? Todd Stahl: No, it really doesn't. The concept here, we touched on hockey a little bit, earlier, but you know, we have, you have all these hockey nets in the arena to protect the fans that a puck doesn't hit them, and most of those meshes are black. It's harder for our eyes to kind of pick up the black mesh than it is for white. There are some that have whites, but not many, and the black is blended in a lot easier. I'm a big hockey fan, so I've been to a few arenas, and the white ones are a little harder to, I think it takes away from the image more, and that's why we're using a black LED mesh.  When we first started, it was white, and it just didn't have as good of a; again, I thought it took away from the product from the backside.  David: So presumably there are limits in terms of the size of a glass panel that you can do because you've got a laminate in an oven of some kind and that they're only so big. So if you have, to use the example I mentioned earlier of, an auto dealer's glass curtain wall where the sheet of glass might be pretty darn big. How do you put multiple units together? And what does that look like in terms of cabling and everything?  Todd Stahl: Yeah. So we're always kind of limited in size by a couple of different things. Sometimes it might be the actual raw product glass that we're using. Some sheets are available to us, bigger and smaller, the width of the laminating materials, and then our oven as well. So basically, in our oven here in Pennsylvania, we can laminate an LED panel roughly about 6x10 feet. You know, that's a pretty sizable piece of glass, and then what we can do, if you're doing a glass facade it kind of gets into a little bit more of how the glass is installed, but you're basically stacking the panels. there's a control unit. That attaches to each panel of glass, and then those control units are all tied together and then that gives you one cohesive image plane from one panel to the next.  David: Do you have much of a seam in between them?  Todd Stahl: So, if you remember, at the trade show, I think we had two panels out there and we had a seam in the middle. So I'll see the seam, you'll see the seam, but when the image is playing, you really don't even notice it's there. A lot of times, depending on the application, a glass facade is a little different, because you're going to have all most likely all four edges of the glass covered, but, we have a lot of applications where the panels are being butt jointed together and it's a nice polished edge there. So, yeah, with the image running and stuff, you really don't even see it unless you get within a couple of feet of it.  David: So we're talking millimeters, not inches, in terms of a gap.  Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. You know, a gap's going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of three, three-sixteenths of an inch, plus or minus. David: So not much at all.  Todd Stahl: Yeah, not much at all. Like I said, it's pretty cool. When that image is going, you're like, it just looks like one big piece of glass.  David: And there are technical limits, like if, let's say, an airport curtain wall that might be like 80 feet high for the side of a terminal or something like that. Can you do that?  Todd Stahl: Absolutely. That can all be tied in. You'd have several zones there, and depending on how you're handling the programming from a laptop, and something like that, you just say zone one's the entire thing, and then you might break it down into individual zones if you want different things playing at different times, but yeah, we this is definitely designed to do entire glass facades or, curtain walls. David: All those little lights generate some heat. How does the heat get out?  Todd Stahl: Yeah, so we've been working with these products for about two years now, and I always expect when I put my hand on the glass to touch it, that it's going to be nice and warm, but it really isn't. The heat definitely dissipates quickly. There is some energy consumption, and we have charts for that. So once we get into a building design, we can get in there and say, “Hey, this is what you're going to need for your power requirements.” But it has very similar power requirements to current LED displays that have been around for a while. But yeah, it doesn't really create much heat. You would think it creates more, and I'm telling you, whenever anybody sees it, one of the first things that they almost always do is, “Oh, I expected that to be warm” and they touch it, and it really isn't.  David: Well, one of the criticisms or let's say what a naysayer might say about this, is, “All right, if I buy this, glass panel with the LED mesh embedded inside of it, what happens if there's a dead pixel? I'm stuck with that forever. It can't be repaired because it's sandwiched in between two sheets of glass.”  Todd Stahl: You know, it was my biggest concern. We spent a good bit of time.  I think the lifespan of the LED bulbs we're using is right under 11 years. So we found the biggest problem that we've encountered, and this took us a while before we were going to bring it to market because that's by far the biggest concern; anyone looks at that and goes, it's not the first time I've ever seen a bulb, you know? So there's a couple of things. There's been a lot of research and development to make sure when it comes out of lamination that we've already caused any bulbs to fail before those processes, and we actually have a little bit of a protocol we've developed. So, one of the biggest reasons a light bulb is going to fail is the heat and pressure in that vacuum. It's not so much the heat, but the pressure because there's a little bit of movement in there. So if all those connection points aren't just right, you're going to get a bulb that may come out after you've done all of the work, and then you fire it up, and you know, there's a lot of bulbs, and a diode and only one is bad, it's not good. So we actually have a pre-laminating process we run to actually replicate what is going to go through the stressors of the lamination process. And if we find a bulb or a diode that might not be working, we can replace it after that pre-cycle of lamination.  Now, on the flip side, let's say it's out there, it's in the field. If we use annealed glass on the front surface, so, annealed is not tempered, but the backlight would be tempered, so you're still dealing with a, fully safety rated tempered and laminated makeup. We actually have a drilling process where we can drill a core out of the glass, and we can actually replace that LED diode. What our experience is that once they come through lamination so far, with all the panels we've been working on we have not had one go out and we've put them in some areas of our glass production facility near our tempering oven, which is a really cool piece of equipment. It has a 600 horsepower blower that when the tempered glass comes through, it cools it to dissipate the heat, but it draws some dust, there's some heat back there. We've had a panel running there for two years in that condition without any issues. But yes, you can actually replace the bulbs if you need to, if one goes out.  David: So I'm curious when an architect and a general contractor puts a building up, they're thinking in terms of being there for decades, with maybe the exception of football stadiums, which seem to need to be replaced every five years or so. Is 11 years an acceptable operating lifespan for a sheet of glass for a builder or for a building owner?  Todd Stahl: Yeah. I mean, our interlayers, they last 20-30 years. The interlayers and the glass products, yeah, they're going to last a very long time. When we've been bringing this product to market I think, the event back to the switch light is one of the first times you're us glass guys are introducing electricity into the mix. And at first that back in 2000, I mean, it was really cool. It had the wow factor, but it didn't quite last as long for me. I didn't really get into the product until recently. But you know, that product will last around 10 years as well, and we don't get a whole lot of callbacks very often with any of our glass products.  But it seems like most clients are happy with a 10-year usage. That's been pretty good for the Switch Lite product. We talk about a decade out there to the architects and designers now that, that's a number that they all seem to be very happy  David: Let's say a car dealer goes in, they're fine, they're thinking in terms of the glass that they put in is there for 10 years, and they may switch it out anyways?  Todd Stahl: Yeah, I think you know that everybody wants to be fresh and new. So we found a lot of these high-end retail stores that we've designed with, for instance, a high-end jewelry line, and let's say they have started in California with a new design. They take that design and they move it east to New York City. By the time they get to New York City, whether that's been five to eight years, and they redesign the whole thing over again. So there's a cycle and I think, especially with retail, and a lot of these buildings, they always want to have a new, fresh look, and I think a lot of times they're redesigning in under ten years for a lot of applications.  David: I'm guessing I could be wrong here, but I'm guessing that there's hyper-competition from China for, what I would say is conventional LED displays and so on; you're probably going to have less competition for what you're doing because of the sheer weight of, even if they can make glass cheaper over in China, shipping glass panels over here would be just ghastly expensive, right? Todd Stahl: Yeah, definitely. It's pretty heavy to air freight glass, so it's always nice that there's this thing called the ocean between us and China, especially us being we've been a manufacturer forever, and thankfully, it is a little expensive to ship a finished product like that and take some time. So, yeah, and you know, right now, we're kind of pretty far ahead of the curve in how to actually laminate this properly. Our feeling was when we got involved with this, all right, we got the LED technology. Now we'll just throw it in some glass, and we got a home run and it wasn't quite as easy to just throw it in glass and end up with a finished product, you know? There are still some areas. We are not the only ones in the world laminating this product, but there are, from what I know, under five; we're the only ones who can do it with thin and large panels. We're the only ones that I know of that are actually doing some of the very specific things to make sure it's going to perform properly in these laminated glass applications. In our process, we are patent protected in our process where I think we're just like in the first phase, I don't know all the legal terminology, but we're going through the patent process for the way we laminate it.  David: Which will help you over here, won't help you with Chinese products, but again, there's that ocean thing in between. Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. We have a few intellectual properties here and I'm not one to get into too many legal battles, but we would have some type of recourse if someone does come and is trying to laminate in a similar technique the way we do it. David: I suspect you're kind of looking around the corner as to where this is going and the types of technologies that are emerging. Do you kind of see this as, what you have right now is Gen 1, and over time the light emitters will get smaller, the wiring will be even thinner and so on? Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's exactly the way I see it going. I mentioned earlier: I really am a glass guy, and this is a glass company by people who absolutely love glass. Now, that's a Will Penn. Clear Motion, we have that same feeling as well, but this is more of a technology company. And what we're talking about today, like you said, generation one. We're going to revisit this in under five years, and it's going to look, I think, a whole lot different.  David: Who's buying it right now? And are you in the field with this?  Todd Stahl: So we're working on probably over 50 to 60 current projects right now in the design phase. Almost everyone we're working with has signed NDAs. So we can't necessarily say the clients that we're designing with right now. But one's a high-end fast food restaurant. They want one of these in each restaurant and that's actually for an exterior application.  David: Are these proposals or purchase orders?  Todd Stahl: They are proposals right now, so a lot of verbal commitments. We have a project we're working on in the Middle East in the design phase right now, that's 18 months out, the funding has been approved. They're designing it in the UK and then we're working with the audio visual company, I think in Texas. So this is really brand new.  David: You're in startup mode!  Todd Stahl: We really are, and this is the third company I've started literally from scratch, and I think it'll be the last one because boy, it is challenging. It takes a lot of energy. There's this great energy when you're starting it, and this is a little extra challenging because this is brand new. No one has ever seen clear LED glass displays like they just did not exist four years ago.  People might've thought they saw something similar. Like you said, it was a film or a grid that was put behind the glass. But when people are seeing this now, we're creating a new market, we're educating people to that market, and we're educating ourselves.  David: I'm guessing when people come to a stand at a trade show, you're at, the architects and the people who design physical spaces are the ones who are going, this is more like it. They haven't really liked the idea of films or foils and all that because of how they look at the back end or they're worried about a film sort of, particularly if it's exposed to UV light and all that, it's going to yellow and on and on…  Todd Stahl: So what the feedback from the A&D community has been? We did an AIA show in San Francisco last June, and we had one or two clients, say, “Hey Todd, we have the budget for this. We have clients who want this product, and we've been looking for it for years.” Then we start designing the project with them, and that's the thing: once I shake hands with an architect, we might not actually have that project begin production for 24 months to a year. So, depending if the building's coming out of the ground or if it's just a remodel of an existing one, it's a very long cycle until we actually get orders placed, and you know, something I've been dealing with for 30 years. It's kind of the way the industry is.  David: Infrastructure projects are never quick, are they?  Todd Stahl: No, they really aren't, but the A&D world is kind of our background. It's where we've been for a very long time in that space, and we've definitely noticed that companies, individuals in the audio-visual world respond to this entirely differently. This doesn't have as many questions in their minds. They're more educated because we've been used to dealing with LEDs for a very long period of time. So it's kind of interesting how the two markets work together, like the DSE show where we introduced the product, I would say more to the audio-visual world if I'm using the right terminology there, it was received just as with that much energy, a lot of more understanding right away, not as many technical questions. David: It's a variation on stuff they've been seen before, but maybe a better variation. Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely, and the architects, like you were saying, and even in general, I think even though LG makes an applied film. The North American President of, I forgot the gentleman's name, he was in my shop a little over a year ago, and we were working with his film, and then we showed him our LED glass, and he was blown away by it. David: “There goes my business”  Todd Stahl: Well, I think he was like, I'm going to make that too. I don't think he was worried about his business, but that applied film that they had been using, again, from a very long viewing distance, the product looks great. It's not yet ready to be viewed in shorter viewing distances, but the fact that it's applied, I do think that there is something like when you're buying a high-end product, you don't want people to be able to come up and pick it off, and I mean that definitely happens with every piece of film, I think I've ever worked with in my life. The first thing people do is take their fingernails, and they try to scrape the edge of it. It's just something that is instinctual about humans. But I think if you take that film now, I always say, if you put a piece of film on glass, it's just film. Once you laminate that film inside of the glass, you now have a glass product that protects it.  It does what you were saying. It prevents it from being yellowed over time because the inner layer blocks out almost 100 percent of the UV rays. So I think it's a great home for the LED mesh.  David: So does William Penn and Clear Motion Glass, do they operate separately, or are you kind of in the same office, the same building, and everything else, it's just different business cards? Todd Stahl: No, actually, we are in the same overall building complex, but we're not connected physically. So Clear Motion, basically has the equivalent of its own social security number, which down here in the business and for business, the IRS wants us to have EIN numbers for our businesses. So Clear Motion has an EIN number. Will Penn has an EIN number, obviously, but they definitely operate as two companies but obviously very close connections.  David: And you are running both?  Todd Stahl: I am running both right now, and spoiler alert: two's a lot harder to run than one.  David: Yes, I bet. If people want to find you online, they just go to ClearMotionGlass.com?  Todd Stahl: Yeah, that's it. They can find us there. There are some emails there. They can shoot an email to us and we'd love to talk to anybody if this product's right for them we're really excited about it and definitely creating a lot of energy with it. David: Are you at a trade show anytime soon?  Todd Stahl: Yeah, so we're doing Infocomm, I believe. It's the middle of June out in Vegas. Are you going to be there?  David: Yes.  Todd Stahl: Awesome, man. We get to meet in person, then. We'll carve out some time for that, Dave.  David: Absolutely, yeah, and that's a good show for you. There are tons of pro-AV people there. Todd Stahl: Yeah, I love that. That's a new space for us. So we're a little extra excited cause that's definitely not like a glass trade show is.  David: All right. Todd, thank you so much for your time.  Todd Stahl: All right. Yeah. I appreciate it, Dave. It was a pleasure.  

Readings here

About The Guests: -The guests on this episode of the Divorced Devil podcast are Rachel and David, the hosts of the show. They provide support and guidance for people going through divorce or relationship breakups. Summary: Rachel and David discuss ten negative traits and qualities that should not be carried over from a divorce or breakup into a new relationship. These traits include anger, resentment, bitterness, cynicism, blame, defensiveness, inflexibility, control, clinginess, impulsiveness, and volatility. They emphasize the importance of working through these negative emotions and behaviors in order to heal and grow. They also highlight the need for self-love and self-preservation during this process. Key Takeaways: - Don't carry anger, resentment, or bitterness from a previous relationship into a new one. - Avoid cynicism and negative thinking, as it can hinder personal growth and new connections. - Take responsibility for your own actions and avoid blaming others for the end of a relationship. - Be open to different perspectives and willing to compromise in new relationships. - Don't try to control everything; allow for flexibility and adaptability. - Avoid clinginess and the need for constant reassurance due to abandonment fears. - Be mindful of impulsive behavior and consider the consequences before acting. - Work through emotions and seek healing in order to avoid volatility and irrational behavior. Others Highlights: -Don't ask my location -The wrath of Kraken -Be the lighthouse -Don't put your penis in the oven -Situationship -It applies to all facets of life -Oscar the Grouch -Peyronie's Disease Quotes: - "Use that resentment. Use that anger and spin it. Use that energy for good. Work on yourself. Self-love." - Rachel - "Don't bring the negative shit to the new relationship. Be the light. Be the beacon." - David - "Take responsibility for yourself. And again, that doesn't mean that you caused it. That means that you're working on you." - Rachel - "Give people a chance. You don't have to like me, but I've shown you who I am from the beginning." - David - "Let go of fault because that'll roadblock you for all the healing, for the denial, for all the things." - Rachel - "Be more flexible in our new relationships. And number seven, control." - David - "Feel the feels. The faster you go through all the feelings, the quicker you'll heal." - Rachel  

Season 4 Episode 16 of the Chasing MacNaughton Podcast from Tech Hockey Guide; David Let's Talk. This week Tim Braun, Rob Gilreath and Matt Cavender were joined by former Husky, David Johnstone for this years mental health episode. #BellLetsTalk Day is coming up on January 25 so we discussed David's struggles in hockey from Juniors through MTU and how he's worked through it. After that, we discussed the Desert Hockey Classic and the state of things. Mitch's Misfits Amazon wishlist is still having items added as we figure it out but you can take a look by clicking here and a reminder, if you rate the Podcast 5-stars, we'll read your review on the podcast and thanks to our newest sponsor, Fiebke Dental in downtown Rhinelander. Follow us on twitter at ChasingMacPod and you can submit questions through our email address, ChasingMac@techhockeyguide.com. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Please rate and review which will help us reach more people, and tell your friends. Please check out Jonathan Zamaites series previews every Friday and Mike Anleitner's Old Dog in Texas column every Wednesday (you should definitely read this week's column). Also, keep an eye out for new recruiting articles on Tuesdays. As always, special thanks to our patron saint Doc McResin for his generous donation to get this thing running, we hope you enjoy. Also, thanks to The Thank You Notes for all the bumpers in today's episode. If you like what you hear, check them out at thethankyounotes.bandcamp.com RAW AUDIO: This post is for patrons at the Silver Level ($25/ mo) or above which includes unedited audio and usually drops the night the podcast is recorded or on Mondays. RAW VIDEO: This post is for patrons at the Gold Level ($10/mo) or above which includes unedited video and usually drops the morning after the podcast is record or on Tuesdays. EXTENDED AUDIO: This post is for patrons at the Black Level ($5/mo) or above which includes extended audio content and usually drops the day before the public podcast on Wednesdays. PUBLIC PODCAST: For additional information and more episode liner notes, check out our episode overview on Tech Hockey Guide. To make sure we can afford all our fancy equipment we purchased for the podcast and the THG website in general, please check out our patreon page and consider joining. Patrons at our Black Level or above receive an authentic MTU jersey patch and access to extra podcast content including extended versions of our other episodes. This week's extended version was over 112 minutes. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/chasingmacpod/message

In this episode Lee talks to David Holmes who has worked in Contact Centres and Customer Operations across Sales, Customer Service and Digital for some of the biggest companies in the UK, currently Operations Director at Cigna Healthcare. Lee and David chat about success and its definition, “harmonious friction”, the team leader role and how open mindedness can make the difference.   KEY TAKEAWAYS Find the job that generates enthusiasm in you. Learn to enjoy challenges to your methods and thinking. Having an open mind and being willing to listen is important.  There is only negative feedback or constructive negative feedback. Generally it is about something that needs improvement. Positive feedback is affirmation.  Being a team leader is about being able to look forward to a destination and then planning on how to get there.  It's ok to bring people outside of the business to be critical and challenging in a way that those inside are too invested to achieve.   BEST MOMENTS ‘Just when you think you've seen it all, someone comes along and shows you something new.' – David ‘What is it that excites you about what you do and why? I love working with people, Lee.' – David ‘That “harmonious friction” generates my passion and I hope I never lose it' – David ‘Let's talk about your past actually. What is it that people saw in you to allow you to create this history?' – Lee    VALUABLE RESOURCES Business Problems Solved Podcast            ABOUT THE HOST For the last 15 years, I have been a multi-sector internal or external business improvement consultant, building the improved capability of individuals, teams and businesses. In my spare time, I enjoy spending time with my two young children Jack & India. I also enjoy listening to and reading business & personal development material. Lee Houghton is “THE Business Problem Solver”, a Management Consultant, CX Specialist and Keynote Speaker.   CONTACT METHOD You can contact Lee Houghton on 07813342194 Lee@leehoughton.com  https://www.linkedin.com/in/lhoughton/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Have you ever had the honor of seeing the Statue of David in person?   It is truly awe inspiring to stand next to the 17-foot masterpiece.    In today's episode, Coach Ashlie Walton and Detective Walton discuss the relationship between David and You.    Tune in as we share the importance of finding yourself, one chizel at a time.    Like what you hear? We are honored. Hit that subscribe button and share your thoughts in a review. If you or someone you know may be a fit to be a guest on our show, please reach out to us! Balance. Optimize. Tactics. Hit that subscribe button so that you don't miss a day of the added value that I am dedicated to sharing with you weekly. Let's Connect! Facebook Instagram Email: ashliewalton555@gmail.com LinkedIn www.leowarriors.com

Pastor Ron Coleman's audio podcast from July 11th's gathering at Grace Church in Chester Illinois.  Be blessed!

