Podcasts about eric oh

Scam losses in Singapore have hit alarming levels, with over S$1.1 billion lost last year - a sharp 70.6% increase from the year before. And one of the fastest-growing threats is investment scams, particularly those tied to cryptocurrency. These scams are becoming more sophisticated, with fraudsters using social messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram to impersonate financial institutions and promote fake investment opportunities. What can investors do to protect themselves? What red flags should they look out for and how can they tell if an opportunity is too good to be true? On The Big Story, Nadiah Koh speaks to Eric Oh, Financial Services Manager, PhillipCapital, to find out.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Even with all of the property management software and tools breaking onto the scene lately, it seems that some entrepreneurs are still identifying gaps they could potentially fill… In today's episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth expert Jason Hull sits down with Eric Nelsen of Walkthroo to talk about a new maintenance solution in development for property managers and vendors. You'll Learn [03:36] What is Walkthroo? [08:43] Developing Software and Utilizing AI [16:52] Getting Time Back with User-Friendly Tools [23:02] Get in Touch with Walkthroo Tweetables  ” It's a lot easier to make changes to software when you're smaller and you're getting things started and you're doing it in the right way.” “ Time is probably the biggest benefit we provide.” “ Vendors in a lot of situations end up being the eyes, ears and hands for the property manager.” “ User experience is a big deal when designing software.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: It's a lot easier to make changes to software when you're smaller and you're getting things started and you're doing it in the right way. Once it turns into a giant beast and it's old, then it's really difficult.  [00:00:11] Welcome DoorGrow property managers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow property manager. DoorGrow property managers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. [00:00:52] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. [00:01:12] Now let's get into the show. And today I'm hanging out with Eric Nelson of Walkthroo. Eric, welcome to the DoorGrow Show.  [00:01:21] Eric: Thanks, Jason. Glad to be here.  [00:01:23] Jason: So Eric I would love to first get into your background. And my wife's chiming in saying I need to remember to promote DoorGrow live today, so I'll just do that right now real quick, and then we'll get to you, Eric. So if you are a property manager and you're watching this make sure you get tickets to DoorGrow Live like this is the most contribution focused, holistic property management conference in the industry. [00:01:44] We do things very differently. "There's heart" is kind of the feedback we get from others. People cry at our events. Like it's really awesome. It's going to be at the Kalahari resort here in Round Rock, Texas. And get your tickets right now. They go up in price over time. So head on over to DoorGrowLive.Com and get your tickets and be there. We've got sponsors. We've got cool speakers. It's going to be awesome. And DoorGrow magic is there. You're going to learn about growing your business from Sarah and myself and we'll help you out. All right, cool. Shameless plug inserted. [00:02:20] Now, Eric, I would love to get into your background. [00:02:23] You know, we hung out briefly in in Austin you came out and got to know each other a little bit, but I want my audience to get to know you share a little bit about How you kind of got into entrepreneurism, how you got into this. So tell us a little bit about your background.  [00:02:37] Eric: Yeah, sure. Sure. I grew up in Houston, Texas kind of came up through the finance world. So I spent about 10, 15 years in finance, went to grad school at Rice in Houston, and I just couldn't walk down the finance hallway. I saw the entrepreneurial professors down a different hallway, really wanted to kind of do my own thing. [00:02:55] So you know, stayed in finance for a couple more years and got into the pharmacy business. And through that business, I got exposed to IT technology and building software to kind of run our pharmacies and improve our ops and, and run those companies. And then a good friend of mine in Shreveport Springs, Texas was is a general contractor and said he works with these property managers and they, he does a lot of maintenance for rentals. [00:03:20] And he said, "yeah, Eric, I want to take on more business, but I can't keep track. There's so many little jobs. There's so much communication going on, text, emails, phone calls. You've got a software background. Can you help me?" And so that's, what's really exposed me to the property management industry and kind of started me on this path. [00:03:36] Got it. All right. So let's get into talking a little bit about Walkthroo and what it is. And it's, it's "walk T-H-R-O-O. So tell us a little bit about Walkthroo and what is it? What does it do?  [00:03:52] Yeah. So Walkthroo is, it's a really kind of a mindset and approach to the business and the underlying core is as much as accounting and tenant screening and even inspections, that software, those tools have grown, you know, with technological advances and whatnot. [00:04:13] If you really look at what we think is one of the four main pillars of property management is the maintenance, that hasn't grown. I mean, if you look back 10 years ago you really couldn't get multiple bids to do any work. If you look back 10 years ago, you couldn't pull up on your screen and compare two different bids. [00:04:29] 10 years ago, you couldn't split charges on an invoice between a tenant and owner. And you look today, fast forward 10 years, and I would say You know, 90- 95 percent of the platforms, you still cannot do those things. Well, when my partner brought me into this, you know, first he wanted me to help him with his, you know, just his construction company, but we quickly realized the problem wasn't him. [00:04:52] It was the property managers he was working with and the inefficiencies that came with the way they handle maintenance. So right out of the gate within a month. We switched that mantra. We're going to work to help property managers. And so that's really been what Walkthroo's focus has been the last three years. [00:05:09] And we really just, again, within the first three months we can get multiple bidders, we can split charges. And so it just showed me right away that it's not for a lack of technology or, you know, lack of know how even. It's just when you look at these software platforms and these operating systems, they just have bigger fish to fry. [00:05:27] They, you know, they all agree we should be able to hire multiple bidders with a couple clicks, but we're going to spend time doing X. So I can't explain it, but again, within the first six months, we had all these features built. And so now we're coming up on three years. We're really looking to round out the platform and keep growing. [00:05:45] Jason: Okay. So besides doing multiple bids and splitting charges, what would you say Walkthroo is? Like, what is, what does it accomplish?  [00:05:53] Eric: So we're going to be a full operating system for property managers. We started backwards. I spoke with the former CEO of Buildium post sale to real page. [00:06:03] And he told me flat out, "we did a lot of great things." I think they were in 19 countries at the time. He's like, "but I'll be honest here. We never figured out maintenance. And so if that's where you're starting, you know, good on you. Good luck." And so we started with maintenance and we built our platform around maintenance. [00:06:18] We've recently added inspections. And so we'll keep growing. So Walkthroo will be A full suite of operating suite for property managers. Currently, we're not there yet, I'm going to go through a couple of rounds of raising money. Currently, we're a maintenance tool. People can use our platform. And we also provide maintenance services still. [00:06:39] So that's, that's, that's kind of what we do today. And the third leg, which just launched, is, and this is probably the most unique feature of what we're building, every other maintenance tool or platform or operating platform out there has property manager and they invite people in and the people have to learn how to use your system and whatnot. We actually sell our software straight to contractors. [00:07:02] So they're using it independent of property management They're using it to paint houses, do handyman jobs around around their cities, and so we're building this network where property managers will be on Walkthroo, the contractors are on Walkthroo, and it's just a simple connection and you don't have, you know, the training and, you know, as a vendor ourselves the last few years, I've been through some trainings to use different systems and I can imagine. It's can like a painter, you know, in downtown Austin that has two employees trying to figure out all these platforms and how to work with these clients. So we're, our goal is to really simplify all that for all the stakeholders.  [00:07:39] Jason: Got it. So it sounds like Walkthroo, you're building this from the ground up. [00:07:43] You're building it as a tool to support and help based on what business owners actually need in property management. You started with one of the biggest challenges, which is maintenance. You're now adding inspections, you're adding other things. And the goal, the roadmap is to make it a full suite that helps maybe a better property management back office or software solution. [00:08:05] So the next big piece is then I'm sure on the roadmap somewhere is accounting and, tenant portals, owner portals, so they can see statements and submit the maintenance request, maybe like all of this kind of stuff. And so yeah, and I don't, I think that there's, there hasn't been a lot of innovation. [00:08:23] We've seen Rentvine come out recently. And it was born kind of out of a lot of complaints people were having about Appfolio. Appfolio was kind of born out of a lot of complaints people were having about maybe Buildium and Propertyware. Right. Right. And so, you know, when software is born out of complaints, you know, of different tools, yeah, it's going to be better than that tool, but it is interesting to start from the ground up building around the needs of and supporting the property manager and the work that they're doing. It'll be very interesting to see where you guys end up and what's kind of the timeline for all of this? [00:08:55] Eric: Well, you know, it depends on fundraising, right? So it's expensive, especially, you get into the accounting engines and a lot of that. There's a lot of costs involved. So we're hoping in the next You know, 12 to 18 months, we'd have a product out of, you know, for small property managers to run their business off our platform. [00:09:12] Jason: That's pretty fast. That's really the goal right now. Yeah. Okay. Got it. Yeah. And it sounds like you guys move quickly. You know. It's a lot easier to make changes to software when you're smaller and you're getting things started and you're doing it in the right way. Once it turns into a giant beast and it's old, then it's really difficult. [00:09:30] Like some of the older maintenance software companies I'm sure they're toying with the idea. Like, should we just rebuild from scratch or throw all this away? Or do we just work this until this horse dies, you know? And so that's always the challenge with software. [00:09:46] And then adoption is always a big challenge. So getting people to use something new or to change to something else. And a lot of times it's easier to get the smaller guys and the smaller companies to make changes. And the big companies are usually watching the little guys make all the mistakes or test stuff out or see. [00:10:04] And then they stand back to wait to see who the winners are. So...  [00:10:08] Eric: yeah, yeah. And thankfully I've got some experience on our side. My partner, Travis, he before he got into construction, him and his dad ran a small microscope specialized software company they sell it to universities. I don't know the ins and outs of it, but they could like take a laser and look into this, you know, the elemental makeup of a molecule. [00:10:26] It was really, really specialized, but that was exactly where he came from. He's like, yeah, you could go with Hitachi or a big Japanese brand, but you can't get them on the phone. You know, like you said, they've, they've done good. They've built so big, but now that's a hindrance. And we're in the same path. [00:10:40] You know, we didn't have splitting the owner and tenant charges, but you know, after talking to a few clients and a few property managers, that was just a common, very common thing. And I said, "well, let's just build it." Well, we're small or nimble, you know, we can, we can get away with that. [00:10:53] So we're going to take that same approach as we go through the accounting side of things, you know, and just interviewing property managers and listening to the industry and saying, Hey, my background is finance and operations. And so, you know, when I met you, something you brought up a lot was transforming lives and, you know, kind of making people enjoy their work and that's something I don't see. When we launched this tool. We decided to launch it internally two years ago. So we haven't really been selling Walkthroo, we've been using it ourselves. We currently manage Over 250 jobs in nine states. And so I talked to more maintenance coordinators and property managers every day and a lot of them could be happier. [00:11:35] So as we build this out, we want these tools to allow some sort of automation and allow people to focus on growing doors and, you know, and doing other things that are more beneficial versus banging their head against walls.  [00:11:49] Jason: Sure. Yeah. I know property management business owners would much rather spend their time focusing on scaling their business than dealing with all the the nitty gritty day to day challenges and difficulty in all the tools that they're dealing with. [00:12:04] So Eric, we're in the middle of this AI revolution and you're like right in the middle of building this tool as we're coming into this new AI revolution where there's just tons of software just coming out. And people can create tools and software a lot more easily and their AI is helping them. [00:12:22] And then everyone's trying to integrate AI. And then you see all these companies that are dinosaurs. They're trying to strap chat GPT on the side of their crazy rollercoaster. And like, you know, say now we have AI. And so how's AI kind of tie into you guys, you know, getting Walkthroo built out? [00:12:43] Eric: Yeah, great question. We've got a roadmap for it. We don't have anything integrated yet. I think it's, it's too early, but you know, my background is really improving operations efficiencies. And so once we have this tool built out, then we will again, deploy AI where it makes sense. Like you said, it's a buzzword. [00:13:03] People will say everything is aI generated. It's like, no, that's just a search function, but call it AI. And so we, you know, we know most of the data. I'm not well tuned on the accounting yet, but definitely on the maintenance side, we know what data and what decisions are being made every day because again, we've lived that life and we're living it now we're doing jobs. [00:13:24] And so we will bring in AI kind of as we roll out the full suite, you know, I'm not sure to be perfectly honest. I don't know if it's going to be a heavy lift. I mean, again, it really comes down to the operations of the business and work