This week's podcast kicks off with Andrew and the market report for the week commencing 26th July 2021, the first week of harvest! In Farmchat, Andrew is joined by two Ben and Ian from the Dewing Grain gang, as they discuss the wild weather events happening across the world and their impact on harvest. Join the guys as they cast their market predictions; will they be right or will sod's law cause havoc in the grain trade?Sadly, there's no beer tasting this week as the Dewing Grain fridge is empty and needs refilling… hint, hint.This episode is dedicated to Hillary Bayfield.Thanks to all our listeners, old and new.Keep in touch - we are @dewinggrain on Twitter. The Dewing Grain Podcast is produced by www.eastcoastdesignstudio.co.uk Dewing Grain - Independent grain trader for Norfolk and Suffolk01263 731550 - www.dewinggrain.co.uk See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The stores of the future are being built today, and according to David Wilkinson, President & General Manager of NCR Retail, they will not be the types of stores that currently come to mind. We are living in a time that blurs the lines between digital and physical, and retailers are working with NCR to make every experience as seamless as possible. David explains how on this episode of Up Next in Commerce. He tells us how personalized shopping will be brought to the forefront through first-party branded apps that customize the shopping experience for you. And he details how retailers in all industries can start breaking free of the traditional shackles of standard point of sale technology and store designs. Plus, David and I nerd out about how cryptocurrency will be entering the mainstream sooner rather than later, and how retailers can prepare for what that will mean for their payments systems. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Tech First, Differentiation Later: Retailers in every industry are trying to find ways to differentiate themselves and create memorable experiences for customers. But in order to ensure quality customer experiences, the basics of how your store functions need to be flawless. Focus first on optimizing all point-of-sale technology and other digital or tech offerings so that however the customer wants to transact, they can without friction. Then, when that is running smoothly, you can begin to focus on the peripheral experiences that separate your store or brand from the rest.Freeform Future: Anyone looking to create a store or business today has more freedom than ever before. They are no longer locked into the old ways of doing things. Traditional points of sale can be rethought. The design of a grocery store can be revamped to cater to more personalized experiences. Fast food restaurants can completely forgo inside dining. So many new options are on the table because in 2020, consumers proved to be willing to adapt to all kinds of new experiences.    Going Beyond The Loyalty Program: The days of trading your phone number for a discount code are long gone. These days, if a consumer is giving over personal information, they want something substantial in return. Brands have a chance to create loyalty experiences that are personalized and incentivize activities outside of the store, such as on social media, to give their consumers a unique reason to sign up. Crypto Checkout: Cryptocurrency is more than just a buzzword — it's likely to begin infiltrating daily life, particularly how people buy and sell goods. Majority of cryptocurrency holders would be willing to pay for their goods with their crypto, and retailers have to start figuring out now how to create systems that would make those transactions possible and secure.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hello, and welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show, we have David Wilkinson, the president of NCR Retail. David, welcome to the show.David:Thank you, Stephanie. Glad to be here.Stephanie:I'm very excited to have you on. So before we start, I would love it if you could highlight what NCR Retail is for anyone who doesn't know, because you guys do a lot and I want the words to come from your mouth instead of ours.David:Yeah, I appreciate that. There's a lot of, depending on who you ask, a lot of misconceptions about what we are as a company and what we do. We think about it in pretty simple terms, we want to create technology that runs the store. And so when I think about that, that's really the software and services that would be creating the capabilities to do transactions and interact with customers in and around the store environment. People might traditionally think of us as an ATM or a cash register company, it's really quite different, it's a payment software and services company across the three primary businesses that we serve, banking, retail, and hospitality.David:We're experts in how consumers interact with technology for things like self-service or automated transactions, which is critical in what's happening around the world today with labor and reallocation of labor, and really just focused on creating great customer experiences and technology to enhance that.Stephanie:Okay, cool. So what are some of the newest projects that you've been embarking on over the past year or two that maybe you had to quickly roll out where you're like, "Okay, everyone wants touchless payments now, or everyone wants this capability"? What have you had to scramble to keep up with?David:Yeah. When you think about our business, we're in the retail side where 70% of our business is grocery, or in big box, I'll put big box in that, another 15% that would be convenience and fuel retail. And then the rest of the balance of that would be, think about a department and specialty. So there are a handful of different trends, as you know, that occur within each of those industries. I'll start with convenience and fuel for a second, as you described. There was a big race when the pandemic was early, everybody wanted to social distance, nobody wanted touch things that other people were touching, so it created the ability or the need to do things like touchless payments at the pump.David:So we've worked with several convenience and fuel retail companies, Kum & Go was one of them, where we created the ability to do stage transactions on your mobile device and reduce the number of touches that you would have to make to the pumps. So it's got store payment, it would allow you this to queue up the pump, initiate the pump activation through our point of sale application, and then you could get to the pump and you always got to touch the pumps to put the nozzle in the car for those of you that have to pump gas in the 48 states that require that. And then the other, you'd have to touch the pump, but it reduces the touch of the thin pads.David:So we're finding those kinds of applications in convenience and fuel. Convenience and fuel also, we're seeing a big rollout of self-checkout, which is one of our flagship... We are the market leader globally in self-checkout, and when I think about what's happening, we really understand how consumers interact with the technology. The hardware is interesting, the software is really interesting, but the understanding of the workflows, the process flow, how do you avoid unnecessary shrink? How do you avoid unnecessary interventions? We're seeing a lot of now, increased demand in the convenience and fuel space that hasn't traditionally had self-checkout, but makes a perfect fit, small basket size convenience shoppers don't want to stand in the line and want different interactions or maybe a less interaction with a person in that environment.David:So COVID is heightened that. So that's what's happening. Convenience and grocery, it's a similar thing. We saw some weird things happening early days with spatial awareness and everyone was focused on, "We've put plexiglass in the stores, we can't have any kind of human interaction, we've got to queue outside the grocery store before we come in and set appointments in different times." So we did a lot of things. We have a very large professional services team that can do custom applications, and we did a lot of that kind of stuff where we're building queuing apps and other things that probably aren't here to stay, but we'll have some longer-term applicability.David:But what we're seeing really is touchless payments with self-checkout, so paying on the mobile or mobile scan in the isles, and then a broader roll out of self-checkout and then getting deeper debt or more density within the store for self-checkout, meaning more lanes enabled for self-checkout so that customers have that capability. I'll take a breath after this, but then the other piece was ecommerce. Obviously ecommerce is growing. If you look at grocery, you can look at different numbers, but it's multi-hundreds of percent growth off of fairly small numbers. But in ecomm, that's being a large part up to anywhere between 15 and probably 25% of grocery quickly moved to ecommerce.David:So we invested, bought a company that has an ecomm engine to turn that experience back over to the retailer so they can have an app, a retailer branded application, allow you to do the list management, recipe management, order online pickup in the store, and then has a picking optimization app on the back end for the retailer. So those are some things that we're working on and deploying that would include payments, but it's a lot going on. Innovation has been compressed into a short amount of time with COVID. I think we're seeing that in a lot of different industries and probably none more impactful than retail.Stephanie:So kind of what things do you think won't stick now that we're a year plus past, and a lot of times when change is happening quick, people are like, "Let's just try everything and do everything new." Some things like ordering groceries online, it feels like it's here to stay, people are debating like, will the percentage fall back again? I think maybe it has this 2020, but then maybe the pie grew. So the numbers, I'm not really sure, but what things are here to stay and which ones were just like a fad and we tried it out and now it's like, no, we actually don't need that.David:Yeah, it's a good question. That's a question we get a lot. I'll start with the easy ones that are fun to joke about in light of the seriousness of the pandemic, but like plexiglass and a sticker on the store that you have to queue six feet or 12 feet or however many feet apart. Those are the things that I think will start to fall down a little bit. We learned that hoarding and stockpiling toilet paper was not a cure for anything. So I think some of those kind of applications or behaviors will go away. What we did find though in the joke in the toilet paper is really about the supply chain. And what we found is that brand loyalty across the consumer base shifted pretty significantly, that you no longer were loyal to a single brand, you were loyal to a brand that had what you wanted and we saw a supply chain shortage.David:And that may have introduced shoppers to where they were traditionally brand loyal for whatever reason, the ability to shop around. One of the trends that will see continue is retailers want more and more data about their consumers so that they can offer personalized experiences, and we all crave that. The social shopping phenomenon is here. And we see it in Asia is more prolific than in the US, but some form of that will start to take hold in the US. And so understanding the customers more deeply is a trend that's here to stay. I think you said online grocery shopping, even while we saw hypergrowth, 85% of the shopping was done in the store, so we think some blend of that will stick around.David:I've seen the same stats that say, "Hey, we've reached the peak of growth, it's going to plateau, maybe decline and then bump back up." So I think online shopping, if you think about it as a consumer, so personally if you think about it, the ability for me to create a list based on past purchases or find a recipe and click on a recipe and add those ingredients to my list or to my basket, have somebody pick those items but I still want to pick out fresh vegetables, fresh flowers, meats, whatever it may be, the things I want to look at, touch and feel, how do we create this hybrid shopping environment where I can do the, we'll call it the center of the store shop, dry other things, and allow me to do the edge of the store, the fresh foods and other things, I think there's there's a hybrid model that makes a lot of sense.David:Now, that's a big change because none of the retailers... We didn't design stores that way, we designed stores to, like I just said, center stores, all this stuff, the outsides are all fresh foods, all the checkout stands are right at the front, congregated. I think this notion of pervasive and flexible checkout will start to take hold. I think those are the trends, convenience, less touch, more choice, and knowing your consumers better are the things that we'll start to see that will stick and we'll see those trends either flatten and start to grow again, or just flatten, but become a bigger percentage of the overall.Stephanie:Yeah. It's funny you mentioned about like what things I want to pick out versus what things other people can. I mentioned this a couple episodes back like, I don't care about picking out the flowers, the cereal, that's all fine get what's there, but no one will ever pick out the avocados the way that I want them or the type of fruit that I want. So why isn't half the store just in inventory, just grab it out of inventory for me, and the other half, it actually want to be and see and touch and smell, that's the part that you can actually interact with. So we're thinking alike, which I like.David:Yeah. You're spot on. Are you a cantaloupe thumper?Stephanie:I am, yep. And the watermelon, I want the perfect little dark yellow spot on it. And my avocados, I hope it didn't get plucked from there and mold growing around the STEM. I'm very particular. And I always think when I order from Whole Foods, I'm like, "Should I write these in notes?" No, because they're going to think I'm crazy if like, "Pick out the avocado just like this, and look for this with your watermelon or cantaloupe."David:Yeah. But think about the opportunity there with what you described. So the application that we have allows us to do a lot of customer specific notes. And then if you have control, if you're the grocer and you have control of your experience, so forget about third-party intermediary picking apps. I'll use Instacart as an example Instacart, sends an Instacart shopper into the store, you may or may not have the same shopper. And the Instacart person doesn't may or may not care, I'll say on a relative scale, cares less about the brand itself where you're shopping. But if the retailer had control of that and knew that you, Stephanie, were a high value customer, you love to buy avocados and that was a real differentiator for you.David:If I knew that about when you shop, you could create an experience that you would actually enjoy buying all the products online, perhaps, or maybe they have an avocado cam specifically for you, but those are the connected experiences that we think getting more and more technology in the stores to deliver those experiences is going to be key.Stephanie:Yep. I think that also summarizes the next couple years, because this past year, year and a half or so, people were willing to try, try online ordering, try going through self-checkout, try all the new things. But then now I think we're in a phase where brands need to actually deliver. We were okay with hiccups as consumers for a while there, but now you go in and if self-checkout is not working, I know some stores I know I'm like, "I'm not even going to try it because every time that little light goes off, if I don't put my thing in the right area and I have to wait and whatever it may be." I remember the brands that it doesn't work with and I don't do it anymore, versus certain stores, I know every time I go in and out and it works perfectly.Stephanie:So I think now is the time when brands have to deliver and figure out, "How do we actually deliver that experience to them because they've been willing to be in beta for a little while now, and now we're popping out of that and we're ready for just like a good experience."David:Agree, agree. And to deliver that, if you think about where retail technology had been, anybody that's been in and around retail technology understands that the way we deploy technology in a retail store is antiquated, fairly antiquated. And the experiences that you described are ones that would say, "I have to have modern capabilities. I can't afford to rip and replace everything." And we're taking this run the store approach where we want to deliver outcomes to you. So as a retailer, we want to deliver all those outcomes that you just described. And the more technology you deploy into the store, as you said, the more it has to be available and working. And that sounds basic, but it it's not as basic as you would think. It's not as common sense as you think across the piece.David:Because I can't put a paper sign or a bag over a kiosk and say, "Hey, this isn't available," it has to be available because that's the way that we're interacting and transacting. And so when I look at that, I think we're investing to deliver at scale all the technology in the store. So think about like the dial tone where it just works. The ability for a consumer to come into your store, identify themselves, stand an item, get a total basket, or start a transaction online and finish it in the store, tender it, take payment. That's what we want to deliver to the store as an outcome, as a service. And then the store then, or the retailer brand can focus on, "How do I differentiate my brand? What experiences can I create? Can I create a store within a store or venues within my store? Or what am I trying to do?"David:Because that's really where the store will start to compete. The base technology is not where the store is going to compete, the technology has to be a foundation for creation of new experiences that will be enabled by technology, and a lot of it, we don't what will it be? I don't know. Most of them are likely to be consumer led technologies as they're bringing their own tech into the store, and we have to learn how to deal with it. That's what we're focused on, is getting down to a foundational level, providing that modern architecture without a rip and replace building the bridge, and allowing them to be cloud ready, cloud enabled to take advantage of all the cool things that are happening and all the investment that's going into all these interesting applications that are all consumer facing or social shopping or whatever you want to call it.Stephanie:Yep. That's, to me, the life cycle of technology, when it starts to work is when it's seamless behind the scenes, that's when you know you've made it to then start building on top of it. You don't even notice it's there. What do you see retail experiences looking like going forward to actually have an experience there? what are you seeing brands doing right now that's really cool? What should that look like?David:Yeah. Think about the experience, think about an online shopping experience overall and why you like it. I will say online shopping is horrible, online buying is a good experience. Shopping online, I have to know what I'm looking for, I don't get to see the selection. Maybe I know a little too much about how the content gets served up to me, but I'm not seeing the full selection or assortment I made. There may be something I like that they don't think I like. So there's all these things that happen. But why you think online buying is such a good experience is because you know who I am. I walk in, "walk in" to your store, and I say, "I'm David Wilkinson. I am here."David:Also, I'll give you permission to see everything I bought, and then you have the ability to say, "Oh, based on everything you bought, these are other things you might like," and serve all that, a package it in a way that makes it a good experience, put it in a cart, and then I also have given you a form of payment that I've told you that you can keep and use for anything that I shop in your store for digitally. And then I transact and then you deliver it to my home frictionlessly. Now, take that and say, "How do you create a great shopping experience?" Take a lot of those attributes of online buying and then physical as you described.David:Let me grab the avocado and make sure it's just soft enough but not too soft, let me thump my watermelon, let me look at the meat, let me look at the flowers. Let me take in the full cereal aisle to see what's going on. I love chocolate, but I don't know if I want milk or dark, but I want to experience that in the store, but allow me to see... If I put a box of Rice Krispies in my shopping cart you might ask me, "Do you want marshmallows?" Because maybe you want rice crispy treats, as a cross sell up. So, deliver that to me dynamically in the aisle on a mobile app.David:You've got my store payment form. I've got all these scanning items in my cart, real-time building that basket real time, and then allowing me to pick up some things that I had you pre-picked for me, that I ordered online, or I may just do pervasive checkout where I'm using computer vision RFID or some other form of sensory fusion to create a basket that always knows what I bought. So the notion of creating that online experience, but with all the goodness of what you could create as a brick and mortar retailer in the store and removing that friction is what the experience of the future looks like. We're not that far from that. That's not a, "Oh my gosh, that's a 10-year vision." We could deliver that tomorrow. It's a matter of breaking down some of the traditional thinking and some of the traditional barriers that occur within retail technology today and then getting the consumer engagement that would drive that.David:So that's the way I see the experience of the future, is a nice blend of all the convenience of online with the greatness of an experience in a store.Stephanie:Yeah. I love that. I think that's also why it's important to take a step back from your industry and look around at like what other tech companies are possibly doing and seeing how other things are being created and being experienced, because I think when you're thinking, this is what the store is, and here's my capabilities, it's hard to think outside the box. Whereas just when you were talking, I'm like, "Wow, how cool would it be to... " People go there to experience things, they go shopping to experience things, and maybe people still want to see shelves, but do you actually need a shelf? Can it be a virtual shelf? Can it be a mix of AR or VR where you just look and you can see all the new brands popping up, you can still feel like you're experiencing it.Stephanie:And then you just tap a bunch and you can have a little bit of both while also the productivity of like your car getting filled on the back end behind the scenes and you're ready to go, because you might not need to see the different types of bone broth on the shelf, but you won't actually see them, but you don't need to be collecting them yourself. And I think yeah, always thinking outside your industry is a way to start feeling that out and seeing new innovations and then rethinking the entire way that retail operates right now.David:Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think it's a lot fun. And you think about those experiences that you have to create and the state of the labor market, it requires more labor in the stores to deliver a lot of those experiences. And we're in a labor crisis where labor rates are going up, unemployment was at a low, but now it's hard to read the unemployment stats because it's more of a willingness or want to work at this point and more labor hours required in the store. I think technology will be the key in getting some of that back. I love the AR, VR. Allow me to build a list outside of the store, whether I'm going to buy clothing, go to a convenience store or to a grocery store.David:You could have a list and shop through your mobile device in the store and it points out where you go and it could point out other like items. There are so many fun things that we're going to be able to unlock with technology and data and the consumer willingness to opt into that if you're creating value for them.Stephanie:Yeah. I sometimes also like to look at the startups who don't have barriers to enter the markets, the ones that can just start a little guide shop type of maybe grocery store or whatever it may be and they're like, "I'm going to implement this store in like a tech-first approach. And it's going to be small, but it's going to be like this." Do you see anything like that right now where you're like, "Whoa, these companies are doing things in a very different way and it could either fail or be really cool"? And you don't have to name names if you don't want to.David:Yeah, we're seeing it on both. We do obviously a lot of research around what's happening on the tech side of retail, and I'll collage together a couple of sources and I'll tell you that there's $100 billion of investment going into retail tech startup is proclaimed to be retail tech startup. Forget about anything that might be on the periphery of that around could be any AI or ML or inventory. It could be some other things. So there's a lot of money and there's a lot of really interesting things happening. Yes, we're seeing that anywhere from retrofitting in-store lighting to create a platform for AI where you can do camera and tracking and you can do facial recognition or gait recognition, store tracking and close the loop with a point of sale system.David:Really interesting things happening there. On the other side, there are a lot of startup retailers. If you and I just sat in a room and brainstorm and said, what do we want to build as a store? We wouldn't be forced to this paradigm of what a convenience store or especially specialty retail store or a grocery store look like today. Why do I need a fixed point of sale? Why do I need these other things? And so we're working with a small startup out of South Carolina that's creating this concept of drive up grocery. They're looking around watching the pandemic, fast food and quick service restaurants do a great job, buy online, pickup in store. No inside shopping. And so we're helping them with the tech. We're going to run all the tech for these stores where they effectively have a dark store that they either order on an app or they drive up and you order on a tablet and they have to pick it quickly, so they have to know inventory.David:So I look at these things and it's fun to watch. They have no barriers, they have no paradigm that they're trying to break. They're just charging forward with a need in the market and how they're going to approach it. So, yeah, we see a lot of that. We see a lot of that around computer vision, we see it on the tech side, we see a lot of that around what's happening with a AI and ML. We're starting to see a little bit more of that around payments and alternative payments with things like crypto. So there's just a lot of interesting things that we see happening.Stephanie:I would think the one misconception a lot of people have too is that retail is dying or dead. And a lot of influential people have said that, and maybe they're retracting that statement now, but what I think is cool to watch is the type of retailers that are opening up. You see a lot of discounters opening up right now way more than maybe in the past, which is an interesting trend. And then you see these very luxury, maybe not too luxury, but B2C brands also only focusing on what experience do you get by coming here? So what do you think around those two types of industries opening up more retail locations this year than before?David:We serve those discounters all around the world and that's not just the US trend, we see that happening in all parts of the world. And I think convenience growth is also... I just this moved to convenience, smaller footprint is a big trend, and I really think it's about that last mile and accessibility. And so, all the discounters will tell you their growth numbers are off the charts. The way I think about that is they have a critical need for data because they have to understand, they're not obviously carrying a full assortment in that store, so they have to understand their demographics. They have to understand that past purchase history of that municipality or wherever they're located. And they have to have probably technology solutions to deploy potentially the order in the store.David:So I think there's a good blend there as the retailers are going to find the discounters that they're really all about location and proximity to their customer base and serving a need that people want either in between a big grocery shop or going to the big box retailer, the ability to just do quick top-up trips for certain items, I think is where they're going to make their names. And I think that they're seeing a tremendous success as evidenced by their growth and the industry. The luxury brands are interesting, or even maybe not the luxury brands, but you see other in a lot of sporting and fat sporting fashion, and other things where you have the home fitness craze or the virtual fitness craze is taking hold, but so many of those things are experiential again.David:So instead of a story, you think about just creating an experience center that allows you... We saw that, Apple started that with their Apple stores, they were very experiential, Tesla had done something very similar, no big surprise, the same person helped design and develop those two stores. But when do we think about that, if you look at what Kate Hudson did with her brand and partnering. So there a lot of interesting things that are happening around creating experiences around retail at those higher end, or call it more luxury brand goods, it's a blend of, "Hey, I have this subscription content and a complimentary set of retail items that you have to somehow bring together."David:And that's a hard thing to do online. I think that's what we're seeing. I think you'll see more of those pop up. And I think we're seeing more of the traditional retail, the older school, especially retail, either collapse or consolidate, and you're seeing a lot of those newer experiential brands pop up. So I think it's a trend that will at least be here for the next three to five years.Stephanie:Yeah. I agree. I'd love to start seeing case studies around these people, they came into the store, their experience is golf store, whatever it may be, they played on in this camping set with their kids, and then it attributed to this many sales. That's what I'm hoping to see over these next couple of years. I think the experience is where it's at, but I also know a lot of people do, maybe even myself who would just go in and have a good time and be all right, see you next week. And so it'll be interesting to dig into that data eventually and see, is the ROI there of having a full-on experiential store or is it more from a branding perspective or how do you even view that from a financial person?David:I think you said it, well, you have to be purposeful in how you do that. You can't just say, "I'm going to pop-up a traditional retail model, and it's going to be experiential." To your point, I think you have to set out to say, "I'm going to create this experiential store. It's got a different footprint, a different look and feel, a different set of technology capabilities." Because you may or may not be catering to the client that's going to buy online. If you look at a clothing store like Bonobos, who has a showroom store or showroom store, you don't buy anything. There you go in and you try things on for fit, feel, you can touch and feel everything. They have one of everything and they have a bunch of different sizes.David:And then when you go to order, all they're doing is ordering online and then they've got your account and you can order online. So I think that's a good example of somebody that has done a great job of creating an experience. And then that also solves the returns problem on the flip side of the econ equation.Stephanie:The other thing that I wanted to talk about with loyalty programs, because I think you've talked about this in the past and I know a lot of companies always try it, and I can think about the ones that actually, I remember that worked well for me, Nordstrom Rack is one of them, I think TJX one's sometimes hard to find where my dollars are, but at least I know that they're there. And then other ones that just don't work well, certain grocery stores where I'm like, "Why do I keep putting my number in here? What am I getting from this?" So how do you think about loyalty programs? How should they be created and how will they work over the next couple of years?David:This is going to get back to data and the ability to do personalized shopping. Some of the research that we look at, and I'll look at things that are 50, 60, 70% of consumers are willing to provide data or willing to give data if they get value in return. I know that seems like a loose equation because value is different to your point from the eyes of the beholder, but I think it has to be a more personalized program like you said, if I'm just going to enter a phone number in and that's going to drive a discount off a price, that's just not going to be good enough anymore.Stephanie:What if it's not clear, if you're like, "I put my phone number in, did I get anything?" You're looking at the little register and you're like, "I don't see any discounts, what am I even building up to? I don't get it."David:Or offering you something after the fact like, "Hey, you made these three purchases, here's something off your next visit." I think there's going to be such a competitive marketplace for people creating personalized experiences. Now, think about social, if you're on the clothing side, like you're talking to those high end brands, the ability to plug into social networking and create a loyalty program that either would reward somebody for expanding their network or influencing your products or the ability to buy through social channels when you see I want input from people that I would view as either my peers or people like me, how do they like reading reviews, other things, information's at their fingertips.David:So I think that kind of information with your personal data, with social interaction is going to be key. But again, I think loyalty programs are going to come down to more of what we talked about earlier around the online experience, creating more of that online experience, where I give you permission to create an experience because I don't want the friction. I want you to know who I am, I want you to know what I like, I want you to be able to recommend things that, and I want the best deal at the time of purchase. And I want you to respect my loyalty to your brand in the long term, and then I want to reduce all the friction.David:So to me, that's bigger than a points program or enter your phone number, and I'm going to track your purchases and may or may not give you a discount. That's creating that 360 full view of your consumer and really truly understanding them.Stephanie:Yeah. And I think it's also, it's okay to interact with them more than you think if it's done in a way that's purposeful. I think that's the interesting thing is you see the brands that you don't ever hear from and you're like, "What am I even doing here?" And then you hear from the brands that just give you random offers that maybe never incentivize you to do something. And so I think there's a sweet spot where a lot of brands now are leaning into that the more, becoming a media company, having their own content, creating this all-encompassing experience and figuring out how to do that in a way that actually drives the results, will be the way of the future.Stephanie:But I think still brands are having a little bit of a struggle around trying to figure out like what that looks and what incentivizes people to want to act and interact with your content or your texts or whatever they need.David:Right. And like we said, in Asia, it's probably a little more ahead with some of that social commerce and the gamification of both social and product recommendations and loyalty. So some form of that will take hold here. I was trying to think of an example of who is doing it really well, nothing just pops into my head. So we'll skip that.Stephanie:We can skip that then. Yeah, no worries. For anyone who listens to the show, they know that I love to always try and talk about crypto when I can, for whoever is willing to do that with me. And so I wanted to hear from you since I know you guys are obviously the payments space and you're probably watching what's happening in that realm all the time, I want to hear your thoughts on how crypto is going to impact retail and specifically around payments.David:Yeah. I love to talk about crypto too, so I appreciate you bringing it up. I think that it's obviously a very hot trend, there's a lot of trending news happening around crypto. Some of them good, some of them bad, whether it's the hype that Elon Musk creates around things those Dogecoin or Bitcoin on Saturday Night Live, you can follow the trials and tribulations of that. When you get to the underpinnings of the applicability of that and the desire of people to participate in alternative payment form that has less, we'll call it less fees or less cost or more direct access, or feel they have more control, I think that's where we're seeing a lot of uptake in cryptocurrency.David:I just read some studies this morning that talked about cryptocurrency holders, 51% of crypto holders are very likely to use cryptocurrency at retail if they would accept it. So you think about, okay, how do we accept cryptocurrency in a retail environment? We did a demo pre-COVID, whatever, I think that would have been 2020 January at the National Retail Federation, their big show that they have in New York at the Javits Center every year, we actually had a cryptocurrency demo where we said, "We're going to help serve unbanked or underbanked cash economy. How do they participate in the digital economy?" But we had our cash acceptance, think about a self-checkout that has the ability to accept cash.David:We could take that cash. We partnered with some companies to convert that cash to crypto that would be then stored on a cloud wallet or a mobile wallet, generate a QR code, and then we shared it. It was a short demo line, and then we effectively go to the point of sale and purchase something with cash that we had just turned to crypto, scan a QR code at the point of sale, a very simple execution of a lot of elegant and complex things behind the scenes and new thinking. So I think we will see more and more crypto applications come up in retail. And for us as NCR, whether it's moving from cash, to still some checks, to credit cards, debit cards, tap to pay, Apple Pay, mobile wallets, crypto, we want and need to, based on what our mission is, to be able to serve your payment needs from cash to crypto.David:So we are absolutely investing in both partnerships and organic technology that is around crypto, we think again, whether it's payment or some other disintermediation using the underpinnings of what distributed ledger would bring to just ease of payment and security of payment, and again, value stream of payment. There is a there there, either work to do to define exactly what that means, and then consumer adoption is a bit of a wild card, which of those will take off.Stephanie:Yeah. But I think once again, it highlights when tech goes behind the scenes, there will be a place when we are transacting and we don't even know really what's behind the scenes and operating that. Even for now, thinking about Venmo, what actually goes behind the scenes to make all of that work, I think there will be a place when people go in and transact, and maybe it is utilizing crypto, but you don't really know how it's really working, you just know that it's fast and you don't pay fees on it, and it just happens, and it just works. And same thing around financing, these companies that you need to finance things, there'll be a much easier way to do it, whereas you can enter into it quickly and you can see your contract quickly and get out of it when you need to.Stephanie:And right now it feels like a lot of friction around that still, and especially for developing countries, like you said, who don't have banks to rely on or can't rely on them because it is a little bit volatile or whatever it may be. A ton of opportunity that I see disrupting and getting to a place where you don't even know what's behind the scenes powering essentially everything.David:I think you're right, there's a broader education that has to be done because crypto is not about nefarious criminal activities and I'm a money launder or in some illegal trade that I don't want my cash to be seen by the government. That's not what it is. There a lot of regulations, a lot of usage around KYC and other ways that are protecting those assets there, a lot of backing that's being done, you see things stablecoin. The volatility of the value is obviously a big myth, we joked about at the beginning, it's up and down, up and down. But getting asset back, tokens and stablecoins will start to create the ability to leverage distributed ledger in the way that it was meant to be, where the chain of custody is always known, the assets itself hold their own chain of custody.David:You remove all the intermediaries and all the middle people, clearing houses and other... It's going to free up the world of payment in some way that we'll see that more, call it a democratization of the payments infrastructure that I think will be interesting, that would be part of it.Stephanie:Yeah. I like watching it. And the only time I get a little hesitant is when I see entities creating their own coins or governments being like, "We're going to be issuing crypto however," it's backed against, I'll just make it up the US dollar or gold or whatever, our currency in this country. And that's where I'm like, "Oh, I feel like you're taking idea of decentralized and you're completely doing the wrong thing with it and it's turning back into a centralized function." And that's the only point that makes me hesitant, but also I know that maybe consumers would hear that it's backed by the US dollar and be like, "Oh, that one is a better bet." Whereas if you actually understand where this tech, even maybe people don't know who created it, but where it even started and the ideology behind it, is not to tie it to a centralized in it, but we will see.David:Like do that then you just recreate the payment system. Probably not worth it.Stephanie:No. All right. Well, let's shift over to the Lightning Round. The Lightning Round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, David?David:I am ready.Stephanie:All right. Hard one first, what one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?David:I think I'll call it ubiquity of buying online and picking up or delivery anywhere. And so solving, how do I get it to the home at a cost-effective way? How do I manage returns? Or how do I combine that experience of in-person and online? However we define that or whatever that looks is going to change the face of ecomm or commerce.Stephanie:Yup. If you had a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?David:Wow, It's going to be totally odd. If I had a podcast, it would be about fitness. And I love to do CrossFit, and so it'd be fitness podcast, and I'd have a CrossFit athlete like Travis Mayer or Mat Frazier or somebody on there.Stephanie:I like it. What are you secretly curious about?David:It's funny, it's not overly secret. I think about what the conversation we just had about cryptocurrency. I'm fascinated by cryptocurrency and the underlying applications of distributed ledger across everything from supply chain to the world of, call it finance or micro lending, or just the stock market. A physical stock certificate is no longer... In distributed ledger worlds, you no longer need a physical stock certificates. So I'm fascinated by that. So maybe more fascinated than secretly intrigued.Stephanie:Yeah. I love that. I always keep thinking about smart contracts and especially going through and buying a home and being like, "Why am I still trying to verify that no one from the 1920s or whatever owns this home, that's ridiculous. Why don't we just put this baby on Ethereum or Cardano and call the Dai." There's so many of this.David:The home knows it hasn't been owned.Stephanie:Yeah. It should know that we don't have, we don't need to ask and pay $3,300 in title insurance to make sure that no one else owns this title. That's crazy.David:It is. I agree with you. I agree with you. So I'm interested in how we unlock all that goodnessStephanie:Yeah. When you want to feel more joy, what do you do?David:I spend time with my wife and my daughter and our dog. So I just hang out with the fam.Stephanie:I like that. And then what one thing do you not understand today that you wish you did?David:Wow. That may be the same answer to what I'm intrigued with the cryptocurrency, but I'll go a different route. I don't understand why I can't hit a golf ball more straight, and I would love to understand that. I would love to understand that.Stephanie:I wish I could help you with that, but I just attempted mini-golf with my three-year-old the other day and it did not go well. And I was like, "I shouldn't be teaching you. I think you're doing better than me." So I hope you figure that out on your own.David:Yeah. I do too. I do too.Stephanie:The last one, what's up next on your reading list or on your podcast queue?David:It's funny I don't have it with me, but it is a book about, it's not a crypto book, but it is a distributed ledger of financial book. I don't remember the name of it, it's probably not overly interesting.Stephanie:Is it new?David:It is new. It's a 2020, 2021 book. Stephanie:Digital Finance: Security Tokens and Unlocking the Real Potential of Blockchain.David:That is it. That's sitting there waiting to read. And then it's funny, the other book that is next next on my list, and I'm old school so I have real books-David:a book called From Cotton Picker to Store Keeper. It's the story of the Brookshire's grocery company. So a Texas company at Tyler, Texas, but it's just a store. It's a family-run store that has a grocery chain that has survived and continues to thrive and grow. And so it's just an interesting read Stephanie:All right, David. Well, it's been really fun having you on the show. Thanks for sharing all your insights and hanging out with me for a bit. Where can people find out more about NCR retail and yourself?David:Yeah. I would just go to our website, ncr.com and you'll find about us. And then for me, I'm on the old school social media of LinkedIn. We do still a lot of posting through LinkedIn, it just works for us. So you'll see more thereStephanie:I'm on LinkedIn, it's not that old school. Cool. Well, thanks so much for coming on and joining us.David:Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

David Riley joins us on the BlueBay Insights podcast to share his thoughts on the months ahead.We asked David:Let’s take stock of the quarterWhat do you think will be the key issues and themes for the quarter ahead? You highlighted is another fiscal package out of Washington. Moving over to Europe - there seems to be some risk to the implementation of the EU Recovery Fund. What is going on?Any thoughts on the Archegos saga?

2 Samuel 23:8-39 As one surveys the annals of history, down through the corridors of time, one will find that history polluted and stained by war.  Bloodshed has left its indelible mark upon the human race, the horrors of battle recorded by those who never lived to tell their story in person.  If there’s one thing that history bears witness to, it’s this, war is not a thing to be desired!!  However, having said that, there is something about the environment of war that is able to accomplish something that a pre-war environment simply cannot do.  Brothers and Sisters, it is in the climate of war where heroes are born!!  A pre-war generation of peace is known by its cowards, and the generation of war, by its heroes!  This sermon is a heart cry for men to rise up in this critical hour and to give themselves to the fight!!  A Church in retreat will never do.  Is there one who would say with the shepherd boy David “Let no man's heart fail because of him; thy servant will go and fight with this Philistine” (1 Sam. 17:32)?  May the Lord see fit to do such a work of restoration in our day.

Spencer is the owner of Aerodrone Solutions. Introduction: Spencer started Aerodrone early in COVID. He’d been in military, then went to college, found drones and did military contracting in Middle East. Because that work was touch-and-go, when he returned from Afghanistan in April and in May, he decided to start his own company. David: What I want to know first is--are there any similarities to flying drones in Afghanistan to flying your DJI drones? Spencer says it's similar in how the camera works. The DJI is more simplified but flying is different since he was flying fixed wing UAVs for the military. David: You were one of the first people to sign up for D$1K—ready to get after it—which is a big reason why you're successful. Obviously, you were in drones in the military, but from a civilian standpoint, how did that process start for you? Spencer signed up for the Part 107, started it, did five minutes of it and didn't touch it again for two years. His friend Gail is a commercial pilot in Ocala who had the idea of starting something casually. Because of the uncertainty of the virus, Spencer was real nervous—but other than drones, what could he do? So he went with what he liked, and started up the drone idea. Spencer says, “I loved the idea of having my own company and putting into it and getting something else. It's super rewarding.” Spencer is a local and has a lot friends who are real estate agents, so he thought it would be really easy. For two months, he did no business, but all of a sudden the flood gates opened and he was overwhelmed with work. David: Take us through those two months, what did you do to get the first client? At first, he didn’t know where to get contacts. He found good ideas from Facebook pages of guys that were starting out. He went to Zillow, found 300 of the top agents in the area and sent out an email, getting not one response. He then started doing direct messaging on Facebook, Instagram (a little on LinkedIn)—letting people know what he does that makes him stand out more. That's when it started clicking with people, Spencer says, mostly because the email was a template and the messages were more personalized. David: Things picked up for you when you started doing more direct reach out. What was your first client? Was it paid? How much did you charge for that? Spencer’s first client was someone he knew, who was a pretty good realtor in his area. She said she’d called three other people and Spencer was the first one to pick up. “What’s huge is answering all your phone calls and also being available. Agents have listings that need to get on the market ASAP. They call and you need to be there soon.” Spencer’s first gig was paid but he gave her a discount for the drone service and a free 3D tour of everything.  Normally that would have been around $299 or $295. Spencer gave it to her for $195, which also included full interior/exterior HDR bracketed photos and drone photography. David: After your first job, where did it go from there? From there, Spencer says, it went word of mouth to a couple of different realtors and some other friends that were slowly coming out of the woodwork. He had a photographer reach out that does shoots and mermaid portraits for kids. “I had no other option because I'm engaged, I have family, I just want to be home. I knew I had to make this work and that's why I've been so hungry for it.” Spencer continued to go on Facebook, asking if realtors in the neighborhood had needs and getting a few potential contacts from that. He’s also gone to happy hours for realtors, showing up with flyers. He says it’s important to market yourself, in the most budget friendly way to do it. Spencer has continued to get random requests other than real estate, which keeps it interesting. He says that specializing in something is good. It’s important to get in the door and make some money. David: You started charging for these jobs and making some money. When did you break $1K for a month? It took two months...in July he hit $1K. He's still growing. Spencer says that growing was like a domino effect because one person tells another person. He just needed to keep being professional, instead of stressing out over a job that should take two hours and it taking 20 hours. David: Let’s say someone is listening to this and says ‘I want to do my own thing’ or ‘It sounds incredible to fly drones on the side’. They say, ‘Spencer, I heard you on the podcast, you sound like you’re a credible person and you know what you're doing. What should I do? Where should I start? What should I learn?' Spencer says that he would tell them first to get their Part 107. “Do the course that Drone Launch offers. It has everything you need for a foundation. Get someone who knows SEO. If you're doing it on the side, it's going to be different managing your time, but be patient. As long as you're professional, produce a good product and chip away at it, you’ll eventually get some good business out of it.” David: Where do you see things going for you moving forward? Do you want to stay in real estate? Are you hoping to branch out into other areas? Spencer wants to do some roof inspections. Being in Florida, they get a lot of hurricanes. He also wants to focus on real estate because he enjoys it. His goal is seven listings a week, which he says is pretty doable in the future. Connect with Spencer: Facebook: Aerodrone Solutions Instagram: @aerodronesolutionsllc Have a Drone Business? Want to be Interviewed for Season 3? Complete this questionnaire: Drone to 1K Business Owner Application Training from Drone Launch Academy Part 107 Exam Prep Course ($50 off) Aerial Photo Pro Course ($50 off) Aerial Video A to Z Course ($100 off) Aerial Roof Inspection Pro Course ($100 off) Drones 101 Course ($20 off) Other Places to Listen iTunes Stitcher Google Play Spotify TuneIn  

Liam is a Photographer/Videographer and Owner with Bentley Studios Introduction: Liam specializes in photography and video, mostly in the wedding industry, averaging about 40 weddings a year, and incorporating the drone. He also takes photos of the transitions of projects for roofing companies. David: Let's go back, let us know how your business started from the beginning... Liam has been an entrepreneur since he was 15. He started in the iPhone repair business, doing that for three years, repairing over 300 iPhones and saving $10,000 to fund his photography business. He got his first camera was when he was 13. He became the school photographer in High School, when a teacher asked if he would have any interest in filming her wedding.  At 16, Liam sweated through five shirts filming his first wedding. He also realized he loved being a part of someone’s special day, giving them their video or photos and seeing them tear up. After that, he started doing social media videos. He’d call local businesses and say, “I'm starting a business and want to try to get into social media. I see you guys are lacking in that area and I would love to help.” He got a lot of practice doing video production this way. David: What kind of reception did you get when you'd reach out? Some turned Liam down, saying they had their own thing, or they didn’t want to dabble in that. Some said they appreciated that he wanted to do it for free and would give him the opportunity to do so. Liam valued that as a networking opportunity. He got turned down a lot and found out he’d get a better attitude and could find a way to not offend anyone and help people out. David: How did the transition happen from dabbling with free stuff and reaching out to businesses to progressing into your first paying client? Toward the end of high school, Liam did a lot of senior photos which led to more paying opportunities. Every once in a while, he’d try to reach out and get opportunities to film a wedding. As he started to have more work to show people, he started to get booked more. Liam owes a lot of his success to word of mouth. He loves to go out and talk to people and create those friendships. David: When did you start first dabbling in drones? Around the end of his senior year, Liam bought a Phantom 4pro and fell in love with it. At that time, not many local people had any drones, so there was a lot of good opportunity in front of him. David: A lot of people get a drone, then want to know how to start getting clients and paying gigs. So, did your free work just turn into paying gigs or did you have a strategy to start making money? Liam had a gradual increase since he’d started out pretty cheap. Over time, as he had more experience, and his portfolio got larger, he gradually increased his prices because of his experience and equipment. Also, people would see his work on Instagram and message him. Liam says, “It was like a large spider web that expanded, but it was a lot of networking that led to those opportunities.” David: What do you do for your social media? Do you have a system, every time you shoot something, you put it on Instagram or Facebook? Liam has a system. After every shoot, Liam always puts a nice grid on Instagram. He says the first thing people look at when they go onto your page is your grid. The “grid” is some type of theme on your whole feed. Liam says if people see your page and it’s too eclectic, they will bypass it. David: What were you charging for a wedding when you first started out? Liam would charge $500 for a wedding, giving clients an 8-15 min highlight video. He wanted the experience and was young at the time so to make $500 on a Saturday was great. Now, his videos showcase the whole day and the client has total control over what’s in the video. The average price for that is $3000. For photos, he charges an hourly rate of $300 and then there's no minimum or maximum on the hours. An entire wedding runs about $4500-$5000. David: When did you start breaking out into other areas? At the end of high school, Liam got more into the drone. Where he lives—in Youngstown, OH—there are tons of realtors. He’d see on social media that a lot of them were just using their iPhone to take photos, so he offered to do houses for free, saying he wanted to learn. At that time, he was trying to incorporate more of the drone to become the go-to drone pilot in the area. That’s when he fell in love with the drone. Liam still has seven realtors that he messaged on Instagram when in High School that he still does houses for. After he did one house for free, he’d offer to sit down and see what kind of price they wanted to pay. Typically, he’d charge $250 for a full photography package and using the drone would be another $100 on top of that. David: How much of your business is with real estate agents? It sounds like you might be more focused on weddings. Liam is more focused on the weddings, which is where the money is. He has four employees, so he'll double book weekends. He says people LOVE drones at weddings—they think it’s the coolest thing. He also does a decent number of aerial photos for roofing companies. And, sometimes, walkthrough real estate tours for $150. Weddings have led to different opportunities, including meeting an owner of a roofing company locally that specializes in schools and large commercial properties. He asked Liam to film the progress of projects to display to potential clients. Liam goes out once every two weeks to take about 15-20 photos and a 360-degree video of the building. A typical roofing project on a commercial property is 8-10 weeks. He charges a flat rate of $300 per shoot which includes video editing. At the end, he puts together a 1-2 minute video of a time lapse of the whole project. David: When you started with that one roofing company, did you see what they wanted and you reached out to other roofing companies, or how did that work? These companies don't like anyone to share their drone stuff but they will share it with other roofing companies or partners. Liam has gotten contacted from partners or other connections within the contracting industry of his first roofing client. David: Let’s look at a snapshot of your week. How many drone or video productions jobs, including weddings, would you say you're going out to each week? The week prior to the interview, Liam had three drone shoots for the roofing company and then two promotional videos for local businesses—which are “about me” stories that they can put on social media or their website. With Covid preventing people from going to their businesses now, a lot of them want to provide opportunities for people to watch what they offer online. He also had a wedding on Saturday. His average week is about 5-6 jobs.   David: Can you let us know your average revenue in a great month and a slow month? In summer, Liam averages between four and five weddings a month, then usually three projects during the week. In a good month, he averages $10-12,000. In a slow month in the winter, he can make $3000-$5000. David: What advice do you have for me on how to get started and get and get going? What would you say? Liam says the Mavic Mini is a great starting point...mess around with it for a while. Then, after some time, he says to jump up to Mavic Air. Go take some photos and get experience to feel comfortable. Liam also watched a ton of YouTube tutorials on how to get good drone footage. David: When someone then says, “I’m ready to get my first client. How do I do that?” What would you say? Liam says social media is a great platform to use, since everyone's on it. Jump in with the realtors. “They don't pay very well, but starting out, you're not going to make very much anywhere.” Liam says think that the more jobs you get under your belt, the better you look. Then start to DM a bunch of real estate agents. They love their social media stuff. Have a good grid that showcases what you do. When the agents click on your profile, you want them to see you have cool stuff and it's organized. Resources Website: www.bentleystudiosusa.com Instagram: @bentley.studios or @liambentley_15

Fred owns and operates Nashua Video Tours, a real estate video and photography company. David: ”Tell us about your company.” Fred has been doing this for 15 years, starting with putting video online. Because the internet didn't support video very well, realtors didn't have computers, or didn't know what the internet was—it didn’t work out too well. When he was just about to quit, the real estate market tanked and people needed ways to sell properties. At that point, flash became the de facto way of delivering video but there were three or four different types of platforms and none of them were compatible with each other. When broadband came into play and the internet became predominant, Fred realized he could do it. Fred had started doing realtor websites. He jokes, “I've never wanted to be in this world, I just fell into it and I haven't been able to climb out yet.” He says back then, you’d buy a template so websites all looked exactly the same—nothing stood out. What became popular were 360-degree tours that were not well put together; that was when Fred thought that a video walk-through of the house made sense because then you could see the layout and the flow. “I just had this bright idea that it would be a way to do something different—but nobody was doing it because they couldn't. I really got started out of frustration trying to differentiate these people.” David: “Let’s start from when the internet was working, you could put video on the internet, and you had a drone. How did using a drone change things for you— if it did?” Fred says he’d been in the video real estate video space by himself for years but as more people got into it, he needed to differentiate himself again. Back then, you could fly drone for commercial purposes with no licensing, and everything was still very fuzzy. For Fred, the real estate market has been an odd place to be. Some realtors think they can get their nephew to buy a drone and let him take pictures, or they don't see that you need to have a license. We  know there’s a difference between having a drone and pushing a button to take a picture or video—and being a photographer with a drone. “If you don't know how to use your camera, you're not a photographer, you don't have the right eye or the right equipment and you don't know how to do it, so it's not going to look very good. The drone is the least important part of the equation.” Fred says it’s nice to show how a property sits on a big piece of land, but flying around, looking at the roof and gutters, then left and right and up and down for three minutes isn’t all it’s about. A simple top down picture of the roof of a ranch with an ugly front yard and an ugly backyard with dead grass is horrible; it’s more of a detriment than a help. If you're trying to promote a real property, you don't want to show the crap in the neighbor's yard or graffiti on the driveway or bad shingles. Fred advises that you should be truthful, but also show people the highlights. They'll realize that the roof needs replacing or that there's a highway back there, but you don't want to promote that right up front. When Fred shoots a house he does the video, interior, exterior stills, floor plans, all of it—he has about five different cameras for different things, including a camera he can stick out of the top of his car to show the neighborhood—and, of courses, he has a drone. He doesn’t use all of those for every property but chooses what he thinks makes sense. Driving through the neighborhood, for example, his goal is to show whether it’s an older or newer neighborhood, if houses are setback from the street or are right on the street with the trees. His goal is to present the property in the best light. “I treat the drone as just another tool. When I get to a property, I either choose to use it or I don't. It's my choice. I don't want someone saying I need to.” Also, Fred sees a lot of video from new drone pilots that’s too high because the pilot is thinking about max altitude when it’s more important to think about what they’re looking at. Sometimes, Fred doesn’t even know what he’s looking at. David: “The thing people struggle a lot with is wanting to get into this—whether it's real estate marketing, promo videos or photography—but don't really have good methods or know how to get a first client. What advice would you give someone? How would you go about starting fresh?” Fred teamed up with a friend who is a realtor and did all of his first stuff for free. He was able to practice, but also able to get stuff out there for other people to see. “What I did then, I still do now. I make it very easy for someone to find me. It's not a secret. I put my name, phone number, and website at the end of every video. I've done a lot of these and I've never had anybody tell me to take my name off. The biggest thing is if nobody knows how to find you, how are they going to know how to find you?” Fred says the real estate business is a lot of repeat business. He doesn’t even want new business because his regular customers keep him really busy. He says clients want to use you for everything—for every listing. The smart realtors understand you have to spend money to make money but they’re busy too; they don't want to call a photographer, then a videographer, then a drone guy, then a floor plan guy. They call Fred and he goes to house, spends 2-3 hours at the property and does all of it. David: What do you typically charge for a job when you do everything—photos, some video, and some drone. What does your full package include? What's a typical price you would charge for that?” For under 4,000 ft2 and just video, he charges $300-$400. For a full package with drone, floor plans, etc, Fred charges $800. He says that realtors want to pay $300-$500 but if you're spending the same amount of time, it’s not worth it to not make enough money. Fred sees people either charging too much and complaining because they're only shooting one house a month or charging too little that are going to burn out. When someone calls him, Fred tells them to look at his YouTube channel, plug in their house to any video, and that's what theirs will look like. It all doesn't take very long, and you don’t have people wanting to change stuff because expectations are set at the beginning. He does charge $100 if someone wants to change anything. “What I give my clients is very fast turnaround at a fair price. What people don't understand about realtors is they care that you're accessible and affordable (which doesn't mean cheap) and that you turn it around fast and are dependable. That's all that matters.” Fred says that the most valuable part of the video is getting the listing. It's not about selling the house, the house will sell by itself. It's about getting the listing. If you're a listing agent, you're competing with two or three other brokers. The reality is if you're out there at a listing presentation with a seller and you're offering video and the other two aren't, then you have an advantage. Not many use video. Sellers want it...buyers love it. He says it’s funny cause you think if everybody wanted it, more people would do it. But because it's so difficult to do, a lot of people stay away from it because they can't figure out how to price it. It’s really all about workflow—shooting as best you can to get what you need, shooting it so your editing time is minimal, and having the right equipment so you can process it quickly and get it out the door. David: “I've heard from other people that are also really successful that they focused on knowing one thing and how to repeat it easily. They can set a reasonable price and then scale it. It's easy for them to knock out projects because they know exactly what to do. Would you agree with that?” What Fred is seeing now with new people getting into the real estate video space is they think it's boring. They’re neglecting to create video for the intended viewer—a potential buyer or a seller who's going to be using that for their house. According to Fred, people want to see the layout and flow of the house. “I'm a creative person who would love to do something different, but at the end of the day, this is what they want and this is why they keep buying what I’m selling. My videos are all 3-7 minutes long and people are commenting on different things that they're seeing so you know they're watching the whole thing.” David: “What’s your main piece of parting wisdom to someone new to the drone space?” Fred says you've got to sell something people want, not what YOU want. You have to put your feelings aside. Give your customer what they want, and they’ll be willing to pay you for it. He says you really have to understand the intended demographic that you're shooting for. If you're filming a $2 million house, you don’t make it look like a music video. That's not what people want to see or hear. Real estate video is boring to everyone except the person that's wanting to buy the house. That's the reality. People have this false idea that it has to be a minute and a half or nobody's going to watch the video, so they try to take this great big house and shorten it to fit it in 1:30’. That's not gonna work. Connect with Fred: Website: Nashua Video Tours Facebook: @nashuavideotours YouTube: @nashuavideotours Have a Drone Business? Want to be Interviewed for Season 3? Complete this questionnaire: Drone to 1K Business Owner Application Training from Drone Launch Academy Part 107 Exam Prep Course ($50 off) Aerial Photo Pro Course ($50 off) Aerial Video A to Z Course ($100 off) Aerial Roof Inspection Pro Course ($100 off) Drones 101 Course ($20 off) Other Places to Listen iTunes Stitcher Google Play Spotify TuneIn

Alex is drone photographer and videographer. He is also the author of two of our Drone Launch Academy courses—Aerial Video A to Z and Aerial Photo Pro. David: “Let’s start with you giving us your background.” Alex already had a videography service. When he’d show up to film a corporate event, he said, it nagged at him that he needed to get a drone and a license to fly it. “I could see how much it helped to diversify between camera work and photography,” he said, “it’s easier to sell and rates go up way, way more if I'm adding photography and drones to the package.” Alex’s first drone was a Phantom 3 standard which hooked him. Although at first like a toy, he came to realize it wasn’t as easy as it looked. Once Alex upgraded to the Mavic pro, he felt it really started to work for him. David: “You mentioned you’d worked in film in Hollywood—tell us about that.” Alex worked on short films and for ESPN, Discovery Health and HGTV, as a camera operator. When he moved back to Phoenix and began doing corporate work, he says that because standards were lower and the budgets higher, he felt more in control of the work. He had creative freedom and client appreciation. From learning so much so fast in LA, which was a sink or swim environment, Phoenix’s high-stress environment felt like a cake walk—which helped him stand out. David: “That’s probably about the time you and I met right? I stumbled across one of your YouTube videos when I was developing the Part 107 course. I took it, bought all the equipment that you had, filmed everything and asked if I could pay you to edit it.” “You were my only fan up to that point. I’d filmed a couple of times with someone else’s Inspire, but I didn't own a drone yet.” After purchasing Alex’s course for $20, David and Alex started making plans to create a cinematography course. Quite suddenly, Alex found out he had a brain tumor and had to have surgery. Six months later, Alex and David re-convened to begin creating the course. Alex began focusing for 30 minutes and would have to sleep 12 hours; a week later, he could do an hour, a week later he could do 1 ½ hrs, etc. They put out that one course, got great feedback and ultimately scrapped and re-did it. David: “Let’s talk a little about your actual drone business. During this time, you’re still editing and flying drones for people. You have experience doing a lot of drone photography for clients. How did you get your first corporate video clients? Alex says it was such a powerful upsell right away to say he could film corporate events from the sky. He knew better angles and how to change settings to make it way more cinematic and because of that, he stood out. A two-day conference cost $2,500 to provide an edited a 4-minute compilation and photos. Alex went to popular conference places in Scottsdale and Phoenix and would film a ton of footage in all those places. So, prospects were confident he knew about drone filming, so he got hired for that even if he didn’t get hired for a full event. He charged $200/hour, which Alex says was easy to do to scare off the value-focused people who want to pay $50/hour, then ask for more time and revisions. Alex says, “When dealing with bigger clients and companies, what they’re mainly concerned about is quality—they want to make sure they get it right and don't look silly in their video. Also, when you quote a higher rate, they think you must be really serious and legitimate.” David: “Did they ask to see a demo reel? How else did you justify charging that much?" Once Alex got his Maverick Pro, he got a huge reel together by going around town filming. He also knew about SEO because he ranked number one in his city by making multiple smaller videos that were specific to what people were searching for.  And, Alex says, “When they then go to hire a guy to film there, I'm the one with my name in the title, so they're immediately going to click on it. That simple step, and I’m already halfway there.” David: “So your marketing strategy, was to go out, have fun, shoot as much stuff as you can, make it really good and put it on YouTube/Instagram? Or did you knock door to door asking people to pay you to film video? What are your recommendations to a new businessperson about how to start marketing?” Alex says when he started filming different parts of the city and putting it on Vimeo and YouTube, some got used, some didn't. He’d filmed Scottsdale in a lot of different conditions—the waterfront, a thunderhead, during a sunset, sunrise or rainbow, which made him stand out. When he started compiling them, the reel just got better and better. Alex says, “That footage doesn't have many views, yet I’ve been contacted by people who were going to hire a drone operator, but since I already had the footage, they wanted to buy it. It's EASY for them to pay you $150-300 because you have exactly what they want. Sometimes, also, they need help with other things.” Another thing he became aware of was that people who are moving to town would look at his videos, giving him more views and his footage rose in search results. David: “Do you want to give a quick rundown on the courses that you have with us--what they are about and what people learn in each one?” Alex agrees to talk about the courses and the timing is right because he added business and marketing sections which are important for those starting a drone business. Aerial Photo Pro is an intro to beginner to expert course on how to get great photos with your drone. It’s hop-on/off the bus whenever you want...you won’t learn it all and make an award-winning photo in one day. It goes into the things he is doing differently with simple stuff. It teaches how to take a raw photo, load it into Adobe Lightroom, and use brushes to make things look more “soft and fluffy” or really sharp. Alex says, “From a business perspective, I’ll always take a photography job. It's almost leisure, I still make $200 an hour and I can do 20 photos quickly. Whether for a construction site, a real estate developer or agent, it’s relaxing because you have so many chances to get the same thing.” Aerial Video A to Z helps people understand filming. Alex says video people make many mistakes in many places across too many things—and there’s a lot of bad advice out there. With video, there are many who don’t understands what they're filming so there's confusion—it’s like putting all this data through a teeny little straw and then taking a sliver out of the back end. This course is very in-depth and if you follow the steps in it, you can get very very good. You just have to be willing to go out, practice and go back and forth. “Once you do nail it, you feel like Steven Spielberg and you send it to everybody. You send these teeny little :30 clips to your mom and she's so proud of you. It's the best feeling ever.” Connect with Alex: Email: alex@dronelaunchacademy.com Have a Drone Business? Want to be Interviewed for Season 3? Complete this questionnaire: Drone to 1K Business Owner Application Training from Drone Launch Academy Part 107 Exam Prep Course ($50 off) Aerial Photo Pro Course ($50 off) Aerial Video A to Z Course ($100 off) Aerial Roof Inspection Pro Course ($100 off) Drones 101 Course ($20 off) Other Places to Listen iTunes Stitcher Google Play Spotify

No boys allowed, although gender is a construct. It's an all-women special! Ang Ferraguto (https://twitter.com/MagnaFarta) is joined by Emma Stefansky (https://twitter.com/stefabsky) , Ashleigh Heaton (https://twitter.com/ashleighdearest) , and Preeti Chhibber (https://twitter.com/runwithskizzers) . This PodSkwad is NOT here to complain about Star Wars, but to talk about this women-powered DC movie full of hammers and hair ties, fun guns and fun outfits, and women helping women by kicking ass. How can you tell this was made by a woman? And which psychopaths are Griffin and David? #Let men have nipples. This episode is sponsored by: TalkSpace (https://www.talkspace.com/) Code: CHECK Hims (https://www.forhims.com/blank) Brooklinen (https://www.brooklinen.com/) CODE: CHECK