and we see efficiencies and you know, there's some decisions you want eyes on, you know, you want, you want human interaction and others are a little more mundane task. [00:13:45] And so we, we are definitely have that in the playbook but I, at this point, you know, our plan is not to have this fully automated AI, you know, software, it's going to be just a much cleaner, easier tool to use and AI will be obviously just a natural component of that. [00:14:01] Jason: Got it. I mean, I think that makes sense. A lot of people start, you know, thinking, Oh, let's make AI do everything. But I think, I think it probably does make a lot more sense to make sure that the tools and systems are working for humans and they're working the right way first. And then AI create some leverage now that this is working well. [00:14:21] And I think that goes for how business owners should implement technology in general is you first do the process manually, and then you start to look for points of leverage and where can I leverage tech, where could a tool like Walkthroo facilitate what I'm doing now or help move things forward? So who's your current target audience? [00:14:39] Like, who are the people listening to this podcast that you think should reach out to Walkthroo to get an assessment on their current maintenance situation?  [00:14:49] Eric: Yeah. I mean, we've talked to everyone from PMI to sole proprietors to self managers. So I would say our sweet spot is probably property managers with, you know, 200 to 500 doors. [00:15:02] Seems to be small enough where the data is not overwhelming. They're doing a lot of work, I feel from what I've seen personally, and so working with Walkthroo helps some of that. And people can work with us in different ways. We some people just use our software. You know, we, If we can, if we can manage jobs across nine states, truly, you know, we know people can manage jobs in their own town or their own state and some of them just hire us as a, they just have us on their preferred vendor list, you know, we obviously I don't have staff in nine states, so I use my tool to manage jobs and manage vendors and the third way people can access and partner with us Is we come on as your maintenance coordinator, you know, we'll use their vendors, their top vendors, let us manage it. [00:15:43] One question I always ask property managers, not surprisingly, the answer is usually similar is, you know, "have you ever logged in as a vendor to whatever system are you using?" [00:15:51] " Well, why would I do that?" It's like, well, yeah, you probably wouldn't think of it, but I recommend it because you know, it's, it's one of those tasks. It's important, but it's also been done since the dawn of property management, I give someone a job, they go do it. But if you, if you're using tools, I recommend logging in as that contractor and seeing what they're seeing. And, oh, this is why it's hard to communicate because I can't upload anything or I can't text or, you know, whatever, whatever it may be. [00:16:20] So the maintenance coordinator role is something we've been taking on more and more where it's like, yeah, you give us your favorite painters and handyman, and we'll either API into your system, or you just send your tenants our way. You know, we structured any way that works best for our clients and the, let us do the dispatching, you know, all the status checks. [00:16:39] I mean, you know, it's just a constant barrage of phone calls every Monday morning on where we're at. And of course, Sunday night we send out reports so we don't have to get those calls. Those are the three ways that property managers can work with us currently.  [00:16:52] Jason: What, what are the results that people that start working will Walkthroo tend to notice or what sort of the changes that you're creating for these business owners.  [00:17:02] Eric: It's time. Time is probably the biggest benefit we provide. You know most I just mentioned the Monday check ins or daily check ins most maintenance tools that I've seen in, by the way, the other way that we know our, our tool is is well built, it's acting and being a vendor for the last three years. [00:17:21] I've logged into all the other tools. You know, when a property manager sees Walkthroo, yeah, they say Oh, Eric, yeah, we're always looking for a new painter. Here's our login to our system. Great. So immediately we take notes and, and figure out what's, what's wrong, but the time component I would say is probably the, the most we hear back on, on the biggest benefit and then most systems will have status indicators, maybe something's in progress. [00:17:44] We've got over 20 statuses. Are we waiting on the contractor to finish the work? Are we waiting on the tenant to accept the schedule and confirm it? Are we waiting on the after pictures to come in. I mean, there's all these nuanced steps that I think historically again, bigger companies are busy, but coming from at it from fresh from outside the industry, it was like, well, this is important to know if I know that I'm waiting on the tenant to confirm a schedule, I don't need to waste my time calling the contractor, ask what's going on. [00:18:14] And so those, that's a little microcosm of. How we built our system and also just a, again, just the workflow. I mean, I was shocked. None of the systems I've used since I've been in property management, offer me a way to do a change order. Very simple, very common request. And I have to like make a phone call or send an email. [00:18:32] And it's just time, time, time. So we make all that click, click, click.  [00:18:37] Jason: For the listeners. Explain a typical change order sort of situation.  [00:18:41] Eric: Leaky faucet. We've got a leaky faucet. We want somebody to go check it out. Contractor shows up on site, looks at a leaky faucet, and says, yeah, this faucet's leaking here. [00:18:51] I can fix that. But also, it created mold and damage all behind it. All under the counter. We've got to rip all these counters out. Well, that's not what the contractor was there sent to do. It's definitely not approved without, you know, anyone signing off on that. So he's got to communicate back to the property manager, "Hey, there's a much bigger issue here." [00:19:11] And so in the industry, it's, you know, typically referred to as a change order. And so now the contractor usually sits and waits and says, okay, I'll, I'll wait for the property manager to talk to the owner. And see if they want me to rip off this cabinet and do all this extra work. You know, I'm just, you know, I'm just a contractor. [00:19:28] Can I explain what I see? So now we're in a waiting game, right? So a week later, property manager boss comes in and says, "what's going on on one, two, three Smith street?"  [00:19:36] Jason: Yeah.  [00:19:37] Eric: "Oh, well, there was a problem."  [00:19:38] "Okay. What's going on now?" [00:19:40] "I don't know. Oh, it looks like, I think we're waiting for the owner to give us the green light to do the new repairs" [00:19:46] and so you can, you can step back and realize how that can. And you add that times 50 jobs or 100 jobs and it starts, it really adds up. So again, the way we built our system was to really eliminate a lot of that excess time. And where are we in this maintenance process? And just put it on the dashboard. [00:20:03] Just like, you know, many other things in life now. Put it in front of my face, so I know where all my jobs are and all my maintenance tasks are located.  [00:20:11] Jason: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm sure that's a challenge, like people discovering new work when they go out to do work. And there's also the issue a vendor goes out to do work and then they notice other stuff they think the property manager should be aware of. [00:20:25] And yeah, I mean, vendors in a lot of situations end up being the eyes, ears and hands for the property manager, so.  [00:20:32] Eric: Yeah, actually that's, that's why we built our own inspection tool. You know, we see everything else that's out there, but a lot of it's not connected. It's, you know, it's separate tools. So I've got a system that does this and does that. [00:20:45] So we tell our contractors, it's in our app, which I think there might be two or three other maintenance platforms, but not many that actually have an app in the app store for the vendor. So again, I challenged property managers to log into whatever system they're using as a vendor. And you'll probably see it's not the easiest thing to use or communicate with. [00:21:05] Well, we turned that upside down and. We've got an app live in the app store. Contractors can download it. So when they're doing work for us, it's super easy. They're on their phone. So we added an inspection tool and said we're going to require you to do, if it's vacant, to do a full inspection. And we just provide that as a free service, like, hey, in case, in case you or the owner missed something, we happen to notice these other 10 items that you didn't want us to fix, but here's some pictures and a report, and so again, like, just to your point, we know we're the eyes and ears a lot of time, you know, at the property, so anything we can do to capture all that data and get it back to the property manager. [00:21:43] We think so it's a win for everyone.  [00:21:45] Jason: Yeah, I love that So, I mean historically that's been a big complaint about some of the property management maintenance coordination tools out there is that the getting vendors to use it the adoption of vendors has been like real difficult and maybe it's Just your from your experience. [00:22:02] Maybe they're just not very good for the vendors through for their experience. It's just not a great experience. So user experience is a big deal when designing software. And it sounds like you guys have kind of designed this from the ground up to make sure that the vendors are going to have a good experience using it. [00:22:17] Eric: Absolutely. You know, again, we, you know, we're, we're signed on as preferred vendor across, across nine states. And so it's, you know, it's our insurance, our butts on the line if the jobs aren't getting done. So we figured out very quickly, we cannot make this difficult for this contractor in Florida that doesn't know Eric from Dripping Springs, Texas. [00:22:36] So let's make the tool super easy. And that's exactly what we did. And so we've had... oh, I would say over three years, I think maybe three or four times we've had to coach somebody through how to use our maintenance tool.  [00:22:48] Jason: Really? Sometimes vendors are old school. [00:22:49] They're not the most tech savvy. They're, they're using physical tools, you know, but yeah. And so that says a lot that it's pretty intuitive or easy for them to figure out.  [00:22:59] Eric: Yeah, that was a big focus for us right out of the gate.  [00:23:02] Jason: Got it. Okay, cool. Well, for those that are, like, hearing about this, or a little bit interested in this, is there anything else they usually have questions about that we didn't touch on, or that they should know about Walkthroo? [00:23:14] Eric: Let's see, not really. I mean, I think we covered most of it. Again, our goal is to really provide more time. I just, we see so much wasted time, you know, in the maintenance process. Obviously, we're going to carry that on through the rest of the modules and operating software, but our goal is to eliminate that time and give it back to property managers and really allow them to, like you said, I know they'd much rather growing doors and making connections and using their time more wisely. [00:23:39] So, yeah. If we can save them hours a week that's really, really our goal.  [00:23:45] Jason: Got it. Okay. Well, it sounds like you guys focus on simplicity. You focus on making these work. How can people get in touch with Walkthroo?  [00:23:55] Eric: Yeah, you can go to our website. It's www.walkthroo.com . You can also send an email over directly to me or my team. My email is eric@thewalkthroo.com and if you want to just send it to our team, it's work orders@thewalkthroo.com.  [00:24:21] Jason: Got it. So it's 'the Walkthroo' and through is T-H-R-O-O. Okay. All right. Everyone listening, go check that out. [00:24:30] Eric, appreciate you being here on the DoorGrow show and hanging out with us. And I'm looking forward. We'll have to have you come back on once you guys have added some new features and it sounds like you guys are pretty aggressive at doing that.  [00:24:44] Eric: Absolutely. Thanks, Jason. Appreciate the time. Good seeing you.  [00:24:46] Jason: Good seeing you too. [00:24:47] All right. For those of you that are looking to grow your property management business or you're struggling, check us out at doorgrow. com. We would love to help you. We are getting amazing results with our clients. And so if you want to get from 0 to 100 doors, from maybe 100 to 200 doors, or you wanted to go from 200 to 500 doors, Or from 500 doors to a thousand doors, we can help you at each of these stages and each of these sticking points to grow and scale your business rapidly and to get the right stress free ops and systems in place so that you are able to do this without making your life worse personally. [00:25:21] And so check us out at doorgrow. com. And until next time everybody to our mutual growth, bye everybody. [00:25:28] you just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!  [00:25:54] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

Eric (Writer of Manga Book Club/Tales of the Mana Crypt) joined me to talk about his love of architecture! He walked me through the history of architectural styles and we figured out some color identities along the way! This is a really informative one so if you've ever wanted to learn some cool architecture facts to impress your friends, this is the episode for you!

In today's episode of the IC-DISC show, Eric Miller from the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EX-IM) provides valuable insights into how this 90-year-old institution supports American exporters through strategic financial services. I also learned that EX-IM is one of just two governmental agencies that is an actual profit center. ​ Before joining EX-IM, Eric worked for a privately-held exporter that was a customer of EX-IM. His expertise both inside and outside of EX-IM sheds light on crucial products like export credit insurance, export financing, and financing for foreign buyers. These solutions can alleviate common hurdles inhibiting international trade growth. ​ We also talk through some real-world examples of these various EXIM solutions. This is a must-listen episode for any company doing substantial direct exports.   SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Eric Miller from the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank) discusses the role of the bank in aiding exporting companies with financial services, operating without costing taxpayers. We delve into how Ex-Im Bank and the Small Business Administration (SBA) offer loan guarantees and insurance to boost companies' borrowing capacity. Eric shares insights into export credit insurance and how Ex-Im Bank's products can help resolve common financial challenges in international transactions. The discussion covers Ex-Im Bank's new domestic project finance product, designed to support projects that have a significant export component. We touch on the requirement for a U.S. majority in product content, aiming to foster manufacturing and job growth in the United States. Eric explains the importance of services, like engineering and architectural services for foreign projects, requiring a U.S. majority for cost. We discuss government resources that can aid businesses in exporting, such as tax incentives and the Gold Key service provided by the U.S. Commercial Services. The episode highlights the STEP grant, a federal program managed by states to support companies with export-related expenses. Eric and I settle the Tex-Mex vs. BBQ debate with an appreciation for both, adding a lighthearted twist to the episode. Contact information for Eric Miller is shared for listeners who wish to connect and further explore export financing options. Contact Details Email (eric.miller@xmexim.gov) Phone Number (713-306-7969) LINKSShow Notes Be a Guest About IC-DISC Alliance About Export-Import Bank of the United States GUEST Eric MillerAbout Eric TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dave: Hi, this is David Spray. Welcome to another episode of the IC Disc Show. My guest today is Eric Miller of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, colloquially known by the acronym of XM. More useful takeaways for privately held exporting companies than any guest I've ever had. We talked about the history of the XM, its purpose and the four service offerings that they have for privately held exporting businesses. We also talked about three other governmental arms that can also be of value. The other interesting thing about Eric is he actually was a customer of XM early in his career when he was a minority owner of an exporting business. So Eric's a really dynamic guy. He's really passionate about serving exporting companies and he really understands what it's like to be in the shoes of their customers. I really recommend you take a listen to this one. It's really valuable hey good morning Eric. Welcome to the podcast. Eric: Thank you, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here. It's an honor. Thank you. Dave: Well, the pleasure is all mine. So where are you connecting from today? What part of the world are you in at the moment? Eric: The great state of Texas. I'm in the Houston area, born and raised in Texas and been all over the world, but this is home. Oh, that's awesome. Dave: In fact, I think you even stayed close for college, right. Eric: I did. I'm a Cougar alumni, so a proud Houston native. Dave: Awesome, so I'm really excited to have you on. You are with the Export Import Bank of the United States, correct? Correct so we also go by XM Bank, sorry. Eric: Yep. Dave: So tell me about XM, tell me about the kind of the history of the organization and why it exists, and then we'll get it. We'll see where the conversation goes. Eric: Yeah, no, it's a good question. I'm biased, of course, working here, but I think it's one of the most fascinating government agencies that exist. We're set up in the executive branch of the federal government. We've been around for 90 years. Most people haven't heard of us. We are small. We've got anywhere between 400 and 500 people as a part of the agency. Most are headquartered in Washington DC, but we do have a dozen regional offices scattered throughout the US and all the major cities. I cover the Houston office and in doing so, I work with exporters in the great state of Texas and help them export more US made products and services. That's really what we're about here at XM Bank is supporting our US companies that are exporting a US made good or service. We're on the finance side of that help. There's other government agencies. Throughout the whole process of a transaction, whether it's finding buyers, whether it's financing a transaction or even getting grant money to help you export. There's other support, but EXIM is specific on the finance piece. Dave: Okay, and so does EXIM. At the end of the day, you know, does this cost taxpayers, you know, billions of dollars to have this thing in place. Eric: Yeah, that's another good question. So you know, we're one of the few agencies historically that have actually built a surplus of money for the taxpayer. In other words, we're using less than we're making and we send money back to Treasury. It changes year to year, but historically, if you look over the past you the past 20, 30 years we're generating a surplus and sending that back to treasury, so costing taxpayers billions of dollars. No, we like to operate a little differently than a government agency. We are an independent government agency, which means we're not inside a cabinet, but we are set up in the executive branch and we like to say we run at the speed of business Internally, we're very efficient, we're very effective and we're very aggressive, trying to reach out to US companies and get them involved in helping them. Dave: Well, that is awesome. I think it sounds like just a win, right. It's a win for the taxpayers. It's actually a profit center, if you will, for the taxpayers. It's good for the exporters, it's good for the country. Am I correct? I think the only other government agency I've ever heard of that's a profit center is like the Patent and Trademark Office. Have you heard that too? Eric: I think you're right. Now, I haven't researched that myself, just in passing and conversations I've heard of the same and there might be one or two others out there. But yeah, it's an unusual feat of a government agency to kind of generate that surplus for a taxpayer and send it back to Treasury. We do charge, you know, fees and that's how the agency itself makes and brings in money. We charge fees for our different products and you know we have products like export credit insurance. To