FULL EPISODE EPISODE SUMMARY Conversation with Dr. Mardi Steere about Mission, Leadership, Emergency Medicine and Ebenezer Moments from her 8+ years at Kijabe Hospital. EPISODE NOTES David - So today, I'm talking with Mardi Steere. This is a conversation that I don't want to have. It's about leaving about memories, and about Kijabe.And I don't want to have it because I don't want you guys ever to leave. That is the hardest part of life in Kijabe. But amazing people come and amazing people go and you're gonna do amazing things and stay in touch. First, why don't you give the introduction you gave at the medical team the other day. Mardi - So this is bittersweet for me as well. We came to Kijabe in 2011 and planned to stay for two years and here we are eight and a half years later, taking our leave. And in some ways, it's inevitable. You can't stay in a place forever. It's been a real opportunity for me to reflect. David - Let me pause you real quick there. So when you first came, who is we? And then what did you come to do? Mardi - In 2011, I was a young pediatric emergency physician with an engineering husband looking for a place where we felt like God had said "To whom much is given, much is required," and we knew our next step was to go in somewhere with the gifts and the passions and the exposure and education that we've been given. And so I came as a Pediatrician, and the hospital hadn't had a long-term pediatrician in quite a while. Jennifer Myhre had just joined the team in 2010 and my husband Andy is a civil engineer and project manager, and now, theological educator as well.We moved here with our then two-year-old and four-year-old to do whatever seemed to be next. David - That's amazing. So give the theological introduction to the Ebenezer. Mardi - It comes from first Samuel Chapter 7 verse 7-12, where there's a battle between the Philistines and the Israelites and Samuel lays a stone to God for being faithful and to remember what God has done. When Andy and I got married in 1998, actually, it was a scripture that was read at our wedding. And we were encouraged when these Ebenezer moments come, take stock of them, step back, and acknowledge what God has done . Those moments will be key moments in your marriage. As I was talking to the medical division the other day, I felt like it was just another reminder that, as we have our professional lives and we work in a place like Kijabe and we serve, it's really easy to get caught up day-to-day in the daily struggles that we all have - with life and death and bureaucracy and not enough money and not enough equipment and team dynamics and conflict. But there are these moments when we take a step back and we see what God has done. This hospital has been around for 100 years, and I've only been here for a little over eight of them, but there are so many moments where I look back on where we've come from - and the journey that we've been on - and I see these landmark moments of God intervening. David - How do you see the balance here between medical excellence and spiritual - I don't know if excellence is the right word - between medical excellence and spiritual excellence. I think the origins of medicine were very intertwined with the spiritual, but at least in Western medicine, it's very divorced and I feel like in some ways, what I see happening here is not taught in classrooms anywhere else. Mardi - This is one of those things that I am going to be taking with me for the rest of my life. I don't know who's listening to this, but Americans have a cultural Christianity where it's acceptable in medicine, I think, to ask medical questions and maybe you ask a spiritual question and saying God bless you and bless her heart, and praying for people is somewhat accepted but still it's a parallel track to medicine. In Australia, it's completely divorced. There's almost a cultural fear of discussing the spiritual in Australia, a very agnostic country. So to be a Christian in Australia, you have to make a choice. But then when you go to medical school, it's taught to you almost don't bring that in. This is a science, and one of the things that I love about Kijabe is that they are inextricably intertwined. There isn't a meeting that we start here without prayer. When I'm covering pediatrics, as a clinician, we start with team prayer and depending how busy things are, if you're trying to see 30 patients on rounds, you might pray for the room, as you start. We ask the parents how they're doing, and then we pray for the mom with her permission, and for the baby or the dad or whichever caregiver is there. We ask God to intervene, we ask God to give us wisdom, we ask him to be a part of the science. We ask him to be a part of the conversations. When it comes to the even bigger picture, when it comes to strategically planning the hospital, and our core values again - they're inextricably intertwined, and it's a gift. One thing that I'm gonna take with me as a leader and as a clinician, is that it is not difficult to ask anyone, "What is your world view and what is your spiritual worldview? Because all of us have one in Australia. That world view might be... "I don't believe there's a spiritual realm." That's so important to know. But what if the answer to that question is," I believe in God, but I don't see him doing anything." What an opportunity we miss. What if we have immigrants in our population in our community, and we don't ask them "What is your spiritual and cultural world view? What do you think is happening beneath the surface?" and we don't give someone an opportunity to say without derision, "I think I've been cursed" or "There is a generational problem in my family," and we don't open up the opportunity to intervene in a way that's holistic, much we miss by not intertwining the spiritual and the physical? The fact is every one of our communities has a spiritual world view, and shame on us if we don't explore it with them. David - Amen. It's fascinating here because before coming here, I thought of missions as giving. The longer I'm here, the more I think of it as receiving. When you stop and pray for a family, the encouragement received from those family members is huge. The trust and the love, and you do see people who come in the halls and you ask, "Why are you here?" "Because my doctor will pray for me." Mardi - So what's interesting to me is there are some conversations going on in medicine around the world right now about this "innovative new concept of Compassionomics." And really it's exactly what you're saying, it's not new and it's not innovative. I think that Compassionomics is our fearful way of re-exploring the spiritual. It's taking the time on rounds to say, "How are you doing as a family, how are we doing as a team," and to take the opportunity to draw comfort from each other. It comes from a spiritual foundation, that I think that we've lost, and I think a lot of it comes from burnout and from the way that medicine has become a business and a commodity. We're starting to re-explore through Compassionomics, and I pray through exploring the spiritual, the deeper side of medicine that around the world I think people really miss. David - Right on. Mardi - And if that's not reverse innovation, I don't know what is. David - It's fascinating, this space that Kijabe fills and how we think about it and how we talk about it. I use a phrase - World class healthcare in the developing world - but when I use that, I don't mean that I want Kijabe to be the big hospital in the big city in the West, because there are certain aspects that we don't want to lose. Yes, absolutely, it would be super-cool to be doing robotic surgery, and some of these wild technological things, but really I feel like what Kijabe excels at is not fancy and not glamorous. It fundamentals of medicine. I remember Evelyn Mbugua telling me this one time. I asked her, "What do you think about medicine in general?" "When I have a challenge or when I'm stuck on a patient, I go back to their history." It's fascinating that that's fascinating! Some of the basic fundamentals of medicine are practiced here, just looking at your patient and laying your hands on them and touching them and talking to them. A conversation is both a diagnostic tool and it's actually medicine. If the numbers are true, I know it's different from orthopedic surgery than for outpatient, but, if half of medicine is actually placebo, this stuff is really important to healing. And it's not anti-science. It actually is science to care about people. Mardi - It's interesting when you mentioned the placebo effect. I think that the placebo effect is considered as nothing, but it's not the placebo effect, is actually a real effect. It's that time and conversation and compassion, truly do bring healing and the point of a control trial is to see in a drug-do better than that. But the thing we're doing, already makes sense. It's interesting to me that medicine around the world is getting faster and faster and more and more advanced. Time is money. I think that around the world, we wanna save money in medicine, we wanna do more with what we have, but we're willing to sacrifice time, to make that happen. And why is that the first thing that goes? Burned-out physicians in high income countries, the thing that they love, is when they have to see more and more patients in less and less time because they know what they have to offer is beyond a drug, and beyond a diagnosis and beyond a referral and beyond a surgery. The one of my favorite phrases in medicine that I truly don't understand but want to spend the rest of my life working on it, is a "value-based care." I think to define value you have to define what we're offering. If value is time, then one of the things I think that Kijabe and mission hospitals can continue to pioneer the way in is, "how do we cut costs in other areas but refuse to sacrifice the cost of time and make sure that our impact is helpful for our patients but that also helps our team members and our clinicians receive the value that comes from being a part of a meaningful conversation. I think that's what patients want too. They don't want the robotics, they come to us because they're helpless vulnerable and afraid, and those are the things that we're treating. They trust what we tell them and if we don't have the time to build up that trust, we've lost a lot of the value that we offer. David - What have you seen change about team? You guys have been part of this big culture change process, but I think it's something that's started long before long before either of us. What do you see is the arc of Kijabe and the archive teamwork and the arc of culture? Mardi - So, Kenya is an incredibly multicultural and diverse country and Nairobi is high-powered and it's fast and it's a lot of white-collar and highly educated people and Kijabe is not so far from that. I think we operate more in a Nairobi mindset than a rural, small town mindset, but that's actually been a huge transition, I think, is going from presenting ourselves as a rural distant place to a part of a busy growing rapidly advancing system, and so that comes with leadership styles that become more open and more I guess, more modern in style. And so that's been the first big thing that I've just seen a huge jar over the part of the decade that I have been here is that leadership is no longer just top-down, enforced. It's participational leadership and I'm a massive fan of that. Leaders do have to make hard decisions and make things happen, but the input of the team has become a much, much higher priority in the last decade. And that's huge because our young highly-educated, highly-aspirational team members have got some great ideas and shame on us as leaders, if we don't take the time to listen to their approach to things. So that inclusive style of leadership has has been a huge arc. And then I think the other thing is just our changing generations, millennials are not confined to high-income countries. We have a young generation of people here who aren't gonna stay in the same job for 40 years like their parents or their grandparents did, and that's the same globally. And so we've had to question, over the last decade, how do you approach team members who are only gonna be here for a little while? Do you see that is, they're just gonna go, or do you get the maximum investment into them and benefit out of them in the time that they're gonna be here and then release them with your blessing? And so that's been something that's been huge for me is when we've got these new graduate nurses or lab staff radiographers, to not be on the fact that three years after they come to us, they go it's to say, "You know what, we've got these guys for three years, let's sow into them, let's get the most we can out of their recent education... Let's do what we can to up skill them with the people that we've got here and then let's release them all over Kenya to be great resources for health care across the country and across the region. David - I would say, for healthcare and for the gospel. I've been wrestling a lot with what does it mean for Kijabe is to be a mission hospital. I think the classic definition - I don't know if we define it as such, I don't often hear people say it out loud, but I think it's an unwritten thing - that what makes a Mission hospital a Mission Hospital, is that it cares for the poor. Hopefully on some level, or on a lot of levels, that will always be true at Kijabe. But I'm really excited about the possibility of what you just described, that if these guys are here for three or four years and we are to training them with the attitude that they are going out as Christian leaders and as missionaries to these parts of Kenya that honestly, you and I will never touch. And a lot of the places I've never even heard of. But if we're equipping them to be the light that's the huge opportunity that Kijabe has to be missional. Mardi - This is a much, much longer podcast, but defining mission is really really important, isn't it? I think that there's a couple of things that stick out to me as you're talking and one is that, I think mission has a history that can be associated with colonialism. And one thing I love about my time in Kenya is seeing that we are a globe of missionaries. The church that we attended in Nairobi, Mamlaka Hill Chapel, these guys would send mission teams to New Zealand, which is fabulous. It's not that lower middle income countries are receiving missionaries anymore. All of us need the gospel, all of us need the full word of Jesus and when you're spreading the gospel, what are you spreading? I think that this is a much longer conversation, but I believe that we are called to go and make disciples we are called to serve the sick, we are called to serve the poor, we are called to serve those in prison. I focus on the parable of the sheep and the goats, it is one of my life scriptures, "when you are poor and sick and needy whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me." And what I hope for Kijabe does is that for whoever passes through our doors, whether it be patient, whether it be staff member, this is who we are, we love Jesus and we want you to know this incredible King who gave so much for us and who has an eternal life for us that starts now. And eternal life starting now means making an impact and restoring that which is broken, and it means restoring it now, wherever you are. As our team members go out to work in other hospitals, I would hope that one of the indicators of success for us would be a lack of brain drain, because it would show that we've shown people, "You know what there are people here that need you in healthcare. And this is why I'm here." If I had wanted to be an evangelist rather than a health care missionary, I should have stayed in Australia, for less people in Australia know Jesus that in Kenya. But I felt like my call in mission was to serve the sick in a place where I could help other people do the same. That's been my passion here, but I'm called to go back to Australia now. Does that mean my mission life is over? Absolutely not. It means that I'm going back to Australia to love Jesus and serve sick there and to do it in a different way. And I think that understanding that all of us, whoever is listening to this podcast right now, wherever you you have a call to mission, it's that sphere of influence that God's put you in. It's to take care of the poor or the sick, or to love the wealthy, who are lost around you that are never gonna step foot in a church but need a love of Jesus every bit as much as one of our nursing students here in the college. David - Amen again, that's fantastic. So back to Ebenezers, back to the the stones. What are things come to mind as you look back over on your time at Kijabe that were hallmarks or turning points? Mardi - There's a few of them. One evening sticks out to me because it's so indicative of the bigger picture and what we've been working towards. I'd been here for about nine months or so. . . One of the things that Jennifer Myhre and I noticed is we started out on pediatrics was that our nursing staff were incredibly passionate about their kids, but no one had really had the time to teach them about sick kids and how to resuscitate them, just basic life support, because they were so overwhelmed. You know, there was one nurse who was taking care of 12-15 patients at a time. That ratio is now one to eight, so it's much easier. But they just hadn't had the opportunity to learn some of the basic life-saving assessment in resuscitation skills, and so we started doing just weekly mock resuscitations with the nurses and as we got to know each other and they got to trust me and to know that I wasn't there to, to judge them, but to try and help them, we would do mock recesses every week, and people would stop being scared of coming and would come with by interested and actually came to test their knowledge. When I started in 2011, about once a week I would get called in, in the middle of the night to find a baby blue and not breathing, who was dead, and there was nothing that I could do. But what we worked together on was setting up a resuscitation room, and setting up the right equipment. And so after about nine months of this, I was called in for yet another resuscitation in the middle of the night, and by the time I got there, the baby was just screaming and pink, and I asked the nurse is what had happened and it was the same story as always, this baby choked on milk, they had turned on the oxygen given the baby oxygen done some CPR and they resuscitated that baby before I got there, they didn't need me at all. And the Ebenezer for me was the was the pride on their faces. "We are experts at this and we know what we're doing." That has just escalated leaps and bounds. Now we've got outstanding nursing leadership and they're being equipped and taught and up-skilled every day. But that was an Ebenezer moment for me that the time taken to build relationship and team and invest doesn't just bring a resuscitated baby and life is important, but it builds team and it builds ownership and pride in "this is what I've been called to do, and I'm good at it." It's interesting because it's what you would do is individual doctors with your teams and doing the mock code. But it's also very much a systems process for Kijabe hospital, right? A big part of solving that challenge was getting the right nursing ratios, but also setting up high dependency units to where children you're concerned about could be escalated. Did that happened during your time here? Mardi - So when we started here in 2011, children weren't really admitted to the ICU at all unless they were surgical patients who just had an operation, and then the surgeons would take care of them and transfer them down to the ward. So the pediatrics team wasn't really involved in any ICU care, extremely rarely. We didn't have a high dependency unit. And our definition of high dependency unit, here, is a baby that can be monitored on a machine 24-7. This is something that shows you how reliant we are on partnerships, David. So for example, the nursing and the medical team together decided, "Look, we think we need a three-bed unit, where at least the babies who were the more sick ones can be monitored on machines." And so, Bethany kids were the ones who equipped... We turned one of our words into a three-bed HDU in the old Bethany kids wing, and that was the first time we could put some higher risk babies on monitoring so that if they deteriorated we knew about it sooner. And we saw deaths start to drop, just with that simple thing. The other thing was that pediatricians who worked here in the past weren't necessarily equipped in how to do... ICU care. And so Jennifer and I said, "Well I'm a Peds-emergency physician, and she is an expert in resource-poor medicine, between the two of us, we can probably figure this out." We started putting some babies in ICU who we knew had a condition that would be reversible if we could just hook them up for 24 hours to ventilator. So we started ventilating babies with just pneumonia or bronchiolitis. Or sepsis, that was the other big one, something that if you can help their heart beats more strongly for a day or two, you can turn the tide. And so we just started working with the ICU team to say, "Look, can we choose some babies to start bringing up here? And four years later we were overtaking the ICU at the time and that's why we had to build a new Pediatric ICU, which opened in 2016. All of these things are incremental, and we stand on the shoulders of giants. The Paeds ward existed because a surgeon said "I don't want babies with hydrocephalus and spina bifida to not get care." And then we came along and said "We think that's great, but we think that babies with hydrocephalus spina bifida, who also have kidney problems and malnutrition, should probably have a pediatrician care for them." And over time, that degree of care, that we've been able to offer has just grown and grown. And we had Dr. Sara Muma as a pediatrician join us in 2012 then Dr. Ima Barasa - she was sponsored into pediatric residency long before I got here. That was the foresight of the medical director back then, to say "We are gonna need some better pediatric care". And then I stepped into the medical director role and people like Ima and Ariana came along and they've just pushed it further and further and further. None of us are satisfied with what we walk into, and we keep saying we can do better because these kids deserve more. David - That's fantastic, I think that's another way when you think about the influence and the impact of Kijabe, it's that refusing to settle. It's to say, "Yeah this is possible. Let's figure it out." And for all the team members to say that and commit to it, and for the leadership to support that I think that's what makes Kijabe special. I read something that the other day, it was just an interesting take, someone said [to a visiting doctor] "Why are you going to that place? It has so much." But Kijabe only has “so much” because the immense sacrifice of so many people over so much time. None of this showed up without the hours and the donations and years and years and years of work. I remember you saying that about Patrick with his ophthalmology laser? How did you phrase that? Mardi - Patrick, he's such a wonderful example of the kind of person that doesn't look for reward, but sees a need and just walks to the finish line. He started out, I believe, on the housekeeping team in the hospital. He's been here for 20 years at least, I think, and then went through clinical office or training, which is a physician assistant level training, and then received higher training in cataract surgery. He started our ophthalmology service in 2012. Since then he had nurses trained around him. He's been doing cataract surgery, and then he said, "We've got these diabetic patients and the care we offer isn't good enough, we need a laser." He went to Tanzania, and got laser training, and now he's going to start doing laser surgery on patients with diabetic retinopathy. He refuses to be satisfied with the status quo. And that's the heritage that we have here. You know, talking about even a moment I feel them enormously privileged to have been here in 2015 as we as a hospital celebrated our centennial. It took us a year to prepare for that, and I know you were a part of that process, David. David's job was find all of the stories and all of the photos and interview all of the people and make sure to document everything that might be lost if we lose these stories now. Being a part of that process... I was in tears so many times when we would hear one more story about somebody's commitment and sacrifice. We've been able to write down that story from 2015, with the Theodora Hospital as we were known then. The stories of not just these missionaries but these extraordinary early nurses, like Wairegi and Salome who worked here for decades, who were initially trained informally, because we didn't even have accreditation for the nursing program. David - We didn't even exist as a country. Mardi - That's a really good point! To hear those stories and to see our very first lab technician was just amazing. And then when these 80 and 90-year-olds came over and saw the scope of the hospital as it exists now, it just gave me a glimpse into whatever we do today, we have no concept of 100 years from now, the fruit that that will bear. And I think a missional life, is like that, isn't it? It's being okay with not seeing fruit. There's foundations positive and negative, that all of us lay in the interactions and the work that we do and I think all of us, our prayer is that those seeds that we plant would bear fruit. We have to be okay with not seeing the fruit with saying this has been my contribution. I've stood on the shoulders of giants and now I hand over the baton to you, who will come after me. Make of it what you will. It's not my dream and it's not my goal, I've done my part, and let's see where God takes it through you. David - And so, very shortly, you're about to become a giant. [laughter] I really appreciate you, I appreciate you bringing that up. That was one of the most important things that could have ever happened. It was in the 2015. It was before we started Friends of Kijabe. The realization for me I always come back to how long life is. It's both amazingly short and amazingly long. Watching Dr. Barnett and realizing that he worked here for 30 years, and then went back to the states, so now he's... I think he just hit 102 years old. It really does bring in a clear view what is legacy, what does it mean and what are we building? But also that this is very much outside of us. We get to pour everything we have into it for a time, but then others will take up that work. And it's both humbling, and amazing and... Mardi - And I think it's helpful to as many of us have a sense of calling on our lives, I think that this is what God has for me now. But we have to hold that with open hands because our view and our understanding of what God is doing is so small and what he is doing is so large. I think sometimes in this kind of setting, you come in with a dream and a passion and a goal, but you see that path shift and change during the time that you're here and that is good and that is okay. I think a danger is when we come in and think that we have the answers or we know exactly where God is going, and then things don't work out, and we burn out or are bitter or disappointed. To come into a sense of mission and calling... Saying "not my will but yours be done," and to just obey in the day-to-day and to see where it goes and to be okay with the direction being different at the end than it was at the beginning - I think that's how we lead a life led by the Spirit. We hold these things with open hands and say, "God take it where you will" and if it's a different place, let me just play my part in that. David - Okay, I gotta dig into that cause. How do you balance that? I would frame it as vision. I feel like a good example to look at, I don't know if it's the right one, so, you can choose a different one if you want to, but the balance between vision and practicality and reality. Because you say that, and you are walking in the day-to-day, but I just think of the Organogram that has been on your wall, which was on Rich's, wall, which is now your's again, which is about to be Evelyn's wall. And you had this vision back in, "this is how I think the organization should work to function well." But there's a four-year process in making that come to pass. How do the day-to-day and the long-term balance? Mardi - I think we're talking about spiritual and practical things combined aren't we? I think that anyone who's in organizational leadership knows that you, your organization as a whole needs a trajectory and a long-term plan. We make these five-year strategic plans which are based on the assumptions of today and every strategic plan. You need to go back every couple of years and say, Were those assumptions right? And just to be a super business nerd for a minute, you base things on SWOT analyses and you base things on the current politics and economics. David - What does SWOT stand for? Mardi - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Then you do a PESTLE analysis, you look at the politics, you look at the economy, you look at the social environment of the day, etcetera etcetera. In technology everything is changing quicker than we can keep up with. And so I think that when you're looking at a place like a happy, which is large and complex, you set yourself some goals, and you work with them, but, you know, so something's going to change. Politics are gonna change, the economy's gonna tank, maybe there's gonna be a war on the other side of the world and we’re the only source of this, that, or the other?Maybe India falls into the sea and we start doing all of the surgeries that India was doing? I just don't even know. One thing for me, I've been enormously privileged to have been the medical director for two different terms that were separated by two years. And so I think I have a slightly unique perspective because from 2013 to 2016, I set the way I thought that our division would work and I came back into the role, two years later and already it had changed, but Rich had made it a better. It's funny, I when I came into the role, my predecessor. Steve Letchford said, "Look, you're gonna need a deputy, you can't do this by yourself." And I looked at my team and said "Um, No, I need four deputies, four sub-divisional heads because this is too much for one or two people and I can't keep my ear to the ground without it. I came back after two years away and there were five deputies and my initial gut reaction was, "You changed my structure!" And then I realized that Rich and Ken had made a really wise call. It did have to be five deputies for lots of really good reasons and that team of five has been my absolute rock this year. David - Who is the team of five? So the team of five, I've got a head of inpatient medicine and pediatrics, and specialties and this George Otieno. There's a head of Outpatient Department, and Community Health and Satellite clinics, and that's Miriam Miima. I've got ahead of Surgery and Anesthesia, and that's Jack Barasa. There's a head of Pharmacy, and that's Elizabeth Irungu. Then there's a head of what we call Allied and Diagnostic that incorporates the Lab and Pathology, Radiology, Physiotherapy, Nutrition and Audiology, and the head of that, it is Jeffrey Mashiya who is a radiographer. What's amazing to me about that is when I instituted this framework in 2014, there were four people and they were all missionaries. And I've come back in 2018 and there are five people and they're all our Kenyan senior staff and they're extraordinarily talented and any one of them can stand in for the medical director, when the medical director is away. What a gift that has been. David - I can't imagine how important this is for continuity. Because you think right now, you're handing off your responsibilities to Evelyn, but she has five people that...those are the executors and they actually get to groom her in leadership. That's amazing and for the strength of Kijabe and the stability, it's indispensable. I don't think there's another way to build a strong, stable system other than to build that. Mardi - Yeah, that's actually one of the things that brings me so much joy as I leave is the team isn't going to notice too much the change in senior leadership because that level of day-to-day practical strategic and operational leadership is just so strong. I think it made Ken as my CEO, I think it made his job easier to say, "Look, who should fill the position that Mardi is vacating?" He was able to say, "Who's got institutional memory and who's got leadership expertise and wisdom, and who knows how the senior leadership team works?" Whoever that person is, they're gonna have a team around them that will mean that no voices get lost in the transition. When I took the job in 2013, hearing the voices of specifically missionaries and surgeons can be really noisy and you hear their voices, but who's listening to the head of palliative care and who's listening to the head of laboratory who's listening to the head of nutrition, which is a tiny team of four people, those voices are well represented by wise people who all listen to each other and make the system work around them. It's a tremendous gift and there's no way to do this job without a team of people like that around you. And you know what, that's one of my other Ebenezers, David. Thursday, we installed Evelyn as the incoming medical director. Seeing those five sub-divisional heads praying for Evelyn and as that took off, I will never forget that. David - Absolutely. I wasn't here the first time, but I remember I should print out a series of those [pictures] because I remember you handing the hat to Rich and I remember it going back to you and then watching you give Evelyn the hat and stethoscope. There's this legacy of people that care. It's interesting to think about... 'cause you are, I mean you’re building this remarkable team and your system and things that operate independently of you. But at the same time, you're unbelievably special, and have given a ton over the past years and you. As Rich phrased it, you walked in shoes that not many other people will get to walk in. It's special. I imagine is what it's like when the former presidents get together for their picture. There's things that only only you guys will know and only you guys will have experienced. Mardi - You know, one thing that is really special is I think a lot of leadership transitions come through pain, brutality and war. And one thing that I noticed on Thursday, is that in the room as I handed over leadership to evil and were Steve Letchford and Peter Bird, who have both been here for decades and who've previously been the medical directors. I think there's a beauty about the transition of leadership here in the clinical division that it hasn't come through attrition, war and burnout. I'm leaving with a lot of sadness, and I'm not cutting ties with this place to see. . . there has been a cost. Rich. I know, I would still love to be here in this position as the person who is my predecessor…but to see such strength of leadership that is here and sowing into the next generation rather than leaving when they died. They've stepped down and gone into leading other areas to ensure that the team that follows them is strong, I think that's a tremendous gift and something unique about Kijabe. People love this place and they love this team and they wanna be a part of its ongoing success in its broader mission. David - And they love and they love that above their own glory and their own desires. I think it's what makes an organization great, it’s what makes a country great. I think it's probably gonna be easier in a place of faith, honestly, that this is God's ministry, not our own, not any one persons's. FPECC What is FPECC? I think it's important for people to know a little bit about how hard is it to create a training program or anything new in Kenya? Mardi - So FPECC is the fellowship program in pediatric emergency and critical care. Ariana [Shirk] and I are pediatric emergency physicians, we trained in pediatrics, and then we did specially training in how to take care of emergencies and resuscitation. And were the only two formally trained pediatric emergency doctors in Kenya. Critical Care is taking care of kids in ICUs and currently in the country, there are four pediatric ICU doctors for 55 million people. I don't have the stats that my finger tips, but it's extraordinarily low. I think of the city where you live and how many ICU beds there are, and how many children's hospitals you have just in your own city if you're based in a high income country. For 55 million people, there's kids just can’t access that care. David - Recently, I'm sure it's gone up, but two years ago, it was 100 beds for the country. Mardi - For adults and kids. . . In the country, there are a 12 pediatric ICU beds. Actually no, that's not true, there are 16 and eight of them came into existence, when we opened up our Peds ICU here three years ago. David - And keep in mind, this is East Africa, of the 56 million people. . .33 million of those are under age 18. So 16 beds. Mardi - That's right. Think of anything that can cause a critical illness. Trauma, illness, cancer, you name it, that's not enough beds. So when I came to Kenyo, I had no dream of starting a training program that wasn't even remotely on my radar. But sometimes things just come together at the right time. It was actually University of Nairobi, where they have the only other Peds ICU, they had been working with University of Washington in Seattle to say, “Look, can you help us start some training?” This is really important, because in East Africa there is nowhere that a pediatrician can learn how to run an ICU. Think of the US, where every state has got multiple training programs, where pediatricians will spend three years to learn to be an ICU doctor. There is nowhere for 360 million people in this region to learn how to do ICU care for children. Just think about that for a second. 360 million people... No training program. There's one in Cairo, and there's one in Cape Town, but that's for 600 million people. So I'm just taking a few of them where there's nowhere to go. University of Nairobi was talking to Seattle. They've got two Peds ICU doctors in Nairobi and they were thinking of starting a program. Then just through several contacts, actually through the Christian mission network, one of University of Washington's ICU doctors grew up in Nigeria but she's involved with the Christian Medical and Dental Association, and so she knew about Kijabe. The University of Washington team came out to Kenya for a visit, and they said, "Hey we heard you doing some ICU care caring Kijabe. Can we come out and see what's happening?" That was in 2013. They came out and said "Hey what are you guys doing here?" And we showed them around, and their minds were blown, they didn't know there was any peds ICU happening outside of Nairobi at all. And so, we rapidly started some conversations and said "Look, why don't we start a training program in Pediatric Emergency Care and Critical Care and our trainees can train at both Kijabe hospital and Kenyatta hospital in Nairobi and they can get an exposure to two different types of ICUs. They can also take advantage of the fact that Ariana and I are here as Peds Emergency faculty, and we can split the training load. Training programs in the US have dozens of faculty for something like this, to rely on just two doctors in Nairobi was an incredible risk even though University of Washington is supporting with visiting faculty. So we said, "Look, we've got all these people in the country at the same time, let's just try and do it." So we started that process in 2013. We took our first fellows at the beginning of this year. It's taken us six years. That's how things work here. You've got to form relationships. University of Nairobi didn't know us real well when it came to our pediatric care. We had to get to know each other, we had to develop a curriculum. We had to let the Ministry of Health know. We had to get the Kenya pediatrics Association on side. The Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board, had to approve the program. The University Senate had to approve the program. We had to try and get some funding in place. None of that happens quickly. It's all relationship that's all a lot of chai. That's all a lot of back and forth and making sure that you don't try and skip anything to get through the hoops, any quicker than you need to, because if you try to go to quick it falls apart. And if University of Nairobi and Kenya doesn't own this program, it's not gonna last. And I think that's probably the first thing to take away for me is this program exists because University of Nairobi and Kenya wanted it I didn't come in here and say, "We need this.” University of Nairobi wanted it, and we said, "How can we support it?" And so Arianna showing up here for a short-term visit - which we rapidly recruited you guys as long-term - it was God's timing because Ariana and I couldn't have done this independently from each other. It's taken both of us to build those relationships over the last six years. Arianna and I are so proud of this program. Our first two graduates will finish this training at end of December 2020, and we hope and pray that we can recruit them to stay at Kijabe and University of Nairobi as our first home-grown faculty. What's been lovely about that, too, is that we've connected with people all over the world who want to support this kind of thing, they just didn't know how. David - Not did they not know how, there wasn’t a way. It literally did not exist until February 2019. Mardi - So now, we're actually talking to colleagues in Uganda and Tanzania, and colleagues in Sudan and other places about... “Hey, is this a good model for you?” I've got some contacts in Nigeria, they've got how many million people, 30 million people or something ridiculous? And there's no way to get this training there either. And people all over the world want to be able to support what a country wants to start in its own strategy. So that's something that I'm just thrilled to be leaving. Even as we leave next month, I'm hoping and planning to come back at least once a year to teach in the program for the forseeable future and to support Arianna from a distance in continuing to connect people all over the world to say, "Here's a way that your global health desires can interface with a local country's needs." David - You two are the only Peds Emergency Medicine doctors in the country and there's a realization. . .What actually is Emergency Medicine here and what is the difference between what it looks like here versus America? Mardi - Yeah, it's a really great question. First of all, Ariana and I trained in a country where there are multiple children's hospitals per city. So, Pediatric Emergency Medicine is the Emergency Department attached to a children's hospital. There are less than 10 children's hospitals on this entire continent, I think. So there are no Pediatric Emergency departments. What is really great is that Emergency Medicine combined adult and pediatric is a growing specialty here. There's been so much great work that's going on in so many countries around the region. Rwanda last year, just graduated their first class of emergency residents. Uganda just on the cusp, the great advocate there, Annette Allenyo is leading the charge for emergency medicine. Ben Wachira is an Emergency Medicine trained doctor here at Agha University, and they're on the cusp of starting an emergency medicine residency training program. You know Emergency Medicine's a funny thing. Emergency medicine in a high-income country, is a part of a functioning system. Emergency medicine in the US means that you've got ambulances that get your people to you and you've got an ICU at the other end that you send sick people to. Emergency medicine here is. . . people showing up on our door step, we don't know how to get them here and then where do we send them? I think that Emergency Medicine training here is so much more broad. We're training people not only how to provide Emergency Medicine, but how to be advocates in a broader system. And I think if you live in a high income country, you can't understand how much medical training is not about medical training. It's about advocacy and building access to care for people, no matter where they're at. What I see emerging here is…from the start, it's collaborative. Emergency Medicine training here isn't just training a doctor in a specialty to give you a certificate and leave you there. It's connecting you with people who are trying to get paramedic systems going and people trying to build ICU care. That's one of the reasons we realized that our Pediatric Emergency and Critical Care program had to be both. There's not enough places to work where you've got the luxury of staying in the ICU. Our graduates are gonna go out and work in hospitals where they will be expert trainers for the pediatricians running the ICU and the family medicine doctors running the emergency department and the surgeons who are doing pediatric surgery with just general training. Our graduates are gonna be those advocates drawing teams together asking "How can we improve the system from arrival at our doorstep till the day we send them home." It's a different focus in our training. Yes, the skills are necessary. You need to know how to run a ventilator and keep a heart pumping when it's not. But it's about building a team and being a part of solving systems issues and hopefully in a way that is affordable and sustainable. David - I love that word, systems. For me, this is the year of systems. Thinking broadly about each of these individual parts because it’s another way that healthcare here is very different from healthcare in the US. The US is just sub-specialization, that's what it's all about. And here, there's not a fine line between. . .for an Emergency Medicine doctor, you're not sitting out in casualty waiting for a kid to come in, right? If you want to find the emergency, you just walk around and lay eyes on every kid and there's gonna be one out of 70 children in that building, who is in trouble. So it really is a bigger and broader way of thinking about things. Mardi - I think another thing that's interesting to me just as we come back to the missional aspect of who we are... I think 00 years ago, a missionary was someone who would go into deepest, darkest wherever and be whoever they wanted to be. I think as we consider what is global mission, our question needs to be, “What is that country looking for, what systems are they trying to develop and how do we help them in it?" And that comes down to health…if you're a missionary, what does the local church want to do? What is their mission and how can we assist them? I think we need to ask better, what system is someone trying to build and how can we be a part of it. Because that's the key, isn't it? We're here to serve God who is restoring creation and he's doing it in lots of different ways already. We don't need to necessarily think we've got the answer, but to say "God, where are you working and how can I be a part of it, and what does it look like?" I think Mary Adam in her community health project, is a really lovely example of that. Community Health growth is a priority of Kenya. So she's gotten grant funding and she is just sowing in it, she knows every county Governor in the country, I'm suspecting. She knows how to get into the system, but how to be salt and light, and how to be the love of Jesus in making things functional and making all things new. I think that's one thing that I think Kijabe is doing well. We are looking at health strategy and saying How can we be a part of it and love that our FPECC program is in partnership with University of Nairobi. I love that our clinical offices have a program that we got accredited for called the Emergency Critical Care Clinical Officer program, that actually wasn't a part of hell strategy, but we did see a gap, and as soon as we trained people in that we went to the Clinical Officer of Council and said, "Hey you want to accredit this? This is a really good program. And they did, and now the Kenya Medical training training college has taken that program and they're doing their own program. I think those are lovely examples of saying “We're here to bring restoration but we don't want to be separate from the system. Where are you going and how can we help” David - What does that mean for friends of Kijabe? How do you see that working with Friends of Kijabe as an organization? Mardi - What's been really lovely, about Friends of Kijabe in the last year, and I know you're excited about this, David, is in what the core the Friends of Kijabe vision and mission. I think a core part of Friends of Kijabe that we've got the CEO, the CFO and the Director of Clinical Services on the Friends of Kijabe board. One question that I've heard you ask so many times in the last year is "Where are you going and how can we help, what are your priorities? Friends of Kijabe exists to help the hospital further its strategy, but also exists as a bit of a connector between people in high-income countries who really want to contribute and who have passions. Where does that intersect with the hospital strategy? So Friends of Kijabe is not going to take the whole hospital strategy and try and piecemeal help every part of it. They're gonna say, "Hey you're a part of your strategy that are happy resonates with and that's become very clear. A lot of Friends of Kijabe funding currently goes towards whatever the hospital thinks is important. The hospital has prioritized the theater expansion project this year and that's great. But, at its core, Friends of Kijabe also says, "We support the needy. We support education. We support sustainability. How can we get there?" And so [FoK] has prioritized putting money towards each of those areas which happened to align with the core values of Kijabe Hospital. So a large proportion of what Friends of Kijabe hospital is doing this year is helping us with an infrastructure project. But every year we're going re-ask "What are your priorities, and how can we help that?" But we're also going to say, "Here is where our heart beats. Can we help with this too?" I think one of the things about Friends of Kijabe is the trust that's developed since its inception. As Friends of Kijabe, we trust that the hospital leadership is following a strategy that is meaningful, that is sustainable, and that is in line with where Kenya is going and where the African Inland Church is going because that's who we're owned and operated by. As long as our missions intersect, I think Friends of Kijabe can trust that at the hospital is taking us in a good direction. David - Awesome, anything else I should ask you? Anything you'd like to add? Mardi - No. It's been an extraordinary eight years and it's been such a privilege to be here, and it's lovely to leave with joy, even as there's associated sadness. I really can't wait to see what the next few decades bring, and I'm gonna be watching both from a distance and also up close, when I come back to visit. David - Thank you Mardi.

Blair offers seven mindsets that any seller of expertise needs to master so that they can behave like the expert in the sales cycle.   Links "The Jedi Mindset" by Blair Enns McClelland's Human Motivation Theory, also known as Three Needs Theory, Acquired Needs Theory, Motivational Needs Theory, and Learned Needs Theory   Transcript DAVID C. BAKER: Good morning, Blair. You are in London. I'm in Nashville. BLAIR ENNS: Yeah, it's my afternoon, and it's your seven AM. DAVID: And don't tell me you've gotten a lot more done today already, because that's just a time change thing. Has nothing to do with productivity. Today we're going to talk about the seven masteries of the rainmaker, choke, choke. BLAIR: You're choking on the word rainmaker, are you? DAVID: Well, a little bit. I'm also, it's like seven. How come it's not six or eight? Seven sounds quite biblically, almost like we need to take an offering at the end of this or something. BLAIR: Let's do that. DAVID: I'm more choking on the idea of the rainmaker. Do you hear that term much anymore? I don't really hear it. We know what it means, though. BLAIR: No, but there was a time when you heard it often. In fact, if an agency were running an ad looking for a new business person, probably a health percentage of those ads would have the title rainmaker wanted. DAVID: Yeah. BLAIR: I've never liked the term rainmaker. It's a little bit funny that an agency principal would be looking for an individual who essentially has magical powers, the ability to make it rain. DAVID: Right. It's dry. The crops are going to die. All we can do is just rely on magic. So let's call on the rainmaker. We have no idea how he ... it was always a he back in those days, but we don't know how he or she does it, but this is our last resort. BLAIR: We have no positioning. We have no leads. We have no prospects. We have no formalized new business process. You absolutely need somebody who can make it rain, yeah. So I've kind of used that term tongue in cheek, but the idea of seven masteries, it really stems from the notion of mindset. Because you can master behaviors. You can master all kinds of things. And when I originally wrote about this a few years ago, I had come home to the idea that I was teaching people sales process and people were learning, so they were onboarding and understanding what it is that they knew to do in specific situations, but yet, they still couldn't bring themselves to do it. BLAIR: So I kind of went deep into the subject and realized well, the things that I'm asking them to do, because my approach, the Win Without Pitching approach to selling to new businesses is a little bit contrary to the conventional way it's done in the creative profession. So the things that I was asking them to do were contrary to their overall general pattern of behavior. And then you ask yourself, well, what sets somebody's general pattern of behavior, and the answer is it's really the thoughts in their head, the mindset. BLAIR: So I kind of arrived at this model, this idea of the seven masteries of the rainmaker. These are the seven things that are concepts that an individual needs to master in order to put themselves in the mindset, the mindset of the expert. I sometimes refer to it as the Jedi mindset, so they master those concepts. So they're in the proper mindset. Then they can begin to behave, generally speaking, across the pattern of general behavior, they can begin to behave like the expert, and then they can start to take onboard these very specific things that we teach client does x, you do y. BLAIR: If you learn those specific points of sales process, what to do in the sale, in certain situations, but you're not already operating or behaving like the expert, then they're not going to work. So this whole idea was about getting to somebody's mindset. DAVID: Okay, so we're going to go through the seven, but before we do that, let's assume that I want to embrace this way of thinking. What specifically, almost mechanically, are you suggesting I'm going to do with these seven things? Do I just write them down, and I chant them to myself? No, you're not talking about that. It's more I analyze my behavior against this list. What am I going to do with this after we get through going through the seven? BLAIR: As I walk you through the seven, you'll think about where you are on that spectrum, and in the first mastery, just ask yourself, hey, are you mastering this now, or do you have some homework to do? And then I am going to get you to chant something funnily enough. DAVID: Good luck with that. BLAIR: After we get through four of the ... I think I said to you, this is either going to be really fun, or it's going to be a complete disaster. DAVID: Right, yeah. BLAIR: So we'll just see how it goes. As I explain the mastery, you just ask yourself, well, is this something I have mastered, or do I have some homework to do? And then once we get through four, the first four, which I consider to be the foundational masteries, then I'll actually talk about stringing them all together in a little saying or a mantra that you can say to yourself, and I don't mean to say that you're like Buddhist guru here or something. DAVID: As you laugh and talk about that, right. BLAIR: We're going to get you to say it out loud and then you'll see that when you do this properly, this becomes the conversation that you're having yourself with, and it sets you up to go into a situation where you're behaving properly. And even if you don't remember the specific things I tell you that you should be doing in the situation, it won't really matter, because you'll be thinking the right things. Therefore, your tendency will be to behave appropriately. You will behave like the expert. And then you can forget all of the nuance, and you'll still probably do pretty good. DAVID: Okay. All right. So let's dive in then. The first one is focus, right? So talk about that. BLAIR: Yeah, so mastering focus, it begins with the subject of focus. When you go in and do a total business review with a firm, I don't know this for certain, but I would expect that one of the very first things that you look at is the firm's positioning. Once you do an assessment of where the firm is and how they need to improve, I suspect that's kind of the foundation of where you start, or one of them. It certainly is in my business. DAVID: Yeah. In fact, I'm doing one today, yesterday and today. And as I was driving to where I'm talking with you now, I was just thinking, you know, I love this work. There's so much science and art around positioning, and it sets the stage for everything, right? How can you have all these other conversations without that? And that's what you mean focus, power in the sell comes from deep expertise, which comes out of that focus. DAVID: So when somebody's listening to this first one, and they're thinking, okay, do I still have homework to do, that question is is my firm focused enough to give me power or leverage in that relationship. BLAIR: Yeah, are you focused, or are you the individual benefiting from a focused firm. And the benefit of focus is when the firm narrows its focus in terms of the types of problems it solves or the types of clients it works for, usually a combination of those two, when it narrows its focus, it allows the firm to build a deeper expertise. So if you're an agency principal, and you have a dedicated new business development person, just ask yourself, are you arming this person with the benefit of focus. So we're going to build a four statement mantra. BLAIR: And the first statement is I am the expert. I am the prize. And that comes from this notion, this idea that I see myself as the expert practitioner in the relationship and not a vendor. I have some power in the relationship because of the depth of my expertise. Therefore I have a sense of being in control, but this idea that I am the prize, I am the prize to be won. I and the firm, we are the prize to be won in the relationship. And it's not the client is the prize that I am trying to win. BLAIR: So again, that's a mindset thing. Do you see yourself as this deep expert and representing a firm that has deep expertise that is desirable to the client, and do you see yourself and the firm as the prize to be won in the relationship? DAVID: That is so powerful, even though the words are so simple. It's the opposite of being a supplicant. It's not an arrogance, though. It's more of a quiet confidence that I've seen this before, and I'm eager to help, but we should talk about whether this is a right fit. I don't have to have this. I keep thinking of all these statements that emerge from what you were just talking about on the focus side. Even though we're kind of skipping, we could unpack this notion for weeks. We could talk for weeks, just about what focus means. But that's how it all starts. I love the fact that ... obviously, it has to be on this list, but I love the fact that it's also the first one. DAVID: So I am the expert. I am the prize. So that's focus. Second would be purpose. So talk about what that means, because we're still talking about very foundational things. How does purpose relate to this as a second one? BLAIR: Yeah. So after you master focus, you build deep expertise. The second, master a sense of purpose. And by purpose, I mean kind of a higher mission or calling. So most well-positioned firms can express their positioning in some fairly standard, almost formulaic language, and I don't mean to denigrate the language by calling it formulaic. I think first, you actually have to express your positioning in a formulaic language before you get creative with the language. BLAIR: So most specialized firms can say we're experts at helping this type of client solve this type of problem, or this discipline for this market. And that's just the beginning. Once you have that nailed, you want to go off in search of a higher purpose. Now, what purpose does for you in the sale is it gives you moral authority. It gives you the moral authority because you're driven, not to sell something to the person sitting across the table from you, and you're driven, not to help them sell things to their client. By tapping into purpose, you're tapping into something that's bigger than you, and even bigger than your client. And that gives you some moral authority in the sale. BLAIR: I'll give you an example in my own business. So Win Without Pitching, I can express our positioning as sales training for creative professionals. So the discipline is sales training. Creative professionals is the market. But my mission based positioning is we are on a mission to change the way creative services are bought and sold the world over. So there are different reasons. It starts to get into this Simon Sinek, tapping into your why thing. But there are certain moments when I will say that statement to myself, or if I'm being introduced to give a speech, I'll hand that language to the person who's introducing me, and that helps me get through maybe a slightly anxious moment and tap into something bigger than what I'm trying to accomplish in the moment. BLAIR: And when you're thinking bigger, when you're thinking past the transaction that's in front of you, and you're thinking past even what your client's objective is, to something even bigger than that, that steals you, gives you this moral authority, it contributes to your confidence, and it allows you to kind of ... gives you more ... I don't want to go back to the power word, but more confidence to navigate through the situation, through the sale, acting like the expert. DAVID: Yeah, and what I'm going to say next, I don't want it to take us too much off track, but I couldn't help but thinking of something as you were talking through this. Part of what we're doing at the beginning of a transaction like this or a possible transaction, or relationship, I guess would be a better way to say it, is to gather some control in that relationship, set ourselves up for that, not, though, so that we can misuse the power, but to use it for the benefit of the client, and sometimes it looks like a mistake. It looks like a power trip. It doesn't make sense sometimes from the outside. It's like if you saw somebody holding a child down, and it was through a glass window, and it looked cruel, and then the next thing you saw is that they were giving the child a shot, or they were dressing a wound or something like that. So we're doing something where we're exerting control to help the client, not to abuse the client. And we're reminding ourselves of that during this purpose discussion. DAVID: I love the example of getting up on stage, picture you've traveled a long time, you're tired, maybe something has happened that's shaking your confidence just a little bit. And you say this to yourself that I am on a mission to help. I guess that's the second phrase here that we're talking about. The first one, I am the expert, I am the prize. The second one, around purposes, I am on a mission to help. All of a sudden, it settles everything down. It reminds us why we're here and what we're trying to do. BLAIR: Yeah, well said. DAVID: So the third one is leadership. This is also a foundational statement. These first four are very foundational. So leadership is the third one. BLAIR: Yeah, let me just build where we are so far. So focus, I am the expert, I am the prize. Purpose, I am on a mission to help. And leadership, the line that goes with that is I can only do that if you let me lead. The idea of mastering leadership speaks to the notion that the sale is the sample of the engagement. So for you to do your best work in the engagement, you need to be able to lead. I use the word power, and I tend to overuse it, and as you point out, I don't mean power for the sake of power. I don't mean overusing it, but I mean, the client letting you assume the expert practitioner position and lead them through the engagement, rather than them relegating you to the vendor position and having them drag you through the engagement or dictate to you how the engagement is going to work. BLAIR: You're being hired to help solve a problem or capitalize on an opportunity. And for you to do your best work, you need to be allowed to lead in the engagement. Now, if you're not leading in the sale, then you won't be allowed to lead in the engagement, because the roles in the relationship are established well before the engagement begins. They're established in the sale. That's why you need to behave like the expert. You need to behave appropriately. BLAIR: So this third mastery of leadership is simply recognizing that for you to do your best work in the engagement, you need to be allowed to lead the client. Therefore, it's your job or a requirement that you assume the leadership position in the sale before you're hired. Again, I refer to the battle for leadership or power or control as the polite battle for control. And it should never feel to the client like you're dominating them or lording anything over them. They should feel the way it feels to you when you're hiring an expert practitioner yourself. They're calm, they're collected. They're clearly in control of where things are going or what the appropriate next steps should be. BLAIR: But they're also quite consultative with you, and they make you feel like you have input and you're not being dragged along. So that's the third mastery is leadership. DAVID: I can't help but think about the notion of process as well, because many clients of the folks that are listening to this podcast, those clients are sometimes going to question the process you want to take them through, and it's pretty important to not only have a reason for the process, but to also stick to your process as the expert. Now, if it's not a good process, you don't need to stick to it. I guess that was obvious. BLAIR: It's funny. I was thinking that, too. I'm sure you've seen this, too. There are a lot of agencies out there that kind of manufacture this, I'll call it process, the Canadian version. They manufacture it, and they lead their clients through it, and I come along, or you as a consultant come along and look in and go oh, it feels a little bit hollow and empty, and it's needlessly long, and it's not as fruitful as the client might think. So I think we can laugh about it, but there's actually some fairly hollow processes out there. DAVID: Right. But assuming that it's a good process and it really is a core part of how you're going to lead the client, then this begins to be a part of how you conduct this conversation. It's like you've hired me as an expert. The way I've done this in the past many, many times is to follow this process. I don't mean the hollow process. I mean the good process. It's allowed me to find the truth more reliably and more quickly. And that's a part of leadership. Leadership is not just the advice I'm giving a client. Leadership is also the process that we go through together to arrive at that advice. That's more the point. So focus, purpose, leadership. And the fourth one is detachment.   DAVID: Let me go through and repeat these phrases again. So on focus, we have I am the expert, I am the prize. On purpose, I am on a mission to help. On leadership, I can only do that if you help me lead. And then third is detachment so walk us through that. BLAIR: Yeah. Fourth is detachment, and the line that goes with it is all will not follow, and that's okay. There's really two things you want to master about detachment. First of all, you want to detach from the outcome. So we're talking about the mindset you get into right before you go into the sales interaction. And you layer in all these masteries, focus, purpose, leadership, and this idea of leadership, I'm going into the exchange, and one of the things I'm looking for is I'm looking to take the lead, and I'm looking to see if you will let me take the lead. Do you recognize me as an expert, and are you willing to let me lead in the engagement? If you are, you'll let me lead at least a little bit in the sale. And the fourth mastery here, detachment is letting go of the fact of well, if they don't, that's okay. BLAIR: Your business is bigger than any single one interaction or any single one opportunity. You are this focused expert. The idea is if this person or this client or account doesn't come with you, if they don't let you lead, if they don't hire you, et cetera, that's okay. So you detach from the outcome. That's number one. You focus on the mindset and the behavior, and you detach from the outcome. So again, if you imagine when you hire or work with other professionals in your life, if you end up saying to a lawyer or accountant or solicitor or whoever the most vaunted expert is in your life, if you decide kind of not to go with them, they're not pleading for you to please, please, please give me your business. Because they're this recognized expert who have, you imagine that they have all kinds of opportunities available to them beyond you. BLAIR: And that's essentially what you should be thinking to yourself and then communicating to your client, and just let go of the outcome. So that's the first point on detachment is just generally focus on the mindset, focus on the pattern of behavior, and let go of the outcome. Don't be tied to the fact that this person absolutely must buy from you. BLAIR: There's a lot rolled up in this idea. The idea of not over investing in the sale is tied to it. It's easier to detach when you haven't over invested in the sale. But the second part of detachment is each of us personally tends to have something, and it's usually one recurring thing that we want from the other person in the sale. BLAIR: And I'll go back to this model of motivation known as McClelland's needs theory of motivation or the three needs theory that says people are motivated primarily by one of three different things. It's the need to win versus others, the need to orchestrate others, and the need to connect with others. So if you're a high competitive drive, and you have a high need to win, then you really need to detach from, before you walk through the door, just let go of the need to win this opportunity. If you have high power needs, you have the need for authority and respect, that's probably a good thing, because you and I and have been talking about that. You want to occupy the expert practitioner position, but some people can be in danger of having too high a need for authority and respect. BLAIR: And that's me. So I need to let go of the need to be the absolute authority on something, and other people have high affiliation needs. What they're concerned about in any social interaction, even in a commercial one like this is the need to be liked by others, the need to connect with and be liked by others. So in that situation, they would be telling themselves something like all right, this person doesn't need a friend. They need an expert practitioner. So I will detach from my need to have this deep, personal connection with somebody. There's some more nuance there. You don't want to detach from that completely. But you do want to recognize essentially what a big motivator is and recognize that you tend to go to this too often, and in the situation you want to let go of it. BLAIR: So the idea is that all will not follow speaks to this notion that you don't need to close every deal, and then there's this secondary detachment of what is it that you personally need. Identify it and let go of it. DAVID: Because we should not need constant affirmation that we are an expert in the relationship. We should enter that potential relationship. Every once in a while, it's on a rocky ground, but believing generally that we are the expert, and there's a lot of evidence for that and that many, many clients over many years have paid us a lot. And then after the engagement, we've heard that it made a difference for them, whatever business our listeners are in. DAVID: I love talking about this notion about how much we care or what we care about. I have this theory that has zero scientific underpinnings, just to make that clear. BLAIR: Those are the best theories. Go on. DAVID: All of a sudden, you're interested now. The idea is that we have 200. Now the number might go up or down, obviously, but we have about 200 instances in our souls where we can care a lot more than the client can. And every time we deeply care more than the client does about something, a little part of us dies. And then we have 199 left. So you want to use those very carefully. They're like little tokens that are not going to be replaced. Caring about the wrong things, it just kind of kills you slowly, right? BLAIR: Yeah, you've punched all the holes in your care card. You're out. DAVID: Exactly. Where's my free card? BLAIR: Clearly, you've punched yours years ago. DAVID: I don't even know what a care card looks like anymore. Okay. So what's this mantra that you're going to try and get me ... you say it, and I'll repeat it. And this rolls up the first four. BLAIR: I am the expert. I am the prize. I am on a mission to help. I can only do that if you let me lead. All will not follow, and that's okay. You try it. DAVID: Okay. If I say that is, will you let me lead the next six episodes of the podcast? BLAIR: Yes. DAVID: Okay. BLAIR: You can have whatever you want if you say this. DAVID: Okay. I don't believe that. But I am the expert. I am the prize. I am on a mission to help. I can only do that if you help me lead. BLAIR: If you let me lead. DAVID: If you let me lead. All will not follow, and that's okay. So obviously, I messed it up. I have to practice this some more. Okay. So those are the first four, and you've wrapped them up. The next three masteries are different, though. They're not foundational. They're more specific situation masteries. And we sometimes get these in as well, today. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: So what's the first one? Silence. BLAIR: You're looking at the list. You tell me. DAVID: Ah, you were pulling that on me. You just did that to me, and I fell right into it. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: Okay, I'm a sucker. BLAIR: The fifth mastery is silence, and I think we've talked about this a little bit before. I think mastering silence is the single biggest little thing that you can do, if that makes sense, and it does make sense, the single biggest little thing you that you can do to become a better sales person. Nature abhors a vacuum, and when a buyer and seller are talking, any time there's a pause in that conversation, there's an impetus on both parts to fill it, and if you're the seller, you tend to fill a pause in a sales conversation with some sort of concession. You don't even have to master silence. You just have to learn to be more comfortable in silence than the other party. Because if you can be more comfortable, then the client is likely to fill the void with a concession or they will give you really valuable information. BLAIR: So we always teach that any time you raise an objection or place kind of a hurdle in front of the client and ask the client to jump over that hurdle, or you ask for a behavioral concession, after the statement or the ask, you just be quiet. So if you put forward your proposal, and it's got a price on it, and you're putting it forward orally, and you say and the price is $200,000, then you just stop and say nothing. And it's hard to do this initially, but it's actually very easy to get good at this. And if you can just kind of not be the person to break the silence, and you let the client fill the void, then you'll get all kinds of information on where the client stands, on how much power you have in the relationship. And you might even get some concessions, whereas sales people like to fill a void in that moment. The price is $200,000, silence, and then the sales person can't stand it, and says, oh but we could do it for less. DAVID: Yeah, and the panic rises so quickly. It's like yeah, maybe they just need to pull out Fortnite and start playing it or check their email. You're not suggesting that. BLAIR: I would say count to 10 under your breath. DAVID: Yeah, okay. All right, so silence is the first of the three after the foundational ones, and the second one is directness, say what you're thinking. We've talked a lot about this one, but it fits in the system, right? So just remind people, if they haven't heard that episode. BLAIR: I was just working with a firm earlier this week, and we were just doing some role play scenarios where I was on the subject of saying what you're thinking. So I was just throwing out some scenarios. And I was saying okay, here's a scenario, you're talking to a prospective client. You're thinking oh, they're probably too small. They probably can't afford you. What do you say? And I was really surprised at how people ... and I've been doing this for years. I continue to be surprised at how people struggle with finding the language to actually politely say what you're thinking, because we are not conditioned to do that in this business. In the creative and marketing firm business, we're taught that we're in the service business. The customer's always right. We're taught to nod and smile yes, even when we think the answer is no. BLAIR: But an expert would never do that. If you've got an opinion that's contrary to one that's been stated by the client, including an opinion on what the next step should be in the path to determining whether or not you're going to work together, you should say it. So be direct. Put it on the table. So I say there's a slight pause. As soon as you get the thought, the contrary thought, you have an obligation to state the thought, and you pause long enough so that you can think of a way to say it with kindness. So we talked about before, the subject goes by the name kind ruthlessness. So you're kind in your language, but you're ruthless in your standards and your behavior. By that I mean, you're being direct, you're saying what you're thinking. If you think the client's assessment of their problem or their opportunity is wrong, then you should say so. BLAIR: If you think there are flaws in the way they're proposing to hire a firm like yours, then you should say so. If you think the client is making a mistake in the engagement, then you should say so. Any expert worth their weight would confront politely with kindness the client with the mistake they think the client is making. And we, almost universally ... it's not universal, but it's almost universal. We don't do that. We need to learn to get better at doing that. So you master this idea of directness of saying what you're thinking. DAVID: I'm picturing somebody taking the oath of office or being sworn in before they give testimony. There needs to be something like that for experts, a commissioning service for experts where they raise their hand and say, I pledge to do it politely but to be honest and to state the truth with the clients who deserve that from me. They deserve that leadership from me. This is very powerful. BLAIR: I love that idea, our equivalent of the Hippocratic oath. DAVID: Right. So silence, directness, and the last one is money. So master your own wonderful relationship with money. That's one of the things we got with another couple or some friends or whatever, and we can talk about sex. We can talk about all kinds of ... we can't talk about how they raise their kids, and we can't talk about money sometimes, and that carries over into how we conduct these early relationships and sales studies as well. We can't really talk about money for some reason. BLAIR: Yeah, and that's why it's the seven and the last mastery. I like the idea that if people were just to read it, you have to master money. Some people would be repulsed by it, the idea. And those are the people that I'm really speaking to here, because we're not mastering the accumulation of money or the spending of money. What I mean by mastering money is mastering our own relationship with money. I believe, and I think we've talked about this before, that most of us have a dysfunctional relationship with money. BLAIR: In my book, Pricing Creativity, the last chapter, I think it's titled the last obstacle is you, and I talk about the mental barriers ... we've done a podcast on this ... the mental barriers to profit. And that's what I'm talking about is not getting hung up on money, and all of the personal emotional things that we were taught or we learned around money, all of the baggage ... baggage isn't fair, because as you pointed out, in social situations, the rules around talking about money are actually quite different than they are in a business situation. You say you've got friends where you can talk about sex, you can talk about politics, you can talk about things. But you can't necessarily talk about money. There's only a small number of people in my kind of personal life, where I have an open relationship without the subject of money, where we've agreed that we're going to talk openly about money, and there's really nothing off limits. DAVID: Yeah. BLAIR: I'm really talking about mastering the subject of the hold that money has over you or the idea that the subject of money is somehow holding you back because you don't feel it's worth it. I got an email two days ago from a client, who said ... he forwarded an exchange that was happening in his firm. He said, oh you're going to love this. He said read down and start from the bottom. So this is a firm that's recently moved to value-based pricing. So they still scoped it based on hours. Somebody internally said, well, it should take this many hours. The client wasn't buying hours, but they sold it for way more hours than it took to deliver. And two people internally were saying this is unethical. We cannot do this. BLAIR: So the principal at the firm and I are kind of laughing back and forth about this, because if you think it's unethical to create extraordinary value quickly, then you have a dysfunctional relationship with money. DAVID: You also have some other issues that are coming around the corner, too. This is such a great topic. I'm not at the point where I'm going to start chanting this. But I do ... I really do like this. So the foundational four, focus, purpose, leadership, detachment, and then the three masteries that are more for specific situations which you might use in certain specific cases would be silence, directness, and money. Blair, this was fantastic. Loved our discussion today. BLAIR: Yeah, thanks. It wasn't nearly as weird as I thought it would be. DAVID: Thank you, Blair. BLAIR: Thanks, David.

Listen Here: iTunes | Overcast | PlayerFM Keep Up with the North Star Podcast Here My guest today is Devon Zuegel, a writer of code and writer of words who spends her time unlocking human potential through incentive design and tools for thought and cities. In this conversation, we jump from coordination problems to urban planning to travel to architecture. We compare cities like Singapore and San Francisco and talk about the power of urban density and architecture to make us happier and healthier. Then, we talk about writing, specifically the three tiers of common knowledge, how to find good ideas, and the concept that Devon calls playing chess with yourself. One thing sticks out from this podcast and other conversations with Devon. Above all else, Devon lives in obsessive pursuit of high leverage ways to spend her time and energy. In the past, that’s led her to computer science and in the future, I suspect it will lead her to cities and infrastructure. Why cities? Devon offers an excellent answer. Cities are big enough to have real importance in the world and small enough to be nimble and somewhat understandable and there are a lot of cities. You can actually hope to make some comparisons in a way that you can’t really do with countries.  Please enjoy my conversation with Devon Zuegel. Links Bloom Algorithms To Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions Georgism Devon’s articles related to this episode:  Advice on Writing Why Flaking Is So Widespread in San Francisco A Day In Singapore: Urban Identity 2:03 Devon on coordination problems and the problems they’ve caused, such as climate change and housing issues, and how clever solutions to these problems are the reason humans have progressed so much in the past hundreds of years 6:19 Human cognition and thought as it is augmented by media, cities and blockchains and the benefits of this augmentation 8:10 The most classic tool for thought and why it’s such a catalyst for healthy and productive cognition, long term and short term memory function and increased IQ 16:41 Devon’s writing process and why she defines it as playing chess with herself 17:45 How Devon has been able to get her writing to flow and the three categories of topics available to write about, common knowledge, obscure knowledge and the intersection in the middle 20:17 Devon’s theory of on why people in San Francisco are so flaky in comparison to sister cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City 28:16 How Devon chooses what rabbit holes she wants to go down prior to writing an article and how to make most topics interesting by creating a model around the idea 32:25 What makes Singapore so interesting to Devon, in regards to history, culture, GDP growth, etc. and her major observations after visiting the country 47:20 The moment Devon became aware of the effect of architecture and how it can make employees less involved with their colleagues by not promoting micro-interactions 50:53 The five metrics that a house should be described with, that are never used, when being promoted on websites like Airbnb, Zillow, Craigslist, etc.  57:00 Devon chooses the three metrics that she’d pick when it comes to the city she lives in and the home she’s living in for maximum interaction, convenience and mental economy 1:03:16 Algorithms To Live By and why Devon sees it as the best self help book she’s ever read, despite it not being a self help book 1:05:37 Devon’s opinion on Georgism and how people talk about economics as a spectrum from capitalism to socialism or communism and the third category of economic goods that it doesn’t touch upon 1:07:30 Devon’s changing opinions and her epistemic status placed on each of her blog posts written with a strong opinion 1:10:03 Devon’s philosophy of travel and why she views it as scale free regardless of how many or little places you visit 1:11:51 Devon’s philosophy of productivity and how she writes down dozens of notes and uses long form emails to repurpose her ideas into publishable articles Subscribe to my “Monday Musings” newsletter to keep up with the podcast. Quotes “I am very interested in coordination problems. I think that they explain a lot of the problems that we see in the world, everything from climate change to nuclear disarming to issues in cities to making it so that people can actually live where they are the most productive to housing policy. I could go on and on. The solution to coordination problems is incentive design, and clever solutions that are some of the reason humans have been able to progress to the extent they have throughout the past few hundred years.” “The most classic tool for thought, and one that I think we tend to take for granted, is writing. Most people think of writing as a way to communicate ideas that they’ve had in their head to other people. Obviously, it does serve that purpose and people sell books for a reason. But, I think it goes way beyond that.” “In the last year, I have found that writing has gotten a lot easier for me. There’s probably a lot of reasons for this but I think the core is that I realized there are three categories of topics you can write about. There’s the stuff that everybody knows that is trivial to write about because it’s easy. On the other end, there’s stuff that nobody knows yet or nobody around you knows yet, so it takes a lot of time to figure it out and it takes a lot of research. Now, there’s this middle area between common knowledge and really obscure knowledge of stuff that you have a unique perspective on because of where you happen to be in life and you understand it so intuitively that you can just talk, think and write about it fluidly. But, a lot of people don’t know it yet. That’s the sweet spot.” “For me, it’s very important that I can walk places. Walking is a way to interact with your community in these small ways, every single day. The way people get comfortable in a place and in a social group is not through one really intense interaction, but through a bunch of smaller ones where you see things from different angles. You experience, what does my neighborhood looks like on a sunny day, on a cloudy day, or when I’m tired. These tiny, trivial things help you understand, much better, how things function. You get to know the vibe so much better and you meet people you wouldn’t meet if you were in an Uber.” “Algorithms To Live By is the best self help book I’ve ever read and it’s not intended to be a self help book, it’s intended to be an algorithmic look at certain problems that people see day to day. But, it helps me frame certain problems that I personally run into in terms of the algorithmic complexity. I realized the stress that I was feeling about certain things I was worrying about, were actually totally rational.” Subscribe to my “Monday Musings” newsletter to keep up with the podcast. TRANSCRIPT DEVON: I am very interested in coordination problems. I think that they explain a lot of the problems that we see in the world. Everything from climate change to nuclear disarmament to issues in cities and making it so that people can actually live in where they're the most productive, in housing policy. Well, I could go on and on and on with the list. So the solution to cooperation problems is incentive design. And I think clever solutions to incentive design are some of the reasons why humans have been able to progress to the extent that they have throughout the last few hundred years. So a primary example is contract law, it makes it possible for people to trust one another. Other examples are the development of risk and the concept of commodifying the risk. DAVID: I was having a conversation yesterday in another podcast and the guest was saying that in 1471, what happened was people were able to pool maritime risk. And what happened was it let big expansive ship voyages happen because you could pull risks together. And so if you invested in a ship and say that ship broke down, then you wouldn't lose all your money. And by pooling risk and by coming up with new financing and coordination solutions, you could do things that weren't previously possible. I thought that was really interesting. DEVON: Totally. That's a great example. Actually. Old maritime risk looks a lot like venture capital today wherein venture a lot of things fail. A lot of things fail spectacularly. But if you can spread out that risk across a whole pool of investments, it only takes a few to like really, carry the whole fund. In the case of maritime investments, a lot of the ships broke down, they had problems. But if one ship came back with a whole load of goods that could repay all of the rest of the costs. However, most, most investors back then couldn't take that risk because most of them would have failed. They might've lost all their money before they hit that one big one. And so by the development of that maritime risk, they were able to get past that sort of short-term problem and to get into the run longer returns. I think that's a really good metaphor for all sorts of problems that we run into wherein the short term it's rational to do a thing that is not as interesting, that it's not as lucrative, but it's also not as risky. But if we're able to coordinate as a society, as a company or whatever level you want to talk about. So one more concrete example to bring it down from like highfalutin, venture capital and maritime risk, you could just look at cooperation problems as simple as when you're dating someone for the first time, there's that standard wait three days until you text them back after you met them because you want to come off as cool. You don't want to come off as desperate, right? But if you really like each other, like all this is going to signal is that you don't like them very much. And that may be rational for you because you don't want to come off as desperate. But if you're both doing that, you end up with an outcome where it seems like you don't like each other very much and it takes a really long time to actually realize that you do. Ideally, you would have some neutral trustable third party who could be a person A, person B, out Alice and Bob like you both like each other. You told me that you liked each other, just go for it. You know, have fun. And I think a lot of healthy relationships that I've seen have actually started in this way because of some small quirk at the very beginning. It can be super useful, but a lot of the pain that I see my friends going through when they date is literally just the result of playing games because rationally, you're supposed to. It's basically a prisoner's dilemma. And so if you can have someone who forces you into the correct quadrant where everyone is better off, that's much better. DAVID: So then let's jump into sort of human cognition and human thought. Maybe begin with media. What interests you? Sort of when I think of where this conversation is going to go today. So much of it is about augmentation, right? Like cities augmenting the potential for humans interact and making that so much easier. And blockchain augmenting human coordination is making that easier. And then here with thought and having tools, augmenting human thoughts and letting us go places that we probably wouldn't be able to go if we were stuck in the mountains on our own. DEVON: I think the underlying reason I'm interested in incentive design is because it allows us to unlock human potential and allows people to do much cooler stuff that makes them happier, healthier, makes life more worth living. I see ways to augment our cognition as serving that same purpose though from a different angle. The umbrella term that people sometimes give this is tools for thoughts and we have basically the same brains that we and our ancestors had thousands of years ago, but we're able to do so much more. Part of that is because we've developed incentive design. The other reason is because we've developed tools for giving our cognition more leverage. And I use the term leverage actually very specifically. You can only get so strong no matter how much you lift. How once you go to the gym, like you're still not going to be an order of magnitude stronger. You're definitely not going to be two orders of magnitude stronger. However, if you design an engine, if you just even add a lever that gives you that leverage, you can do so much more with your muscles. I see that that translates directly to your brain. The most classic tool for thought and one that I think we tend to take for granted is writing. Most people think of writing as a way to just communicate ideas that they've had in their head to other people. It obviously does serve that purpose. People sell books for a reason, but I think it goes way beyond that. So one thing that writing does for you is it expands your working and your long-term memory. With the long-term memory, it's pretty obvious. You take notes, maybe you don't remember all the details, but you can look them up later. DAVID: To your point, even today I was writing something this morning and I wrote something that I wrote about a year ago and I have no recollection of writing it and I read it and I was like, wow, that's actually pretty smart and it really helped me, but I think to your point, there's a permanent element of writing and being able to sort of work through sentences and craft them, makes it so that you can achieve thoughts because of the repetition and the sort of tweaking and editing of writing that you can't do if you're just speaking like we are right now. DEVON: 100 percent. And I've also had that experience more times than I can count of like coming across something I've written and being like, oh, this is interesting, I wrote that. That came out of my brain. And as long as you have enough of a pointer to that idea that you can find it when it's necessary, or it gets surfaced by accident because you happen to open up an old notebook. That's extremely powerful. It makes you much better at remembering. I think even more importantly, a writing helps you with your short term memory, your working memory. There have been a lot of studies showing that a working memory is one of the highest things correlated with IQ and the ability to solve problems. And I think the reason for this is because if you have good working memory, you can hold a lot of state in your head and you can sort of fiddle with that state. You can hold contradictory but potentially correct ideas and outcomes in your head while you work through the problem. And then they collapse into one at the end. DAVID: Describe state real quick for someone who doesn't have the computer vocabulary that you do. DEVON: So state is what is the current status of the world right now. Let's say you're working through a personal problem and with your family or something, and you want to go through step by step and sort of understand the implications of what different people have done. You're getting the story from different friends, like maybe you're helping reconcile like your aunt and your uncle or something like that, having marital problems and you want to understand how they got to that point and how, given where they are right now at that point, like how different changes result in better or worse outcomes. Understanding the current state of the situation and then like fiddling with it and being able to hold all of those sort of partial computations in your head are really important to be able to compare them and to be able to move forward and find a solution. DAVID: So you're saying that writing and sort of computers at large now help us hold more state so then we can move on to higher-order tasks that perhaps aren't memory, that our brains are really well suited for. DEVON: Exactly. And they're more interesting. And working memory can kind of provide abstractions. I think the best metaphor for working memory or external working memory is like scratch paper, that there's a reason why math teachers always tell you, feel free to use as much scratch paper as you want. That's not just because they hate trees and they want to waste all paper. It's because being able to externalize that process is really, really helpful. Offload is the perfect word. DAVID: So back to writing. DEVON: I think it actually goes even much further than memory. With writing, it is fundamentally the process of externalizing an idea which allows you to play with it in ways that I don't think are so easy when it's in your head. I'm certainly not capable of it. Writing things down can reduce the amount of ego that you have as you fiddled with an idea. Maybe I'm just crazy, but when I wrote them down and almost pretend like the person who wrote that wasn't me, it was like, that's past Devon or someone else entirely. I can detach myself from it much more in a way where, when I am a thinking through something just in my head and lying in bed wondering. I'm not going to be as rigorous about it. Now that's not strictly worse. There are other things like everyone has great thoughts in the shower for instance. It's very common. But it doesn't serve all purposes, especially if you're trying to vet and find the nooks and crannies of an idea. When you write it down, when an idea has inconsistencies or gaping holes, they are clear and right in the face when it's written down in a way that is just so easy to gloss over when they're in your head. DAVID: And also when you're speaking, you can sort of gloss over some of the inconsistencies with emotion, right? If I speak really deeper and confident with what I'm saying, actually there's an element of trust there. It was really funny. So we had a meetup in Queens a couple of weeks ago and my buddy goes on Snapchat stories and he goes really confidently, coming to the meetup and he goes "Did you know that the reason it's called Queens is because Queen Elizabeth came to New York in 1754?" and you're sitting there being like "Man, you know, why are you being so smart here?" And then he finishes the thing and he goes "Well, I just made that up, but you believe me because I said it so confidently." So what writing does is it strips out the emotion out of a form of communication and it allows logic to take over emotion. DEVON: Right. And it allows you, it gives you something like almost physical to move around and change. I'm a really big believer that constraints are actually a good thing in your thinking because if you're completely working in a vacuum, you have nothing to push off of. You have no feedback cycles. Whereas if you can just get a draft onto the page, you can fiddle around with it so much more. And I find that writing that draft in the first place, that's usually the hardest part, but once I have something to work off of, it gets much, much easier. It helps you find implications that you didn't realize there were, which again, I don't fully understand like the cognitive science behind why this is. But by putting it on the page, you start seeing these almost trails in your head of like, given this, given I said this, what are the implications there? And you can actually follow those trails and like come back to them after you've written them down and realize, oh, this thing does have an implication I hadn't considered. One of my favorite things to do when I'm writing is just looking up synonyms for words. And the reason is not just to make myself sound smarter. Though, that's always a plus. But much more importantly is that by looking up synonyms, you can think about which words don't make sense here. Even though they are technically synonyms. And why they don't make sense and analyzing that is extremely useful. It's sort of a generator function for coming up with new ideas. Similarly, I think choosing the right word is also really important. Words come with such heavy connotation that picking the right one can be the difference between concepts really striking home and like feeling kind of flat. So I highly recommend people using sources when they write, all over the place. I actually use sources when I write code as well, for variable names and class names and things like that, because it helps you. Computer science and programming is basically the art of abstractions and abstractions is another way of saying names mostly. And coming up with really good names for things is a really critical piece of being able to write good software. So I think the source, I go to thesaurus.com probably 300 times a day. I have never actually counted, but it's a lot of times. I've always idea called playing chess with yourself. DAVID: Walk me through that. DEVON: So I think writing, especially the writing process, before you've published, as kind of like playing chess or yourself. There's that Pixar short, it's called like Geri’s Chest Game or something like that. And it zooms in on this guy sitting on a park bench playing chess and his partner isn't around. And you're like, oh, I guess maybe they went to the restroom, maybe they're coming back and then all of a sudden the camera zooms in and he's like on the other side, playing with the white pieces now. And then he flips back and forth and you realize he's just having a ton of fun and playing against himself. And he's really excited against himself. This is a hard thing to do inside of your own head, but it's actually a lot easier when you've externalized something because once you have that writing on the page, you can treat that as sort of another person almost. And play around with it in a way that is just much harder when you're by yourself. DAVID: Totally. And then the other thing is I think you have sort of an uncanny knack for generating unusual ideas and I don't say this to discredit you, but I think that you've built some systems to make that a hell of a lot easier. Walk me through different tiers of common knowledge. So I got an email last week from a guy who said, I love your writing, but the biggest thing preventing me from writing is that I always think that everybody else knows the things that I know and that's the biggest thing. Stopping. And I responded and I said, well, that's not necessarily the case, but I wasn't able to formulate something that I think that you've been able to grasp in terms of different ways of thinking about what is common knowledge? If you could describe that. And then how does that translate to writing and drafting an idea? DEVON: Yeah, that's a great question. So in the last year, I've found that writing has gotten a lot easier for me. There's probably a lot of reasons for this, but I think the core one is that I realized there's sort of three categories of topics that you can write about. There's the stuff that everyone knows that's like trivial to write about it because it's easy. The sky is blue. Okay, good. That's awesome. No one wants to read that. Very common knowledge. On the other end, there's stuff that no one knows yet or no one around you knows yet. And so it takes a really long time to figure it out, requires a lot of research. I can point to some examples of things I've written where I'm very proud of this writing that I've done, but it was a slog all the way through. Some of the stuff that I wrote about, the federal housing administration last year, just required poring through hundreds of documents from old FHA manuals and things that I don't know if people have looked at in a while and I found some novel stuff, but it also was a ton of work. Now there's this middle area between common knowledge and like really obscure knowledge of stuff that you have a unique perspective on because of where you happen to be in life and you understand it so intuitively that you can just talk and think about it fluidly. But actually a lot of people don't know it yet and I think that that is the sweet spot for generating a lot of streams. DAVID: How would you know when that's true? DEVON: That's a hard question. For a long time, I just thought that this the way I think is the way that everyone thinks. And so I was like, no one really wants to read about like my theory on flaking in San Francisco. Everyone in SF knows that already. DAVID: But what's your theory on flaking? DEVON: I haven't lived really in any other city, but my impression from talking with friends is that the rate of flaking is extremely high, with friends, with romantic partners, et cetera, relative to sort of sister cities like New York or Chicago or LA. I think part of the reason is that people in my social circles in San Francisco really understand opportunity cost well. There's a very casual culture here where it seems like an acceptable flake. And we also are like, even more so than other millennial types, are very technologically savvy. So if 10 minutes before your coffee date you're like, oh, sorry, I got caught up in something. Can we reschedule next week? It feels trivial because it's just a text. You're not going to literally stand them up because they just won't show up. But the problem with this is that it's another cooperation problem where we ended up in this equilibrium where it feels acceptable for everyone to flake all the time and just not show up to their commitments. But then like everyone's worse off because your scheduling is more complicated. You never really know. If things are going to happen when you think they're going to happen, you kind of don't want to be seen as like the pathetic one who doesn't cancel the plan. So you almost are incentivized to flake because if someone flakes on you enough times, you're like, well, I don't want to look like an idiot. I don't want to be taken advantage of here. So, next time we make plans I'm going to double book and see which one feels more interesting that day. And I think that leads to a real breakdown of trust and like happiness and satisfaction with relationships. Since I realized this, I've personally made a stance where I'm like, I will not flake on something unless I have an exceptionally good reason. And my friends I've noticed have also started to like follow up with me where I've put a stake in the ground. It helps that I wrote a blog post about it. I put a stake in the ground of like, I don't want this to be okay anymore because it's like making everyone's life worse. DAVID: What about San Francisco makes flaking uniquely common here? DEVON: I think there's a mentality of casualness where if you walk around the city, no one's ever dressed up. I mean, literally today I am wearing yoga pants and a tee shirt, and people want to look mostly clean cut, but they'll wear athletic gear almost all the time. I think that is indicative of a broader social casualness. Certain social norms are not as strong and in fact, the social norm is to not have strong social norms. And if you want to come off as like cool and casual. If someone is placed on you and you say something and you're like, hey dude, you flaked on me last time too. That's sort of like a point against you. You're seen as uptight or something. Maybe LA is also more similar to this, but I think like in New York, I feel like there's more of a seriousness in the way people interact where it's like your people get dressed up when they go out. Like when I go to New York, I always feel super underdressed. I think that carries over to a lot of parts of the culture. Where you don't break dates unless you have a good reason. Whereas I can look back on my calendar before I had all of these thoughts and honestly I was either breaking or having commitments broken on me like 50 to 70 percent of the time. And I don't think I'm unique in this because I've had conversations with a lot of people on my team. So I want to go back to writing, but I just want to summarize why I think that falls into the second category of common knowledge. So the first category is things that everybody knows like the sky is blue. The third category is things like the history of FHA housing, which probably requires a lot of research and nobody knows those things. But the second category is things that everyone sort of has a common framework for discussing like flaking. But because you are in a social circle that has a high opportunity cost in San Francisco, you have unique insight into that problem. And when we have a common knowledge, a common way of speaking about something and you have unique insight into that same sort of thing, that is when you should go pursue an idea and share it with the world. DEVON: Totally. I think that's a really good framing of it. I especially like the term common knowledge. Because I don't think anything I said in the post was surprising to anyone, but I think finally sitting down and putting the pieces together as to why all of this stuff comes together, I think is the difference. And just taking the time to sort of reflect on like various dynamics in your own life I think can be a really powerful generative tool. DAVID: I gotta ask, as you think about your writing, you think about your learning sort of your process for living, so to speak. It's cool because I like people like this. Your process for living is also a process for sharing, right? It's almost like a co-dynamic between the two where you live, you share, you share, you live, and I think that they, they sort of co-evolve and develop. Who were the people who have really inspired you to become like that and who were the mentors, digital or physical that have really inspired you? DEVON: There have been a lot. And this actually ties really nicely into the framework of like common knowledge to obscure knowledge. I think I used to think that a writing had to be this big formal process where you sit down with an argument or a spectrum and you try to decide where on that spectrum of arguments you lie and then you dive deep into the literature and you study it, and then you pop out weeks later and you've like displayed to the world this thing, this masterpiece you've been working on. A lot of writing does follow that. A lot of great writing. And I don't think people should stop doing that by any means, but I think there's this other type of writing that is treat your ideas less as a final project product and more as a process. Someone who I think does this very well, I don't know him personally, is Ben Thompson at Stratechery. He writes about the same stuff day after day, but each time he writes about it, he turns it a little bit in his mind. He comes at it from a slightly different angle and over the course of years he has built this canon of like what aggregation theory and he has this whole vocabulary that he's built up and you can see when you go back to his earlier writing, the idea is not fully developed at all, but the writing itself was the thing that developed the ideas. And I think that that is a huge mindset shift that I've had where I used to think first you have the ideas and then you write them down, but actually, you should have some seed of an idea. But then when you start writing, that's what actually brings it out and like causes it to flourish and grow. Another person who's played a really big role in helping me realize the value of this is Tyler Cowen (my podcast episode with Tyler). His blog, Marginal Revolution is just like one of my favorite things on the internet. It's the most ridiculous set of things. It's the intersection of all stuff and he doesn't take it that seriously. DAVID: Right. And the juxtaposition of ideas that you find there puts your brain in crazy places because he'll share, NBA basketball, his recent trip to Ethiopia, and then markets and everything in some weird market that you've never heard of. And I think that really cool ideas and really cool ways of thinking come not necessarily when you discover a new idea, but when you juxtapose ideas that you're vaguely familiar with and then your brain just goes in weird places through that. DEVON: Yeah, by having this huge diversity of sources and ideas, it allows for a type of lateral thinking that I think is really missing in the world. And something I particularly love about Tyler's work is that he both does and doesn't take it seriously at all. So by does, I mean he does, he spends all of his time doing this and he cares about deeply. So he's serious in that sense, but he also treats it as this big game where he's just like, you know, I'm just having fun, I'm pursuing the things I find interesting and I will go down the rabbit holes that seem interesting and ultimately they will become useful. DAVID: So talk about that. So that is a really important part of the learning journey, especially on the internet. so if you take before the internet, right? Like, think of the process of going into the library to research a project in college, right? You go to the librarian and you say take me to history and then it's between like book number 800-899 on the little codes and sort of you spend time in history. But you said something there that I don't think you realize that you said, but it is what it means to learn on the internet. It's sort of having hunches and ideas that certain rabbit holes are going to be interesting and having the audacity to go down those rabbit holes. But how do you gauge what rabbit holes do you want to go down? DEVON: So I think it doesn't matter. I actually think that almost everything can be interesting if you try to build a model for it. Now so things aren't interesting if you try to just rote memorize stuff and I think that that's going to be true with basically every topic actually. However, if you try to understand why things happen and build a causal model in your head, everything's interesting. When I was much younger I felt like, ugh, I like playing sports but I don't really enjoy watching sports. And I think this is a pretty typical like nerd opinion to have. But I realized that if you actually watch a game and you tried to understand sort of where the threads are, like if you pull this thread here, what happens to the fabric over there, have this ongoing game. It's extremely fascinating. Same with a mortgage history. Like if the FHA had done this like tiny little thing differently, like what would have been the rippling effects downstream and why do you think that's true? What are the other explanations for that same behavior? So I don't think the specific rabbit hole really matters that much as long as you are actively forcing yourself to build a model. DAVID: It's interesting because I was just watching the NBA finals and with the Warriors. So Stephen Curry, the reason where he is so good, is because after he passes the ball, he runs to the corner and tries to catch it and you just watch it and it's like, it's amazing to watch. But just, it's funny because. And then I would also watch switches on screens and what not. These are things that sound advanced, but they're super simple. And just by having two or three things that I could sort of hook to, then it opened the door for the rest of it. And it was funny because to go back to Tyler when, whenever I try to learn something the best advice that I've gotten from Tyler Cowen is the idea of entry points. Find something that you like, something that it's intuitive, a metaphor that you like, start there. And then as you begin any sort of learning journey, start with an entry point that you're familiar with and use that as your balances, your crutch to go explore new territory. DEVON: I strongly agree with that. So in high school, I thought of myself as much more of a liberal artsy type of person. I was always pretty good at math and science and so on. I didn't struggle but it just didn't click until I was 16, 17. My boyfriend and I at the time rebuilt a 67 Mustang that he owned and we did an engine swap. We replace the rear end, we did a lot of work on this car. And suddenly all of the engineering and engineering related skills that I've picked up over time became fascinating. I was like, I want to understand how all this works. I picked up something like thermodynamics books and like this, this car was the entryway to all sorts of things and now this is a particularly useful one because if we did it wrong we would die while we were driving it. So like we had pretty good motivation to figure stuff out. But I think finding some sort of entryway into that is critical. And I mean working on the car has literally changed my career in the sense that I don't think I would have gone into mechanical engineering and then computer science if it hadn't been for that thing. I mean the guy helps too, but the car was like really this concrete thing I could imagine in my head and then want to understand the pieces that made up the whole thing. DAVID: Totally. Well, I want to switch gears and talk to you about the thing that I'm most excited to talk to you about today, which is really cities and with the intersection of architecture and incentives. Maybe we can start with Singapore and I'm going to ask that selfishly because I'm really interested in Singapore. I think there's a lot to learn from Singapore, but you were also just there and you've written a lot about Singapore. What is so interesting to you about Singapore? DEVON: Oh man. What is not interesting about Singapore? So Singapore I think is one of the most interesting countries in history. And that's saying something, given that it's only been around for I think 50 or 60 years. It is a city-state. It's only about 5 million people. It is ethnically extremely diverse. There are ethnic Chinese, ethnic Malays, ethnic Indians, and many, many other groups there as well. And it's one of the safest places in the world and it has a booming economy and it has been for a long time, seen as like a center of stability in a region that has not always been stable. So all of those things are incredible about Singapore and that would be crazy for any city or any country, but especially considering where they came from, where they had, I don't remember the exact number, but they had GDP, I think equivalent to like Vietnam in the sixties, and now they have significantly higher GDP than almost any country in the world. One of the highest. Now GDP doesn't measure everything, but it correlates with a lot of important things. The reason I think if I had to pick one reason why I'm fascinated by Singapore, it's because it has one of the weirdest types of governance ever. DAVID: Describe the governance. DEVON: The governance is increasingly less so now, but it's quite to totalitarian. It's not very Democratic at all. DAVID: It's funny because my first thought is whoa, that's not good. But it seems like you're hinting at something else. DEVON: I also think it's not good. And if the whole world were run the way Singapore is run, I don't think that would be a good thing for the world. In part because of the specific things that Singapore does, like it still has like physical punishment and so on for not very big crimes. But then also beyond physical and capital punishment. It also just like having one system for the whole world is not a great thing. It's extremely fragile. Things can go wrong in ways that ripple across the entire world. Now that sounds extreme, but I bring that up because I think Singapore is interesting because it is the opposite. Not only does it not, not only is the whole world not governed the way Singapore is. Singapore is tiny. So even if you really strongly dislike what Singapore is trying to do, what it's experimenting with, it's relatively easy to leave. Now I want to add the strong caveat that like leaving the country you were born in is never an easy decision. And I am not like underplaying that. But it is relatively much easier than leaving a massive country that is not deeply interconnected with the world. And so the thing I find exciting about this country is that it provides this room for experimentation at a relatively low cost. If the entire United States were to take on an experiment, say universal basic income or something else entirely, and if it were to go wrong, it would just, it would be a disaster. It could cripple the country and it would affect roughly 20 million people, something like that. And like you also wouldn't even really be able to know if what the causal mechanism was if UBI was the thing that screwed up or something else entirely. Whereas if you can run a bunch of smaller experiments, which this is the idea of federalism, then you can actually compare the results. People can leave if they really don't want to be part of this experiment. And I think this is really important. People don't like the concept of being experimented on and I get it, but if we don't experiment with new models, we're never going to improve. And so I think the question shouldn't be, should we experimental or should we not experiment. It's like, yes we should, but we should find the ways to have the greatest diversity of experiments while also minimizing the cost. DAVID: Right. Like a lot of what China's doing is sort of A, B testing cities, but the downside risk is impacting millions and millions of people. And I think to your point about minimizing the downside, you know, you could argue that they've gone too far. DEVON: Yeah. I think there's a Slate Star Codex blog post that has a great word for this. It calls it archipelago communitarianism. The concept is like we could have a bunch of cities or very small countries, that had radically different systems and the only promise that they make to each other is that they won't stop the people from leaving those places if they really want to. Maybe there are a few other rules too. I'm not gonna remember the entire details of the blog post, read it a few years ago, but I love this idea of having like little islands of extremity to really push an idea to its limit. And if it, if everyone leaves them, that means that that's not what people wanted. DAVID: Well, that's sort of where the whole voice exit loyalty idea of crypto is coming from. Traditionally in terms of countries, you could voice and you could sort of vote and you could say we want to change the way that things are run by speaking up and there's an exit where you can leave. But traditionally with citizenship, you haven't really been able to leave your country. Even if you're abroad, you still have to pay taxes as an American citizen. And so you're forced to be stuck between voice and loyalty. Whereas now we're switching to where you can still voice your opinion, but if you don't like it, you can exit. And there's a lot of freedom that I think comes with that. DEVON: Yeah. I think it's not just that you can still voice your opinions and also you can leave, it's that you can voice your opinions often better if you have a very small community. A single person has much more sway over the outcome. So it seems very likely to me that it's much easier for a person in a very small community to be able to make a change in that community to begin with and like shape it in their own image than it would be for a massive country like the US or Brazil or something like that. So by bringing it down to a smaller scale, you both get added exit rates, but you also get a greater voice. DAVID: Totally. So you were just in Singapore. What stuck out about being in Singapore to you? Let's go to two places. What is the biggest thing that surprised you when you were there? And what is the biggest thing that you've been thinking about since you came back from Singapore? DEVON: I knew that Singapore had great Infrastructure. I knew that its citizens were well educated, that a lot of its systems just worked. But I didn't realize how much this is embedded in the psyche of the place. It's not just that like, stuff works well and some people forget about it and like go ahead and do their own thing. It's like the most central place of the city right next to Maxwell's Hawker Center, which is like a big destination in the core of the city. There's this place called the URA, the urban research association. I don't remember the exact acronym. Basically, it's this like big gallery on urbanism and like what it means to be an effective city with good governance and what it will take for this to continue and get better over time. I went into this gallery exhibit because I can't keep away if you say that it's like an urban museum. I'm like, okay. It's Devon catnip. I couldn't help but to go in. And I was there at 3:00 PM on a Tuesday and it was full of students, the sense that I got is that like every Singaporean student probably goes there like once a year. I don't even think that we have a gallery like that in San Francisco. And certainly not in the center of the city and kids definitely don't go there all the time. There was this overall sense of understanding of why things work so well, how things won't necessarily keep working well in the future unless we do something about it and like a sense of responsibility that people in the community have to like be a presence voice, which seems very contradictory with some sort of a more totalitarian style of ruling. But Singapore may be the only place in the world where there's a brain drain into the government and not out of it. That is very consistent with what I saw. It's very deeply respected to be a good technocrat. Someone who understands how systems work and like truly wants to make them better. DAVID: They pay well, what else? DEVON: They pay very well. There's really high prestige going in. I haven't really thought about this too hard. DAVID: Okay. Then we'll switch gears. So you said something really interesting about cities before we were recording the podcast that I thought that you phrased perfectly and that you're especially drawn to cities because they're in this middle of scale, right? Where they're big enough to have an importance on the world stage, right? Like a city like New York, San Francisco, Singapore, they're a big deal. But then there are small enough to be nimble and still sort of understandable like it's hard to sort of wrap your head around what it means to be American because they're just so much going on here, but then also sort of what you were talking about earlier in terms of experimenting. There's a lot of them so you can sort of abstract lessons from each one. And so it's this perfect size, perfect density, perfect volume that makes cities really interesting to study. Right? DEVON: Totally. I think that the nimbleness is really important. There is some digital ID that Singapore is rolling out for all of its citizens pretty soon and they're going to just do it. They have 5 million people, which is a lot of people to roll something out to, but it's big enough for this ID to really matter, but it's small enough where they're like, we can just do this, we can just, we can just make it happen. And I think that's thrilling that you can experiment with something of that size. At the same time, you have this really tight feedback loop. If your trash isn't picked up tomorrow, you're gonna notice within a week you're going to probably start writing letters and like your trash better get picked up. I think at the national level, the feedback loops are much longer and it's just harder to know if people are governing you well at all. And that's a recipe for disaster. It leads to much more misalignment of incentives. DAVID: Definitely. Tight feedback is key to learning. DEVON: It's key to everything. Like if you don't have a tight feedback loop, you're just not really going to improve I think, and you're actually very likely to do things that aren't purely for signaling that you care as opposed to actually doing the right thing. DAVID: Go off on that because that's an idea I haven't explored. DEVON: Yeah. Officials in the US tend to do grandstand a lot, at the federal level. And the reason for this is because they don't even really know if they're having the impact they want to have or that their constituents want them to have. The only real information that people get on both sides is like what someone said, even after the facts, even a decade later, it can be very difficult to draw any meaningful causality stemming from a particular leader. I think that's true in any organization ever. Even as small as a single person organization. You can't do randomized controlled trials on like everything or almost anything. But the problem just grows in scale to a huge extent as you get bigger. I think if you can keep it to a smaller size, it's like, well, you either did your job or you didn't. And the problems are much more manageable, the relationships are less opaque. It's just a much more transparent system overall. DAVID: Totally. So, I mean, for me what's been really interesting is in New York studying art decor, one thing that I love about architecture is I've been thinking about this idea a lot, where a lot of history is sort of subject to the narrative fallacy where it's written by the winners and the really good book on this is The People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. He admits that it's biased, but he tries to tell American history from the perspective of the losers. And if you have a generic understanding of American history, you're going to get so many ideas pumped into your head that are totally different. So what's really cool about architecture is, if you look at something like the Chrysler building and at the very top of it and in the lobby and sort of the birds hanging off the side, you know, 60 feet below the top of the building, you can see this like technological enthusiasm, this almost sense of like a utopian spirit that technology in the twenties and the roaring twenties was going to come and save the world. And through the architecture of New York, you can really understand the city in a way that understanding history might not allow you to do. DEVON: Yeah. And I think it's especially interesting to see how buildings change over time in reaction to that original time when it was created and how they shift. I think the moment when I really became aware of the importance of architecture was in my very first job, we started out in this very small office that was cozy and like my desk was far away from the restroom and the kitchen. So when I wanted to take a break, I'd have to walk past everyone and I'd have like a little conversation and I felt very positive about all my coworkers and I feel like we had a really good rapport. About halfway through my time there, we moved into a totally different building. It was supposed to be fancier, it was nicer by everything you could put on paper. But the shape of the rooms was super messed up. Basically, everyone was very close. It was more like a doughnut where like all of the good stuff was in the center and good stuff, meaning, like the kitchen. And so you didn't have to walk past anyone to go see it, which was kind of nice if you're focusing on a problem or you want some alone time, there are pluses to that, but you don't end up having these interactions. And as a result, I almost immediately started feeling like the only people I knew in the company were my team and a lot of the work that I was supposed to be doing was cross-functional. So this made me significantly worse in my job just immediately. Now, of course, this doesn't stop you from having coffee with a coworker and the sales team or something or organizing something with the product team or you know, inviting them to sit at your table at lunch. But these micro-interactions are really critical for building that rapport, for making, keeping people on context. I almost felt like I was a remote worker, and I don't mean to insult remote work. I think that there are huge pluses to that, but it's really undercut the benefits of being in the office as soon as we moved into this new place. DAVID: It's funny because I feel like so much of architecture now, we place such an emphasis on the outside of a building what most people see. But I don't know that we have the same sort of rich discussions about the experience of actually being somewhere. And I guess the example that comes to me is natural light. Like I value natural light in indoors just to such a high degree. It's like the number one thing that I care about in a building, but so often we look at the outside of buildings, so we say, oh that's beautiful. It looks great in a photo, but the experience of being inside of it, I don't actually know that the incentives are aligned for architects to think about that. DEVON: I agree. I mean if you have ever spent time looking for an apartment on Craigslist or a place on Airbnb, actually everything and I'll explain that later. But on craigslist it's like it tells you the square footage, it tells you how many rooms, how many bathrooms there are, which are obviously important details, but it does very little to describe features like natural light and things that make you actually happy, how livable it is. I think part of the problem for this is that it's a much harder thing to commoditize, which means that like it's harder to measure. It's harder to compare two things, there's not a strict measure that you can really use. But it really matters. It really matters a lot. The experience of being in a place is totally different from the way people will often describe a room, at least in describing a room in comparable terms. I think maybe it seems possible. Maybe someone just needs to build a vocabulary for it. DAVID: Okay. Let's play a little game. So if you had to take five metrics for deciding a house on Zillow, right? We have rooms square foot, but if you had five metrics that don't exist right now, what would it be? You do some, I do some. DEVON: Okay. I kinda like this, I'm thinking of it sort of like the, you know, the big five personality. It's kind of like that. DAVID: So you get three, I get two. DEVON: Let's see, I'd say flexibility. Like how much can you change the space to fit your own needs? Is it like very tightly custom designed? The purest example of this would be like the cabinets are built into the walls so you can't move the cabinets. Versus like a lot of ability to move stuff around. DAVID: Mine is the density of power outlets. Most houses don't have nearly enough. DEVON: Oh my god. The computer science building at Stanford has almost no power outlets, which is insane because you go there for the office hours and you know, everyone's there for hours and hours and hours and everyone's computer starts dying around hour three and there's one power outlet and the whole building. Yeah, that needs to change. DAVID: Here's another one. Where I really like houses where the rooms are super private and the open spaces are super public. So you have the kitchen, the living room, the dining room, all sort of in the same room because at the houses that I grew up in, the kitchen was always separate from the dining room. And so whenever we would cook as hosts, It was always sort of awkward because you sort of had to choose. Whereas you get this awesome communal vibe, but I think it really helps with family dynamics if all that is sort of in the same room and it has really good natural light and there's a nice ambiance in there because then people can cluster there. But then you balance that with like the privacy of the rooms. DEVON: I'll expand that one to like the ability to pass through. So in the house I live in right now, it's very hard to get to the backyard. DAVID: Yeah, describe this house because it's actually really cool. It's a commune with 10 people, but like really intelligent people here. DEVON: We call it an intentional community because commune has a lot of economic implications that probably don't apply. So I'm one of 10 people who live in this house. We're actually expanding to an upper floor and it'll be 16 soon. And we're just a group of people who we all care a lot about, having really easy relationships and what that means is I think a lot of the most meaningful and happiness-inducing experiences and interactions that you'll often have will be these little micro-interactions. It's very similar to what I was talking about with my old office. Where if it's really expensive to meet up with someone and hang out with them, it takes money, time, and energy. You have to have to call them, which seems like not a big deal. But here's an intention that's necessary therefore it to happen. You're only going to become close with people where you have an explicit reason to do so. Like sort of a motive almost. Whereas if you're just in the same place, this is why people love college so much. If you're just in the same place with a lot of people who are energetic, motivated, ambitious, like these amazing things will happen where you'll just bump into each other throughout your day and like amazing things will happen without intention and I think that's amazingly valuable and really easy to undervalue. DAVID: You make a really good point because that's almost in a place where that's not the case. Having relationships where you meet somebody right away is almost the mark of a good friendship. It was Saturday night, 11:00 PM a couple of weeks ago. My friend calls me and he goes, what are you doing right now? And it was the first time that happened to me in New York, but it was this like moment in our friendship where in order to do that. Like that happened all the time in college. Like that's college 101. Oh, what are you doing right now? But for it to happen in New York? First of all, was like shocking to me and second of all it was like this mark of our friendship where to get there with somebody takes so much more work because of the way that New York is built and that happens daily in this house here, which I think is really cool. DEVON: It's amazing. I mean, it's amazing you say that that's the case in New York because New York is probably one of the best places in the entire US for this. Like in the opposite sense of what you're talking about. Now imagine if you guys lived in Irvine, California or a far-flung suburb of Salt Lake City or something comes up for you to meet up with this person. Like right now it's just, you jump on the subway, you're there in a few minutes. Not that big of a deal. In those places, you have to like get in your car. Maybe you have to get your snow boots on. You can't get drunk and go home, which is also a good way to bond with people. Also, when you arrive, it will likely just be the two of you, probably no one else was invited, whereas like in a city, maybe you meet up at a bar where there's like a bunch of other random people around you who ended up being really interesting. Actually one of my closest friends. I met like at an event at the MoMa, and just because we like bumped into each other at a mixer afterward. That wouldn't have happened if we weren't in the city. You don't have things like the MoMa in far-out suburbs. And so this is like another example of not just architecture but the general built environment, having dramatic effects on the way you actually interact with the world. DAVID: So let's play another game. If you were to take, I gave you three, we're just going to do metrics again, three metrics or three data points that you could pick and you're going to choose where you live, the house that you lived, a location, what city, what the house looks like, what would the three that you picked be? DEVON: That's a good one. One would be, how long does it take for you to walk from where you live to like your top 10 favorite locations in the city? I think if the answer is a long time and especially if the answer is like you can't even walk there, that's not a good sign for me. Now I don't mean this to be normative for everybody. Other people do have other preferences. Some people want to like go on a big ranch in Idaho and like never see another human. Again, totally not my type but good for them. I'm not saying it's the case, but for me it's very important that I can walk places. I think the reason for this is because walking is a way to interact with your community in these small ways every single day where I think the way people get comfortable in a place in a social group is not through just like one really intense interaction, but through a bunch of smaller ones where you sort of see things from different angles you experienced, you know, what does my neighborhood looked like on a rainy day, what does my neighborhood look like when it's a cloudy day, what does it look like when I'm kind of tired? And these sound like tiny, trivial differences. But you can understand much better how things function. Maybe usually on a sunny day people will like to sit outside at Maxfield's coffee down the street, but on a different one, people sort of tuck inside and it has this closer vibe. You get to know the vibe just much better and you end up meeting people that you probably wouldn't meet if you were in an uber going from point A to point B all the time. So walking is one. Another one would be if for random and sort of once in a while type things like I had to get a necklace fixed the other day, how easy is it for this to be a part of your daily routine? So is it like you have to drive like way out of your way and find some really specialty store to do it? Or like what I did, I was able to walk two blocks away. There's a little jeweler who was able to fix it in three minutes and I walked back and that was like not even my whole lunch break. That was just a little pause in the middle of my day. I grabbed coffee on the way and I came back and up until that point, I had no idea that jeweler was there and we had a nice conversation. But it was just right there. And I love that my whole community can be inside of this little circle. Number three. DAVID: I'll give you my three real quick. So my first one would be natural light, as I've said many times before. That's super important to me. The second one, yours is walking, for me, it's like not having to use a car. So I actually sort of like taking public transportation so I just don't like driving and I don't really like being in cars. So those are the two. The third one would be I like being able to walk, especially to food. Like at my old apartment I was super close with everyone who worked at the bagel shop and I'm pretty close with all the ladies who work at maya taqueria, my local taqueria. And the last one would just be a high density of super intellectually hungry people, which for me is why I've chosen to live in New York. DEVON: Oh, I see. So we can expand this beyond built environment. I would definitely make that my third one as well. This is why I'm in San Francisco, New York maybe is a good choice too, but there is just always someone I can talk to about whatever crazy idea I have going in through my head or is going through their head any given day. I find not everybody here necessarily wants to discuss these ideas, but by using twitter you can actually find these people and like create this strong core where I've basically tricked my brain. The thinking that like everyone around me is just this crazy monster of ideas, continually coming up with new things. There's so much intersection of like different types of people doing work in the city. Everything from like researchers to engineers to entrepreneurs to artists. And unfortunately, fewer these days, as a city gets more expensive. And they're all just mixed together in this pretty small city where you can always find them. But then I think the important component is you also have to have some tools that sort of overlay this to help find them. Just walking around the city. Like I was talking about before, won't surface all of these people and you also are less likely to get outside of your current network if you just stick in your small neighborhood. DAVID: Let's do a quick fire round. So I'm going to ask you like five, six questions and try to keep your answers to like 30 seconds or less. Why do you love Stewart Brand so much? DEVON: He is a polymath. A lot of people take crusades on things. They pick one idea and they just drive it for years and years. Stewart takes hundreds of ideas and makes them all good and is still able to keep a really strong sense of identity despite not having like one thing that he ties himself. DAVID: So I have a theory that personality will end up being almost like the last mode and that sort of so much of what's happening in society right now is like brands are sort of disappearing where many people have less likely to have a favorite brand. But I think that the internet has made it really easy to connect with people. And Stewart Brand is always sort of been a pioneer of technology and I think that people can move around and explore different things through their personality in ways that institutions can't. And I think that that's really helped somebody like Stewart Brand. I don't actually think that focusing on the same thing is like a vector that really matters when it comes to consistency with a person. DEVON: I think that's true. And I think Stewart and Tyler are two fantastic examples of this being 100 percent possible. I think that most people don't realize that and they think that they have to pick one thing and so that you see th

David and Blair compare each other's competitiveness, and then offer some specific ways principals can actually collaborate with their competitors as a part of building beneficial business relationships.   TRANSCRIPT BLAIR: David, today we're going to talk about how to crush your competition, is that right? DAVID: Instantly I got very excited about the concept, that's really not what we're going to talk about, but I love that idea. Oh my God, I'm just too competitive, but that's actually the opposite of what we're going to talk about I think, unless you want to switch it at the last minute. BLAIR: No, I was with a bunch of guys the other night, and had this little men's night retreat thing, and maybe more than half of them were entrepreneurs. One guy was winding down a business, and he was saying, "I'm not sure if I'm competitive enough to be in business." I didn't say anything, but I thought, I suppose that's vital for you to be competitive in your nature to succeed in business, would you agree with that? DAVID: Yes, I would, but there's something wrapped around competitiveness that is just as important to me, and that's risk-taking. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: It does seem like the two of those are related, that's why I quit doing a few things outside of work, because I realized I was not as competitive as some of the young fools that were willing to sacrifice their body, and I wasn't. It's not that my body is so precious, it shouldn't be sacrificed, it was more I was allergic to the pain. Yeah, there's something about competitiveness and risk-taking yeah, for sure. I'm competitive, do you think of yourself as competitive? BLAIR: I've measured my competitiveness and your competitiveness, and you're more competitive than I am. I'm as competitive as the average person, but the makeup of that competitiveness is a little bit skewed. You can break down competitiveness into different forms, so I think of myself as average competitiveness. DAVID: Okay, this is more about how do we tame or tamp down some of our competitiveness for our advantage, and for the advantage of the world really. BLAIR: You really want to talk about this idea of collaborating with your competitors, is that correct? DAVID: Right, yeah, and it's something I've learned in my own business life, but I've also tried to coach my clients to do it as well. It's been really interesting, it's a concept that strikes us like, did he really just say you should be more collaborative with your competitors, or did I mishear him? No, that's really what I mean. BLAIR: Okay, so we think of being in business just like my friend said the other night, we think of it as business is highly competitive, and we need to be cutthroat, and we need to always have an eye on our competition. We're trying to best them, I'm fond of saying that positioning is an act of relativity. You position relative to your competition, and in endeavoring to position your firm against your competition, you're trying to kill them. BLAIR: Now that's an overstatement, but that's the prevailing view, right? The competitors are there, people that ... It's your job to beat, it's your job to win against them, and you want to fly in the face of that a little bit, so where did this idea come from? DAVID: Well it's been rooted really in 20 plus years. I did something a little crazy back in the late 90s. I wanted to start an event, and that was obvious to me, I wanted to start an event. Okay, so what kind of an event would it be? Well it needs to be an event that's going to attract a lot of people. How do we do that? Well, the content has to be fantastic, it's like okay, then I just stopped in my tracks, because I'm thinking, well if the content's going to be great, then I've got to invite a lot of my competitors there. DAVID: We don't see eye to eye on everything, but I need to have them there, because they're very smart. People are going to come and want to hear from them as well, like what kind of a stupid conference would it be where I'm the only one speaking? That's not a conference, that's like your own personal platform. I was faced with a decision, do I really want to give my competitors a platform? DAVID: I was nervous about it, other people were a lot more nervous about it than I was, they thought I was crazy to be doing that. I thought, this is a worthwhile experiment, and maybe there's some value in being the person who organizes the conference, and does the programming for it. There turned out to be that value, but it was a wonderful experience. It opened up my eyes entirely to the fact that I don't have to make somebody else lose in order for me to win. DAVID: That I can let my guard down, and it actually translated into the way I run events now. People come to an event for the first time, and they're surprised that within about an hour, an hour and a half of the start of the event, people are starting to share stuff that they would not have thought they'd see themselves sharing at the beginning. They're much more transparent about it, and it's just sort of that style that I like to have, it fits with this notion of competitors. DAVID: Recently what struck me, and then I'll shut up for a minute, because I know I'm taking a long time to answer your question. I was listening to the Dan Patrick daily talk radio sports show, and he was talking about interviewing Kobe Bryant one time. They were talking about how do you get yourself up for a game that doesn't really matter? In other words, maybe you're out of the playoffs already, or you know you're going to beat this team, because they're not good. DAVID: What Kobe Bryant said, was at the end of the game, I want my competitor to question why they even got into the sports game. I want them to question why they even became a basketball player, right? I thought, well that's kind of funny, but it's really not the kind of spirit I want as a collaborator. BLAIR: Even when he's playing in a game that they're almost certain to win in, he's still thinking about crushing the spirit of his competitors. DAVID: Right, yeah, what's the point of that? BLAIR: Do you still have a page on your website that lists your competitors? DAVID: I do, right? I do. BLAIR: Am I on there? DAVID: I don't know, I know you don't want to be, so let's just say you're not. BLAIR: Yeah, I think you had me on there, and I called you out, I said, get me off that list. DAVID: Right. BLAIR: I don't know why that is, okay, so you conceived of this idea, this event, and you had a partner in this event, can we name the event? DAVID: Yeah, it's MYOB, Mind Your Own Business. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: The how people, were the financial partners and the marketing partners, and I did the programming. BLAIR: That's where you and I first met in 2003. I reached out to you when I started my business somewhere in 2002, and you invited me to speak at this thing. DAVID: Yeah, and look at how much good has come from that, right? BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: You and I have become friends, we do a podcast together, we share a lot of clients. Here's the biggest thing, I learned so much by having you there. I mean the very first time I heard you speak, I learned so much. It made me such a better advisor, and the same could be said of the other folks, not everybody, but most of the other folks that I invited. It's like, oh wow, it made me a much better advisor by listening to them in that kind of a setting. BLAIR: Let's walk through how somebody can, once they get their head around this idea, how they can put it into practice. First, I can imagine what the objections are, right? When you're talking to somebody about this idea of be more open to your competitors and collaborative with them, what's the first thing that comes up objection wise? DAVID: Well it comes up a lot too, and it's like, "Oh, that's a good idea, but I can't put that on my website, because what if my competitor's see it?" It may be something like our new focus, that's usually not as big an issue, but things like client criteria, or some unique way we have of going about solving problems for clients, or a case study, or something like that. They envision these competitors in the wee hours of the morning sneaking onto their website and furiously copping things down and grabbing screenshots, and then reinventing their own firm, as if they're really doing that. DAVID: That's the objection, I don't want my competitors to see that. I don't want them to copy me. Do you hear that, or do you see it in other ways? I'm curious if it's just my clients. BLAIR: I'm not sure if I hear it a lot, but I sense it a lot, and I've experienced it myself too. My own experience has been, if you're really carving out a path of leadership in something, it means you're constantly, by the reinventing your business, or coming up with new IP, with new ideas, and by the time somebody's adopted something that you've ... Let's call it stolen, stolen something that you've put on your website and made it their own, you should be somewhere else, right? You should be off into the distance. DAVID: Right, and that's part of your practice, part of my practice, part of what we urge clients to do is to reinvent themselves frequently every couple of years maybe. While this may work beautifully for you now, it's not going to be the thing that you're doing down the road, reinventing. Let's talk about the whole positioning thing, how many competitors does Win Without Pitching have? BLAIR: It really depends on how you frame the question. If you look at sales training for creative professionals, I don't actually know of any other organization that frames their value proposition, the discipline in the market, the combination of discipline in the market that way. That would be ridiculous for me to say there's no direct competitor, so that's at the very narrowest, who else says we just do sales training for creative professionals? DAVID: Right. BLAIR: Our real competition is any new business consultant to the creative professions. DAVID: Right. BLAIR: Anybody who's selling sales training. Most sales trainers aren't specific to a market, so anybody in the sales training business, any new business consultant. DAVID: If somebody popped up, let's say you just heard through a client of yours or something, and they said, "Hey, have you seen [inaudible 00:09:14], it looks a lot like yours?" Pretend that you have this conversation with them, and you look at the website. It is the same positioning, sales training for creative professionals, or creative entrepreneurs, what would your reaction be? BLAIR: My reaction would be, I would gird myself for a fight in the most positive sort of way. I love a challenge, if somebody was using that same language, I would just steel myself and whip my team into a frenzy, and run out into the battlefield. DAVID: I'm picturing this movie scene, yelling to this guy. BLAIR: Yeah, Braveheart. DAVID: Right. BLAIR: Somebody would have to be using very specific language, very specific to me. One of the things that I've seen over the last few years, is when I started my business back in 2002, when I was a new business consultant, there were very few new business consultants. Whoever was out there, the Internet was still a relatively new thing, right? Web browsers were about seven or eight years old in 2002. BLAIR: If there was a lot of competitors out there, I wasn't aware of them, I was really aware of two or three. Nowadays there's rarely a week or a two week period that goes by where I'm not made aware of a new business consultant. I made this conscious decision a couple of years ago to just quit thinking about them as competitors, and just to think about them as my future distribution network. BLAIR: I recently put out a call on LinkedIn saying I want to forge a closer relationship with the world's best new business consultants. I know I met a lot of consultants out there who say, "I give your book, the Win Without Pitching Manifesto to all of my clients." What I said in this post on LinkedIn, I had about 30 inquiries from it, is if you're already preaching the principles, and if you're already teaching the Win Without Pitching way, and you're interested in formalizing the relationship, then reach out to me. BLAIR: I had to see somebody else doing that, and somebody else talk about the benefit of it just the way that you're doing it now. DAVID: Yeah. BLAIR: For me to just have this switch in my mind. You've been very good at this, and you've been a very good role model for me in this, in being a generous competitor, and it hasn't been in my nature. I'm the person who loves a fight, so something has shifted in me in the last couple of years, and I look around at the people I know in business, and some people that you and I both compete with. They are such open, generous, sharing people, even though we are fairly direct competitors. DAVID: Right. BLAIR: I've just decided that these are going to be my role models in that front too. Now, I'm mellowing in my old age or something, because something's definitely changed. DAVID: Yeah, it is really interesting to see. I'm doing an event shortly, and I've invited ... You'll be speaking there, it's really important to me that you speak there to address the whole sales training process. I'm just unqualified to even speak to it, but I feel like the people coming need to hear that. Then, I think four of my competitors will be there. They won't have a platform, but I will introduce them, they're coming for free. DAVID: I invited them, and I plan to put in the work. We're going to split up into groups, and we're going to try to apply these positioning principles to the individual firms. These competitors know what they're doing, and so the evil side of somebody might hear that and say, "Well, wouldn't someone just hire one of these." It's like, well that's fine, because in my mind feeling like you have all these competitors is really misunderstanding the fact that it's not just about what you do, but it's about how you do it. DAVID: I have a very specific style, and whenever I try to cross the line and be somebody that I'm not to a client, like more of a coach or something like that, I am doing a disservice to them, and I'm doing a disservice to me. I find it really wonderful to have these other folks who are very good at what they do, who have a more appropriate style for a certain client. When I think about living in a world where I couldn't recommend other options for my clients, it's a little bit sadder to me, because I do want my clients to get help, even if it's not with me. DAVID: Now what's interesting though, is we have different approaches to this when we're not as busy. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: We tend to be a little bit less generous when our businesses aren't run well, when we don't have a steady stream of opportunity. That's just another argument of 100 arguments to run your firm well, so that you're not paralyzed by not enough work, or thinner margins, or something like that.   BLAIR: I was going to play devils advocate here a little bit, and push back and say, well it's easy for you to be magnanimous this way, you're the worldwide leader in your field. You've got all the work you want, I think most people from the outside looking in would see that, so it's easy for you to just say, "Well there's plenty for everyone." If you're running an independent creative firm, you've got a dozen people, you're not seen as meaningfully different, do you think the principle still applies? DAVID: No, I don't, and I think the solution there is to have a positioning where it's so much clearer to you and to your prospects where you're a perfect fit. If you haven't nailed that positioning equation yet for your firm, then I think this is a very dangerous thing to do, right? Now you could still be generous in some other ways, like you could be generous in sharing contractors with other agencies, or even some employees. In terms of clients, I think that would be a dangerous thing to do, if you haven't ... DAVID: Well, a couple of things, not just positioning, but also having this lead generation process in place. You and I have talked quite a bit about this, how we have a simplified plan that's driven by discipline, so if you don't have the positioning and lead generation in place, then it's a pretty dangerous thing to be this magnanimous. The way to fix that is not to be selfish, the way to fix this is to fix your positioning and lead generation. BLAIR: Do you find that your generosity towards your competitors is returned? Are you referred business or other similar invitations from these competitors? DAVID: In some cases I am for sure. I think about Tim Williams for instance who I think does really good work. I've sent work his way, he's sent work my way for sure. I think about Carl Sachs, I think about the folks at Newfangled. I think about Philip at the Consulting Pipeline podcast. I think about Drew McClellan, I hate mentioning names, because there's going to be a bunch of names I've left off, but in general yes, absolutely. DAVID: Even at the beginning where they're taken aback by the generosity, they'll soften up over a few years, and discover that it's real. I'm really trying to help them, I'm not trying to hurt them. That started years ago, like you write a new book, or you have a new program, tell all your competitors about it in a gracious, respectful way. Hey, this is where I'm headed, just want to let you know, and oh by the way, here's a copy of the book, hope you're doing well. DAVID: You see an article that's really helpful that would benefit them, you send it to them. I tell you, a big one is speaking engagements. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: If I've been on the platform somewhere, and I talk with the program person, I say, "Listen, this was fantastic, I loved this event. I appreciate you inviting me, do you want a couple of suggestions for people who are also would be a really good fit for this?" That's a perfect opportunity to extend that graciousness to one of your competitors. I find that you're not hurting yourself in any way, you're simply helping everybody in the process. DAVID: I've found that to be very effective, and I've had a lot of my competitors do the same for me, where they've introduced me to a speaking opportunity, and it's been very, very much appreciated. BLAIR: A guy I know who does over a million dollars a year in speaking fees said to me, the number one lead source for speaking engagements is other speakers, right? They get approached and say, "Well, I can't do it, but you might want to think of this other person." He said it's important for you to cultivate relationships with these other speakers, and that means you start referring speaking opportunities to them. DAVID: That's interesting. BLAIR: Two weeks later I was invited to speak in Dubai when I was in another part of the world, and I referred to my new friend. DAVID: Yeah, because you didn't want that long travel, yeah, absolutely. BLAIR: Let's talk about some specific ways agency principals can collaborate with their competitors. I think I've got a list here of some things that you've identified. At the top of the list you've got learn how to run your firm from each other. Do you want to unpack ... Oh, I just said the word unpack, do you want to peal that apart? DAVID: That even sounds more pretentious than unpack. BLAIR: Like an orange. DAVID: Let's just say unpack, okay? BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: Yeah, what's the possible benefit in not helping another principal run their firm well? Hoping that they'll fail? Well, that seems pretty evil, right? The one area where it seems like there's the most benefit for everybody, is to learn how to run your business well. You've learned some principles about key metrics you want to look at, or how to hire the right person, or how to run a meeting better, or how to have the best relationship with your bank, or there's 100 things we could list there. DAVID: Those are the kinds of things that I would put at the top the list, because nobody enters this field with the business management training that would really benefit them. They're all starting from some other skill path, not a role path, and so they come into the business, and they have to learn everything either from somebody that they worked for, and often that's the best place to learn it. DAVID: A great example of a principal that you worked for before you started off on your own, or they learn it from maybe an advisor, like a paid advisor, or maybe they learn it from another principal. That would be the first area I would suggest collaboration, it could be informal or formal. I find that most principals have three or four people that they're friendly with, they can just shoot them an email, or get on the phone and say, "Hey, I'm facing this noncompete situation, what have you learned? Can you introduce me to a lawyer?" Something like that. BLAIR: Oh, that's great, including on here help find good employees. I was thinking about there's an agency principal in Australia you and I both know him. I've done a bunch of work with him. He's told me some stories of when he's had to fire people, they don't say fire in Australia or UK, they sack them, which always sounds extra harsh to us in North America. He's told me stories of he'd bring somebody in who isn't working out, and says, "You're not working out, I'm letting you go, but I think you've got great skills in these other areas, so I've lined up two interviews for you today." DAVID: Wow. BLAIR: Yeah, so he's ruthless when it comes to correcting hiring decisions, but he's very kind in how he goes about it, and he recognizes that everybody's got strengths, and he's got good relationships with his competitors. He's very clear about why he's letting that person go, and why he thinks his competitors should think about bringing that person on, and usually in a different role. DAVID: Right, yeah I think that's great, like if it's for the right reasons, there could be something about the style of this firm that wouldn't be true of another firm. It's not like they're a bad person, they're just not a good fit for this particular role. BLAIR: Is there a line that there's the danger of crossing? The first word I wrote down when you sent me notes on this was collusion. DAVID: Yeah. BLAIR: At some point can you get too close to your competitors? Does it cause some sort of problem, or the perception of problems maybe among clients, or maybe even regulators? DAVID: Yeah, well in the US that would fall under the jurisdiction of the FTC, Federal Trade Commission. Where collusion is very clear, and you can get your hand slapped pretty quickly would be around pricing. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: Not so much which opportunities to pursue, although you could get in trouble there, like hey, if I don't pursue this one, can you not pursue that one, that would be collusion. The main area would be on pricing, like how about what's your price on this? There have been some specific lawsuits, the handbook of pricing and ethical guidelines was one example that had to get rewritten, because of a lawsuit as I understand it. DAVID: That strikes me as evil, and I don't think we're talking about that so much. It's more like here's an example, so let's say you're going to respond to an RFP, okay? I know, don't shriek on me here Blair. You're going to respond to an RFP, and you know that another agency has been through an RFP process with them. You might just call them up and say, "Hey, what was that like? Is this even worth it?" Most of the time it's not going to be worth it, but that would not be collusion, that would just be simply sharing public information. BLAIR: I hadn't heard the story around pricing, I was doing a talk on pricing about 18 months ago to an industry group slightly tangential to the creative professions. There was a lawyer in the room, and he kept warning about collusion, he did not like the idea that the competitors were in the same room talking about pricing. I thought he was being ridiculous. DAVID: I think he was being ridiculous, where it can be collusion, is if we're talking about a specific instance. It's not about for instance, the labor law allows you to band together against a common enemy so to speak, that's not collusion. Collusion would be a specific instance related to pricing usually. BLAIR: Gotcha, all right, so let's say somebody's listening to this, and they're warming up to the idea of being more collaborative with their competitors, but they don't currently have relationships with those competitors. How do they go about it? Where do they find these people? Maybe they're so highly specialized, or poorly specialized, they're just not sure who their competitors are, how do you go about it? DAVID: Yeah, if you're poorly positioned, most of your competitors are the ones in your locale geographically. You know those, because they're there, and you share employees, and so on. If you're well-positioned, your competitors are more known to you, even though they're not close to you geographically. These are the names that keep coming up when you are competing for work and so on. DAVID: That would be one way to identify them, obviously Google's our friend here. Another way to identify them, is going to trade conferences. Trade conferences are almost always vertical, or they could be more demographic oriented conferences, horizontal conferences, where you keep seeing the same people there, not so much exhibiting, but you just see them there, they're speaking and so on. DAVID: You notice that these are the folks whose articles are appearing in the same places that yours are, so just connecting with them through your contacts, within a particular focus would be a good way to connect with them. Another might be a common mentor, I get this question a lot, like do you know of somebody that's doing this that I could talk with and so on? I don't connect people who aren't clients of mine, but if they are clients of mine, then I'll try to find somebody to connect them with. DAVID: I actually put round tables together, which are specific attempts to do this, that's not really the subject of this podcast, but that's an example of what a paid advisor might do. Sometimes a common mentor, so like if you're getting advice from an older woman or gentleman in your town who's coaching you on running a good creative business, because they've been in that field, and they've slowed down a little bit, they usually are going to know somebody else that would be a good fit for you. DAVID: I am talking about cooperating with folks who are definitely otherwise competitors of yours. I'm not talking about people that you might meet in a YEO, or YO kind of a context, I'm talking about people that you'd compete with normally. BLAIR: Okay, are there instances where this can go wrong? Obviously, I wouldn't ask you to name names, but I'm sure there has to be situations where you started being magnanimous towards a competitor, and then at some point realized this is a one-way relationship where this person is taking and not giving, and your idea about them ended up changing. DAVID: For sure, yeah, I can think of an attorney actually in New York that I was referring lots of work too, and it turned out that not only did they never share generously, but they kept asking, kept asking, and it became annoying. I just basically shut them down, they still do good work, so I haven't done anything to hurt them at all. If somebody is actually out to hurt me, then we come into the Kobe Bryant crush them phase, which is actually the evil side of this, and it's kind of fun. DAVID: You have to do that once or twice a year, right? Otherwise, I was just wondering if people are still listening at this point. Otherwise, it just doesn't happen, because who are the people that are going to hear the worst things about me as an advisor? It's going to be my competitors, right? If my competitors hear about me, but their experience in working with me is not at all matching, they're going to pause the conversation and say, even just to themselves, you must not be a good client, because that's not how I've experienced him. There's so many advantages here to make this work well. BLAIR: Yeah, it strikes me as this is going sound a bit corny, it's a bit like love though, right? The more you give, the more you get, and the more open you are, and more gracious you are with your competitors, the more likely you are to get back. Even if it's not a full reciprocation, there's still that feeling of you helping others, of yourself worth, etc., it's got to escalate. DAVID: Yeah, for sure, and there are many times when somebody does great work, and you've sent them lots of work, but they're not sending you work. That's okay, because they might be at a different place on the referral chain. In other words, by the time they hear of a client, they're past their need for you, whatever you happen to do along that chain. DAVID: It can't be a tit-for-tat thing, it's really just about surrounding yourself with people who are generous in life in many ways. I find that, that's a very satisfying experience, almost regardless of the outcome. BLAIR: Well, you've convinced me, I'm going to start thinking about maybe referring a piece of business to you. DAVID: Yeah, it's about damn time honestly. BLAIR: Thanks David, this has been great. DAVID: Bye Blair.

David Corbin: Keynote Speaker, Business Adviser, President of Private and Public Corporations, Inventor, Mentor and pretty good guy…..David M. Corbin has been referred to as “Robin Williams with an MBA” because of his very practical, high relevant content speeches coupled with entertaining and sometimes side splitting stories. A former psychotherapist with a background in healthcare, he has served as management and leadership consultant to businesses and organizations of all sizes – from Fortune 20 companies to businesses with less than 1 million – and enjoys the challenges of all. He has worked directly with the Presidents of companies such as AT&T, Hallmark, Sprint as well as the Hon.Secretary of Veterans Administration and others. http://davidcorbin.com Notes from the interview: Why is it important for nonprofits to be clear about their brand? You have a brand. If you don't work at defining it, your audience will. You create an impression by your actions, intent does not stop that. Everything you do adds to the impression you create. Make believe you are always being observed and act accordingly. Audit your service by experiencing your deliverable. Would you do business with your organization? When working with people to build organization framework, when to we focus on brand promise? From the beginning. Why do we exist? Who do we serve? How do we want to be known? What do we really want? Who are we really? Everything we take on needs to fit who we are at the core! Do the Brand Audit right at the beginning(Before you deliver any services or approach anyone)! Team must be fully engaged all the way through. Quality and Clarity Determine Financial Results. Growth must start at an individual level for the organization to grow. People – The only completely renewable resource of any organization! (And the most valuable) Culture is a reflection of leadership! How Do Leaders Keep Our Internal and External Brands Fresh? Integrity – Living the values of the organization. Boss Watching – Biggest Sport! Model the behaviors the brand represents. Transformation consists of a series of small steps, often many of them! It starts with one in a row! Everything counts when it comes to integrity. Leader must lead by example. The Transcript NPC Interview with David Corbin Hugh Ballou: Greetings, this is Hugh Ballou. We are live with the Nonprofit Chat. Today, we have a guest who will bring energy to a lot of different topics tonight. David Corbin is a friend of ours. We have known each other for a number of years. This is the first time we have had a live interview, so welcome and thank you for being here. David Corbin: My pleasure. I'm happy to be a live interview. I hope the other ones weren't dead. What are you trying to say, Hugh? Hugh: You're a live one, man. I like guests to start out by telling people something interesting about yourself. Why do you do what you're doing, and what is your background that gave you… The few times you and I have had some deep conversations, I have really been impressed by the depth and breadth of wisdom that you have on these topics that you talk about. Give us a little paragraph or two about David Corbin. Who are you, and what brought you to where you are today? David: Well, I'm a human being. I'm not a speaker. I'm not an author. I'm not a doctor. I'm a human being, and I play the role of a keynote speaker, inventor, and mentor. I am a guy who loves life. What can I say? If there is a way- As I did yesterday, I had a client fly out from Mexico. The objective overall was for him to be happy, healthy, prosperous, and the like. I am the guy who likes to do that and likes to be that as the extent I can continue to learn and grow. I do all of those things. As you know, you have been in my audience, and I have been in yours. I love to share ideas from a platform. I like to consult with corporations at the highest levels and then solopreneurs. I love to run my 5K every Saturday, and I love to play tennis. I love to hang out in my backyard. I look out there, and I have chickens running around and a turtle in the pool. Life is great. Hugh: You're in San Diego, California. David: I am. Home of Tony Gwynn, the famous Padre. Today I was honored to be invited to the unveiling of his statue in our little town here. I was also with his family at Cooperstown at Baseball Hall of Fame as he was inducted with Cal Ripken. I am in southern California, San Diego. The town is called Poway. Hugh: Love it. The first time we met, we were in Lake Las Vegas, and you had just published Illuminate. You're not an author, but you write some really profound stuff. You actually were in a suit and tie that day. What inspired you to write that book, and what is it about? David: I'll tell you what it's about. It's about facing the reality of situations in our life and our business. You see, I have read the positive mental attitude literature, and I have had the honor of meeting Dr. Norman Vincent Peele and some of the luminaries in positive mental attitude. I am honored to be in the latest Think and Grow Rich book, Three Feet from Gold. Nowhere in that literature does it say ignore negative issues, that we should push them under the carpet as it were. I came to realize that my most successful clients were individuals who had the courage to face those issues, not just accentuate the positive as the song goes. But rather than eliminate the negative, I learned the key is to illuminate the negative in a model that I call “face it, follow it, and fix it.” That is what Illuminate is about. It came from the realization from practical experience, that whether it is a nonprofit, a for-profit, or a for-profit that doesn't intend to be a nonprofit but ends up that way, no matter who it is, the individuals who have the courage and the character to face the problems head-on, that is what I found to be the greatest model, and hence the title of Illuminate: Harnessing the Positive Power of Negative Thinking. Hugh: What I can count on if we are having conversations is the words coming out of your mouth are not what I can expect from anyone else, because David Corbin is one of the most creative people I have ever met. I remember when we were introducing ourselves at CEO Space one time, one person said they were a consultant, and then you came along and said, “I am an insultant,” and I said, “I'm a resultant,” and your head went, Whoosh. At least one time I one-upped you. David: It's on my website now. There is an asterisk at the bottom and says, “Maestro Hugh Ballou, genius extraordinaire.” Hugh: I am honored, David Corbin. I have not seen that. A resultant in a pipe organ is a pipe that is not as long. A sixteen-foot pipe has a certain pitch. They don't have space, so they miter it, and the result is a lower tone from a shorter pipe. We actually create a bigger result without having to be bigger ourselves. We can amplify the sound by what we do. You and I, I love this Illuminate. Two weeks ago, I talked to David Dunworth, who is also an author. He has quoted you. We talked about that. You illuminate a lot of people you maybe don't even know. It's really how we amplify what other people do. I'm just energized by the fact that you're here. You have another book that is new. You've written about brand slaughter. Is that the title? David: It is. I was just on the TV news this week talking about that. It was fun. The guy couldn't get over the title. The concept is- People create their brand based upon their values and the brand promise out to the world. They put a check off and think they're done. Don't stop there. You're either building your brand—you, your employees and everyone else in your organization—or killing it. Nothing is neutral. You are either engaged in brand integrity or engaged in what I call brand slaughter, just like manslaughter in the first, second, or third degree. We can read in the news that people are convicted of manslaughter, but you don't often see people convicted of brand slaughter, except maybe in the case of United Airlines or Pricewaterhousecooper in front of 30 million people after 87 years of great service to the Oscars. I don't know if it's brand slaughter. I think they can recoup from that. However, United Airlines is going to have a hard time coming back from that brand slaughter, wouldn't you agree? Hugh: I would. It's one that got highlighted in a series of really dumb things the airline has done. We're talking to passionate people who are providing amazing value but are limited by how people perceive us. I was talking to someone on a radio interview, and he said, “There is a charity in my area, but I quit giving because I really wasn't sure what was happening.” That is part of our brand promise, who we are and what we stand for. David: That's right. When we look at the organizations that part of our charter is to serve others in an amazing way, and there is no shortage of people in the giving field, those organizations are carrying a lot of weight for the society. They are making a promise out there. By and large, they are delivering. However, there are some actions and behaviors they either are taking or their management/leadership is taking or their front line people are taking—they are taking certain behaviors that are undermining the brand and the promise of the entire organization. It doesn't have to be that way. Look, I have had great experiences on United Airlines. I truly have. I love Gershwin, so when I hear that music, it pus me in a wonderful state. I have met some wonderful people. They are not just a group of dirtbags. However, the one person who carries the credibility and reputation of the organization pulled down the asset value of the corporation, the reputation of the corporation, and created for great humor, “United Airlines put the hospital back in hospitality,” such that Southwest Airlines came out and said, “We beat our competition, not our customers.” That kind of stuff is just going to keep going because of one guy making one bad move. I want to tell the leaders, managers, supervisors, and individuals who are carrying the torch of these organizations to do what I teach in this book called an ABI, an Audit of Brand Integrity. Have every one of your employees take a sheet of paper and write down the values, write down the brand, and then write down the touchpoints they have on a daily basis with the individuals they are touching: a customer, a fellow employee, a vendor. Everyone who is carrying that brand, and that individual looks at their touchpoints and asks themselves, “How does the brand live that touchpoint?” What could I do, what might I do, what should I do, what ought I do to really boost that brand? If the organization, let's say United Airlines because we are picking on them, but I can tell you two of them I experienced today alone. But I focus in on that one. If the CEO said, “Folks, this is our brand. We are doing a brand audit. After you do that audit, come back and tell us examples of how that brand is to live in your head. Maybe even tell us some examples of what you have observed in our organization when we have committed brand slaughter.” There is a statute of limitations. Nobody is going to get busted. But it helps us to see how the brand is alive and well and being fed and nurtured and supported, and on the other side, by the law of contrast, we can see where we have fallen down so we don't fall down that hole again. That would be an amazing solution. I implore everyone who is listening, whether you are running a nonprofit or not—maybe you are going to at some point but now you are a parent or a neighbor or a member of a church or synagogue—and ask yourself: What is your brand? How are you living that brand? I think when we get serious about this, we can't solve everything we face, but we can solve anything unless we face it. This is a way of facing the opportunity of building your brand asset value. I sound like a politician. I am David Corbin, and I endorse that message. Hugh: That's right. Your passion is contagious. Our friend from Hawaii, Eve Hogan, is watching on Facebook. We have a lot of people that we know. David, there are four million 501(c) somethings. There are 10's, 6's, 3's, and government organizations. There are all kinds of tax-exempt organizations. They are charities; they are social benefit organizations. Russell and I are on the campaign to eliminate the word nonprofit. Rather than defining ourselves by what we're not, which is not correct either—we do need to make a profit to make things happen—we are social benefit organizations. We leverage intellectual property. We leverage passion. We leverage the good works and products we have for the benefit of humankind. These nongovernmental organizations that we represent have a bigger job and more important job today than ever before. There is real confusion on the whole branding thing. I want to back up a minute to a question posted a few minutes ago. How can nonprofits eliminate their brand? But I think it's important for them to know why they even need a brand and why it is important to be clear about the brand. It's true for any organization, but we are talking to nonprofits. The reason we have top-level business leaders like you on this series is we need to understand good, sound business principles to install into these organizations that we lead. Why is branding important? How do we illuminate that into the communities that want to support us but need that information? David: Let's just say this. Whether you like it or not, you have a brand. Whether you know it or not, you have a brand. These scanners- I have a scanner over there. It's a Hewlett Packard. It doesn't compare to these scanners. *points to eyes* I have a computer that we're working through. It doesn't compare to this computer .*points to brain* Everyone is walking around with these scanners and this computer, and everything counts. Whether you acknowledge it or not, you are creating an impression from the eye to the brain to the heart to the soul of who you are and what you're doing, whether you believe in it or not. I don't know if you believe in gravity or not, but if you walk off of any building in any town of any city, you are going down. It's an immutable fact. Now, thank you for the concept of the not-for-profit. Why talk about what we're not? That was brilliant. You open up my thinking. I thank you for that. I want to let all of my service providers know that everything that you do is creating an impression, whether you believe in it or not. Could you imagine if I came out and said, “I want to talk about hygiene and important it is?” *while sniffling and rubbing his nose and eyes* That would be absurd. I happen to have a 501(c)3 for anti-bullying called Anti Bullying Leadership Experience. Everything that we do is going to be carrying our mojo of the anti-bullying. Could you imagine if I started yelling at one of my vendors and pouncing on them and playing a power trip with them? That would be the antithesis of everything. The point I want to make is make believe that you are on the stage of a microscope and you are being observed in everything that you are doing because you are. And as soon as the leaders know that, they will start looking at things differently. You drive up to the parking lot, see what the front door looks like, see how you are greeted, and you are watching everything that is going on. God is my judge, I must tell you. Hugh, you know I am putting together a little wedding party for my daughter. I was at two places today, one of which the woman didn't show up to the appointment, and she needed to call me back, and she didn't later. One was a very famous place called L'Auberge Del Mar. It's five-star. When I called to make a room reservation there, I was there for seven and a half minutes before I even found someone. I eventually called the manager who called me back. I said, “I'm going to give you a gift. I would like you to call and try to make a room reservation and get the experience of what that's like.” She did. She called me back and goes, “My goodness, Mr. Corbin. I had no idea.” We need to audit all of these activities. Our service organizations, which do not have an unlimited budget that a lot of corporations might have today, must be efficient, must be effective. The best consultation you can get is from yourself experiencing your deliverables and that which it is you are bringing to the market. I just think that we don't have a lot of wiggle room for error. There is a wonderful book by Andy Grove who started a little company called Intel. You probably haven't heard of it. Andy wrote a book called Only the Paranoid Survive. I don't think he is suggesting that we walk around paranoid. I think he is suggesting a strong and deep introspection into what we are doing and how we are doing it. I want to punch that home. Please, please for the benefit of all whom you are serving and whom you could serve in the future, take this message seriously. Know that you have a brand. Live that brand. Make sure that everyone in your auspices know how they live that brand. Hugh: Those are wise words. Mr. Russell Dennis is capturing sound bites. He is very good at picking out things, and you have given him a lot of fresh meat today. David, you work with a variety of different kinds of clients, some of whom you and I both know. When you are working with them on building out the whole framework of the organization they are launching and growing, at what point do you hone in on this brand image, brand promise, brand identity? At what point in this process do you focus on that aspect? David: I believe strongly with begin in the end in mind. It's more than rhetoric. If you are a service organization, really ask the penetrating questions. 1) Why do we exist, and do we need to exist? 2) Who do we serve, and how do we serve them? 3) How do we want to be known? 4) What do we want somebody to yell over to the fence to their neighbor about our organization? When you have that, you work backwards from that. Business planning takes the existing business and carries it out into the future, but strategic planning envisions the future and works backwards from there. I take a deep dive of visualization. Actually, as you know, I am a graduate of Woodstock. I was there in 1969. So I can say not just visualization, but hallucination. I can really hallucinate on those questions. I just was in front of an audience in Atlanta and said, “What do you want? What do you really want?” I say that to businesses as I do strategic planning. Who are you? Who are you really? Then you know all of that. That is when you contemplate for your brand promise and the reputation that you want to earn because you can't demand it. Then when you do that, you get the confidence to move forward. You now have the gristmill, and everything must go through that. How does it go against our brand? Should we do that? Great, tell us how it fits into our brand. When someone does something that is off-target, how did that dent our brand, and what can we do to prevent that from happening again? In direct answer to your question, do this brand audit right form the get-go. I promise you not only does it give individuals a sense of ownership, but it gives them a sense of confidence because nobody wants to mess it up. In Europe, they take it down to the bottom line. When you ding the brand, you are actually pilfering money from the organization. Isn't that something? Imagine if we really own the brand. No one changes the oil when we rent a car because they don't have ownership. When people know what the brand is in their hands, they take ownership. What happens is when you collaborate with your people, you breed creativity and commitment. Now they are engaged, they are enrolled. Nothing can stop a service organization with passionate, engaged people. That is why I plug what you're doing, Hugh. Hugh: Thank you for that, David. That is such a vivid description of how we can upgrade our performance and upgrade the performance of the organization that we have a huge responsibility for as the leader. Perceiving ourselves as the leader doesn't mean we have to do everything. It does mean we need to be involved in the grassroots of what is going on so we can know what is actually happening. And what you talked about brings to mind that we build relationship with others in the organization. To me, that is the foundation of leadership, and it is also the foundation of communications. You gave the gift to the hotel manager that she didn't have because she was too busy doing the top-level things to get into the minutiae and figure out, Whoa, how do we look to the public? You could go to any big company in America and help them do an audit, and it would bring them immense value, probably within the first 30 seconds of your conversation. Part of what you described is part of this word that you have used, which is such a brilliant framing of how we- Everybody in Synervision is a leader. We lead from different perspectives, and we impact everybody else in the organization. We also represent the brand. We don't know who is going to go wild, like United Airlines. That was such a terrible thing for everybody, but it highlighted an underlying problem. Brand slaughter was what brought it to the fore. I bet that cost United a whole lot of money so far, not to mention future business. Let's take it back to the charities. We are doing work that impacts people's lives, sometimes saving people from drug addition or suicide or insanity. There are a lot of worthy things we are doing. We have elements going on that kill the brand. I love it when you talk about this brand slaughter thing. I'd like to put it back into context in what we're doing with this world of charities and how we need to contain this brand and empower our tribes to represent the brand and not be guilty of brand slaughter. Give us a little more food for thought, especially for charities. I work with churches, synagogues, community foundations, semi-government agencies. I find there is a similarity with everybody, that we are not aware of how the culture is represented by the people, and that brand slaughter is committed in minor ways, but also in bigger ways. I am going to shut up now and let you talk about brand slaughter and why that is so crucial for our charities. David: I look at it this way. I believe that the financial results of any organization is largely dependent on the quality of its people and the clarity of its people. Be it a service organization or otherwise, I believe everyone in the organization should create a circle. I don't mean hands holding. I mean draw a circle, a wheel with a hub and spokes. Every one of those spokes is an essential core job function for that person. If it's a leader, we know some of the spokes are delegation, communication, strategic thinking, and financial management. Those are all spokes. Whatever the position is, if you're an operating room nurse or a development manager for a service organization, you create that wheel and look at the spokes. When you do, you start rating yourself on those spokes. The hub means you're terrible. Outside at the end is a number ten. That is mastery. You get real serious with whoever you are, whatever your job is, and rate yourself on a scale of zero to ten. Where you are an eight or nine, great, pat yourself on the back. That is really cool. But don't stop there. Unfortunately, Americans tend to stop at the immediate gratification. Look at what I'm doing great. We say no. Focus in on the threes, fours, and fives. Set a goal to a six, eight, and nine, and close those gaps. I say that to my brothers and sisters who work in the serious world of service delivery. I mean what we would call service providers and not-for-profits or whatever you want to call them. When you get serious, and you rate yourself on a scale of one to ten in those areas, and you start closing those gaps, magic happens. You know what the magic is? You start building a momentum of growing yourself. You can't grow an organization unless the individuals are growing themselves. You show me an organization that does what I'm talking about: closing the gaps, setting personal goals, and getting more efficient and effective in what they do. I don't care if their building burns down; they could accomplish their mission in a tent. They could do it with dirt floors. They could do it anywhere. The saying is, “Wherever two or more people are gathered in His name, there is love.” Let me tell you. Whenever you have a leadership team and a management team that talks about building their people, the only renewable asset in an organization, no matter what happens, they will win. Every one of the employees increases their asset value. You invoke the law of control. People feel good about themselves in the extent they are moving in the direction of destiny. Their confidence goes up. Their competence goes up. People talk about going down the rabbit hole. Now you are going up this amazing spire into success, achievement, productivity, confidence, peace of mind, and self-esteem. I am passionate about that because I have seen it work. I help it work. I live it myself. I couldn't talk about it if I didn't live it, or else that would be a form of brand slaughter. Hugh: I can validate that. You live out the David Corbin brand. You illuminate the brand. Or you don't do it. You are very serious about being spot-on. You show up fully present. I have been doing the German ice cream thing. I am being Häagen-Dazs Mike. Russell, do you have a comment or a question for our guest tonight? Russell Dennis: It's a lot easier to tear a brand apart than it is to put it together. Look at United. Those guys have been around forever and a day. And in the space of a day, they have torn the whole thing down and trashed a lot of good wealth. It's very easy. Brand is about- it goes beyond a logo. People think of a logo when they think of a brand. It's not the logo; it's what is behind the logo that symbolizes something. I am going to pull a definition out of a book that a very wise man wrote, “The brand as is a tangible expression of top-performing culture comes to life when the elements including the mission are taken off the wall and put into daily action at all levels and through all individuals in the organization.” That is a big mouthful. Hugh: Who is the wise person that wrote that? Russ: Just some guy who is sitting around while we chat. Hugh: David Corbin wrote that. Russ: Brand slaughter, to me, is the ultimate thing. To say this is what we stand for and do something completely different. I think there are some people out there who are scrutinizing and are waiting for somebody to make a mistake. I have seen people do that. You run into those folks in a supermarket. People don't intentionally set out to fail, but it happens. These are things that are talked about in the Core Steps to Building a Nonprofit course. When it's building that foundation, they could lay all those things out. The time to figure out your brand is right at the outset. Who do we serve? What is in our wheelhouse? What do we have? What are we weak at? Where are our gaps? I think you have to hammer those strengths and work with them, but when you have a gap, that is where your recruiting starts. You recruit your advisors, you recruit your board. Or you look for collaborative partners. But you find a way to do it that will stay because everything rides on it. You have to have it all in place. You have to have a solid foundation to start making those plans and do the things that you want to do first. What are we going to do first? There is a big vision. I have been working with Sue Lee. We had a great conversation yesterday. I have also been working with Dennis Cole on his foundation. We are looking at some potential sponsors. We have got some things that we are going to be doing really soon that are interesting, but we are ready to break out and go out there and be a service to people by telling them they don't have to succumb to any bad circumstances they have because of an injury or major illness. You can work around that. The whole brand is about living that and walking that walk. These are pretty courageous young men I am proud to be helping. Hugh: Part of that course where you talked about- David, Russell is helping people bring in revenue to their so-called nonprofits/charities. There is a relevance. Russ, I'd like to get David weigh in on the relevance of this branding and attracting revenue, the income that we really need that is the profit that runs our charity. Russell, I'll bring it back to you in a minute, but you had illuminated some things that I wanted to get David to weigh in on. There is a monetary equivalent to the integrity in our brand that you talked about earlier. David: Yeah. Just as in the strategic planning you are asking yourself who are we serving and why are we serving and how are we serving, when you look at the individuals you are appealing to in business development, you say, “Hey, contribute to us. Support us.” When we are looking at that, we then need to reverse-engineer that. That is what I do in my visualization/hallucination. Why are they contributing? What have they contributed to before? What are they contributing to? What is going to make them feel good? How do they know they are contributing to the right organization after they contribute so they might want to contribute again? When you contemplate the psychology of that, much like you look into why people invest into businesses, you think about those donors. Then you know that the emotional connection- You guys have heard me talk about the mojo factor or the God only knows factor. Why are you contributing to them year after year? God only knows. Would you consider not contributing to them or contributing to someone else? Absolutely not. Why? God only knows. They are not sure what that emotional connection is, but you know the emotional connection. In my case, with the anti-bullying, we are looking at the ramifications of some of these young souls who have been bullied and how it impacts their lives. Individuals who are donating to that might have experienced some bullying before and know the pain they went through, as well as the imaginations throughout their life. We know that now, so we know what the mojo factor is to get that individual to know who we are, what we do, and how and why they might want to invest. When that becomes our brand, when they can see it and feel it and taste it and touch it, which it to say there is energy between what we are doing and what we are saying, from the logo and the color and the actions and our behaviors and our sounds, then when we have that going on, we have this awesome connection. Years ago, some of us are old enough to know about Ma Bell. Remember Ma Bell? And then a company came in called Sprint and they wanted to break that God only knows connection, that amazing connection between Ma Bell. Sprint came in and said. It was MCI. They said, “We are going to beat the price,” and Ma Bell came out and said, “Oh yeah? Make them put it in writing.” Ma Bell, you don't talk like that. Ma? They broke that bond, you see. That is just an example of breaking a bond. When it comes to our organizations who are listening today, the bond is that promise. The two great things that my friend Russell just discussed are 1) it's a lot easier to kill a brand than to build a brand. That is so true. And secondly, among other things Russell shared, there are some people out there who are looking for you to mess up. There is an individual looking for the rabbi to have a ham sandwich. There is an individual who is looking for the such-and-such the wrong way. They are looking for that. Why? Because it is easier to find the fault in others than to take the personal responsibility to build themselves. So when you know that, don't be paranoid. But be a little paranoid and know they are watching you. Not only are people scanning you from a neutral point of view, and those scanning you from a positive point of view, but there are also those naysayers who are looking for you to be hypocritical. They are looking for you to mess up. That is when I say have everybody lockstep in knowing what is our promise and behaving that way. You can't go after fund development and not be the brand, or you are wasting your time. Hugh: Whoa. So Russell, I have interrupted you. Were you formulating a question? We are two thirds of the way through our interview, and we are getting into the nitty-gritty. Did you have a really hard question to stump our guest with tonight? Russ: There is no stumping David. It just follows in with what I was saying. The fourth step of building a high-performance nonprofit is to be able to communicate that value that you bring to everybody you come into contact with. You have people that work in the organization. You have donors. You have people who get your services. You need to know how to do it with everyone. With people who are working with you internally, you have to set an expectation so people know exactly what they are signing up for. Understand that you are not everybody's flavor, but you are some people's flavor. When you talk to organizations or donors or people who are going to support you, here is the reality of anything you undertake: There is going to be some risk associated. If you walk in and tell them, “Everything is going to be peachy,” when you are in the service mind-frame or an entrepreneur, we can be hopeless optimists a lot of times. It has been my experience that a lot of things take twice the money, time, and effort they are going to take because we go in with those good intentions. We have to be fully transparent, especially if we discover we have some problems or snags implementing the project. The time to talk about that is as soon as you discover it and look at it and say, “Well, we may not be where we quite want to be.” Up front, transparent. Illuminate as David has talked about. That is a book that is on my shelf. I love that book. I read the thing in one sitting. A lot of people want to cover up. Or human egos want to make us look good. When we are in the business of trying to help people with some serious societal problems, you have to get the ego out of the way. That is hard to do. It makes it difficult to get organizations to collaborate or talk to one another. I have seen a lot of that, too. My philosophy is that you can get a hell of a lot done if you are not hung up on who gets the credit. It is an uphill climb often, but I think the landscape is changing a little bit. People are going into business with a socially benefited mind. They create business structures like the LLC and the B-corp and the benefit corporations. We are seeing a lot of these social enterprises crop up. People can not only make a profit but can also do some good. It's all about doing some good, but there are certain things we have to look at. It has to be run efficiently and effectively, but it doesn't matter what your tax stamp says. Hugh: There is a comment on Twitter: “Doing what you love, loving whom you serve, believing that your nonprofit is vital. I knew too many whose hearts aren't in…” That's interesting. David, do you want to respond to Russ before we go to the final set of questions here? David: Well, a couple things that come to mind. Something that you had said earlier, Hugh, and something that Russell just said. I'll start with Russell. Yes, you need to face the issue. Face a lot of issues. Look at what happened. Happily, there will be lemonade coming out of this lemon on the United Airlines. Not for that doctor, but he will get a huge settlement. That is not what he wanted. I think the industry is shifting now. I read somewhere that Southwest Airlines has changed their model around overselling seats. Sometimes it takes this type of situation for people to learn, and then they shift. A lot of people don't really appreciate their life or family until God forbid maybe a near-death experience, and that is what wakes them up. I say practice safety in driving before then, don't wait for a near-death experience. Start contemplating for the potential issues or challenges that might happen in your organization before it happens. That is the part of roleplaying what could/might happen. What could possibly happen in this situation? Those are the types of things. Don't be a negative nelly. Don't get me wrong. The government has something called Sarbanes-Oxley that says the corporation has the fiduciary responsibility to anticipate, predict, and prepare for a natural disaster. It makes good sense. You don't have to mandate that to me as a business owner. Of course, if I am manufacturing a car, I want to make sure that if the person who creates my rearview mirrors goes down, I am still going to be able to meet the needs of my organization, my shareholders, my staff, my employees. Of course I am going to do that. I don't need regulation. For crying out loud, I don't even need the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is to provide reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. For crying out loud, that is just good sense. It is just good sense. Plus it is the right thing to do. But be that as it may, we need to face the issue before it happens. Oh by the way, be prepared for facing the issue after it happens. So Mr. President of United Airlines, anticipate if a problem goes down how you are going to handle it. Don't say he was only following procedure. There was a guy in Nazi Germany who used to say that, too. I was just following procedure. I hate to make an extreme example, but I make a point following procedure. Following procedure, pulling a guy off, breaking his teeth. Come on. To say that is just ridiculous. What Pricewaterhouse did after they had a big brouhaha in front of 33 million people, they had 87 years of doing the job really well. What happened after that is they came back and apologized. They said Mea culpa. Just like the Japanese corporate executives did if a plane goes down, they resign. They take personal responsibility. But what Pricewaterhouse did is they said: It was our responsibility, and we apologize. We are looking into it. We want to congratulate those people on camera, including Jimmy Kimmel, for handling it elegantly. Even bringing a little humor into it. We apologize from the bottom of our hearts—I am paraphrasing here—and we will get to the bottom of this. We will let you know what happens so it never happens again. You see, that ding wasn't brand slaughter. It was kind of like getting a ticket for tinted windows or a light being out. I believe we are going to forgive them after a while, but it will be hard to forgive United Airlines after they issued responsibility and took that cheap ticket out. I'm piggybacking off some of the comments you made earlier. I think it's an important point. Anticipate what can go wrong. It doesn't require legislation for that; it requires common sense. Then practice. Practice so it comes out naturally. Sir Lawrence Olivier said the key to acting is spontaneity, which is the result of long, hard, tedious practice. I say practice. Hugh: I could hear you talk all night, David. I think people would be with us this long. There are people listening to you with lots of focus. We could all reframe our own leadership. The question we threw out for people to think about is from the leadership position. My forty years of conducting, I know that what the orchestra and the choir sees is what I get. The culture is a reflection of our leadership. Representing the brand internally helps them represent the brand externally. My question to you is, in this whole spirit of illuminating- I don't know about you, but I find some leaders who have more blind spots than awareness on the impact they are having on the brand externally and internally. You can do your own inventory, but I don't think we can. We need to illuminate with some outside, impartial person asking us the right questions. David, how can a leader, especially one that has been in a position for a while, keep it fresh and illuminate our own representation of our brand internally and externally? David: I think it's about integrity. Integrity is a powerful word. It's thrown around. But integrity, the leader living the values of the business. I can't ask you to do what I'm not willing to do. They say one of the biggest sports in life is soccer, but I don't think that's true. I think the biggest sport in life is boss-watching. Seriously. I really think that. They set the culture. They set the pace. To the extent they are leading with honor and integrity, with the values and behaviors and all. I talk about illuminate, face it, follow, and fix it. One time, instead of getting out of the shower and running past the mirror, I stopped. I didn't quite like what I saw, and I saw a guy who was 40-50 pounds overweight. I thought, My goodness. How dare I talk about illuminate if I don't face it. I faced it. I am asking everyone, every leader, to face: Are you living in integrity? I followed it. I found out why I was gaining weight. I was having a glass of wine or two every night, and it brought my blood sugar down. I would eat anything that was there. There are sardines and chocolate syrup. Looks great! And then I'd go to sleep. I didn't realize I was training to be an athlete. There is an athlete who drinks alcohol and eats a lot of food at night, and that athlete is called a sumo wrestler. I was training to be a sumo wrestler. I couldn't be a leader of Illuminate and be that hypocritical. The fix it was to take small steps and make some transformation. I ask my leaders, my brothers and sisters who are leaders, to get serious. I walked into an association that has to do with diabetes, and I saw a big Coke machine there. I look at some of our organizations who are in the health industry, and they are not healthy. I did a lot of work with a company. I won't tell you the name of it, but it rhymes with Schmaiser Permanente. They are talking about their model called Thrive. And I look at some of their employees, and they are out of integrity. I say, “Don't talk about thrive. You are better off saying nothing. When I see the word ‘thrive' and see people who are grossly unhealthy, I know you are hypocritical. I wonder where else you are cutting corners. I don't like that.” Everything counts. Everything counts. I scan, I think, I feel. Maybe below the line of consciousness. But if it is not in integrity, I am not donating my time and my money to you. I am going to move on to someone who is. Any business, any organization, the leader must lead by example. When she falls down, she says, “Mea culpa. You know what. I fell down. I apologize for that. Here is my plan.” The feminization of business today is so important. Authenticity comes with that, and a lot of drive. When we have the character to say, “Whoops, I messed up, wow, that is a big difference,” that is leadership. Leadership is real. Vulnerability, authenticity, those are just words. They are being overused, but they are real. Get serious about that. Hugh: You are preaching our song. We preach that leadership is influence. We get to choose if we influence positively or negatively. Those are good parting words, but I am going to give you the chance to do a wish or thought or tip for people as we leave. I want to recognize that they can go to davidcorbin.com. David Corbin leaps over tall buildings. Do you really run a 5K every Sunday? David: Every Saturday when I am in town. Hugh: Wow. And you went to Woodstock? You know who else was there? David: My brother David Gruder. Hugh: Yes, he was at Woodstock. You and I are contemporaries. I am a little older than you are. I have never had anybody on this interview series take a sound bite from Rhapsody in Blue. He is a modern-day Renaissance man with many skills. David Corbin, you are indeed a blessing to a lot of people, but tonight, to Russ and me for sharing this great stuff with so many charities. As we are winding up this really powerful interview, David, what is a parting thought or tip you'd like to leave with these amazing leaders that are making such a difference in people's lives? David: I would express my gratitude for their passion, for their hard work. It is difficult today. Service organizations, it seems as though they are being told to jump through hoops and then they make the hoops smaller and then they set the hoops on fire. It's not easy. We need to attract people to volunteer and donate and work for our noble mission. Every morning, I wake up. My hands and knees are on the ground like our Muslim brothers, and I give thanks and gratitude every single morning. I want to give gratitude to those of you who are taking the rein and doing this amazing work, this social work. I thank you for that. I deeply hope that some of these ideas might help you be more effective, more efficient, and more joyous and confident in what you do. Thank you for what you do. Hugh: David Corbin, special words indeed. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with so many people. Your words will live on. Thanks so much for being with us. David: Thanks, brother. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Kid Power Radio. I’m your host Max and each week I review what’s happening on TV, at the movies, books and music I like ….You get the idea. This is a really special show... we have a person who works at Cartoon Network on my show. Let’s just start the show, shall we...  This week on Cartoon Network… This is it the moment you’ve been waiting for in the last 18 seconds...David from Cartoon Network's Adult Swim and Creator and Star of Aqua Teen HungerForce and Squidbillies. Listen to the show and hear David's answers to these questions and more...David's shows are on Adult Swim and I only can watch them when my mom or dad is watching them with me. But we talked mostly about how he got interested in animation and how he does his shows and other cool stuff.Here's what we talked about. Okay, first thing first...do you want me to call you Dave or David? Let’s start the interviewing questions... What cartoons did you watch as a kid? When you were a kid did you like Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny? Do you like The Simpsons? My favorite show on Cartoon Network is The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy what’s yours? How did you get started as a voiceover at Cartoon Network? Where and how do you record the show? Are all the people in the same room when you record? You’re the voice of  Meatwad on Aqua Teen Hunger Force-How did you figure out how Meatwad would sound? What other cartoon voiceovers have you done? How did you learn to do different voices? Do you draw any of the characters on the show? This is the final question... Could you say, in a Meatwad voice, "I just loved being on Kid Power Radio?" Thanks and goodbye Name That Tune   Tristan emailed me the answer to the Name That Tune last week Great job Tristan Here’s this week. In the movie news... I saw UnderDog and it was really good. Good effects, Good graphics, Good well, everything was good. It’s totally kid friendly. You’re whole family will love it. I give it 4 stars, 2 thumbs up, and an A+ If you go and see it you’ll love it.  Listener Question...  Okay so I’ve been getting lots of emails from 3 people and they all say they’re my number 1 fan!!! We have Tristan from England, Courtney from Australia, and Eli from Georgia. Now I cannot have 3 number 1 fans I mean that’s the point of "#1 Fan" So I have decided to do the Kid Power Radio #1 Fan Email Challenge These are the rules... You tell your friends to vote for you as my number 1 fan at RadioStarMax at Yahoo.com...You cannot vote for yourself and if you do I won’t count that vote... After 2 weeks I will announce the winner. Good luck to Eli, Courtney, and Tristan.  Thanks everyone for sending in emails. You all are now official members of the Kid Power Radio Street Team. Your job is to tell all your friends about the show and if they email me they could get a special shout out just like you did.  And special thanks to David from Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Squidbillies for being on my show Remember, you can email me at RADIO STAR MAX at YAHOO.COM That’s it for now. See you next week.  Bye.

We look at the people who are closest to David, his mighty men, who put their lives on the line for David. Who are these people? Why they want to die for David? Let's look at how we can be like these men and we take a look to their philosophy and way of living in regards to David.