just kind of dive into what we do, yeah, let's do that In export credit insurance to just kind of dive into what we do yeah let's do that In export credit insurance. So let me take a couple steps back. When an exporter engages in international business, when they find a foreign buyer in a country and they say, hey, here's what I sell, whether it's a product or service, there's always a sticking point. If you will product or service, there's always a sticking point if you will in the negotiations, when it comes to money flow. And what I mean by that is the exporter will say, hey, I'll ship my product or I'll do the service, but go ahead and wire me money before I ship it. And then the importer, the buyer there's always a reluctance to say well, I don't want to wire you money, because what if you close your doors? I never hear from you again. So when there's a new relationship and there's a transaction that's trying to occur, money, the movement of money, is always a sticking point. Who sends it first? And exporters lose a lot of deals because of this. I speak to exporters on a daily basis and every week there's at least one that says I wish I would have known about this. It would have helped me with the last negotiation I had with a foreign buyer who said you know, ship me the product on open account and I'll pay you 60 days later. I wasn't comfortable with that as an exporter so I closed the door and lost the deal. So XM gets involved and we say no, go ahead. And you know, if they're asking for credit terms, go ahead and provide that to them and we will back you up on the payment. We will insure that receivable from default. So if something goes wrong and the foreign buyer doesn't pay back the exporter as intended, we will insure it. They put a claim into us. So when I say claim, just like any other insurance policy, right, you're driving a car and you get to an accident, you file a claim. Something goes wrong with the house, you file a claim with the home insurance provider. We're no different. We're an insurance provider on foreign receivables and the government gets involved in this space because you know, david, look at the trade deficit. Last year we're nearing a trillion dollars. Most years, from year to year in the last 10 years, it's getting worse and worse. So what I mean by that is we're bringing in way more than we're sending out, and what we have found through our research as a government agency is the number one reason more US companies are not sending more product abroad is the number one reason is fear. They are fearful of what that process looks like and the government gets involved. Then we say let's take away that fear. We'll put the risk on our shoulders as it relates to credit insurance. Go ahead and give your foreign buyer terms or open account. We'll shoulder the risk and if they don't pay you, we'll pay you. And we want to help the trade deficit. We want to as a government agency. We want to stimulate US manufacturing. We want to create jobs through exports. That's really what the mission is here at Ex-Im Bank. Dave: Okay, yeah, no, that's really good. And do you specifically underwrite each customer? You know each foreign customer, or is there just you guys? Just use some general parameters. Eric: Yeah, no, it's a good question, like what does that process look like? So we have four different credit insurance policies. We can do everything from hey, we'll underwrite every buyer if you're not comfortable with it. Or hey, we'll give you a policy where you can do your own underwriting according to our credit standards but give you that autonomy inside your company to do it without coming to us every time there's a buyer. So there's different approaches. Most exporters like the autonomy because they can approve a credit right then and there, rather than sending us the paperwork and then us process it and then get back to them. So it just depends on timeline. But yeah, we can do either. Dave: And does the policy insure 100% of the invoice or is there a co-insurance piece where your customer is taking some of the risk? Eric: So the coverage will be anywhere from 90 or 95%, depending on which policy. Most of them are in that 95% range, but some of them are in the 90. Okay, they have the option. Dave: Yeah. So it's enough that as long as the company's got decent margins right, if their margin's greater than 5% or 10%, then their risk is just if a deal goes bad. They didn't make any money on that deal. Eric: That's a fair way of looking at it? Dave: Yep, but they have enough skin in the game that they do want to make a profit on that transaction. They want to all that trouble. So they have a motivation to not, you know, sell to people who you know they have serious concerns about their ethics or integrity or ability to pay. Eric: Exactly, and that's really what it's all about. Hey, I've got a new relationship and you know, name a country. They're asking for open account. And open account, you know, most people are comfortable with that in the US. They have a recourse in mind. Hey, if I don't pay, here's the process where I can recoup. But that all goes away when you send it to a foreign country. Like you know, how do I even get my money if I don't? I'm dealing with a different legal environment, political currency, culture, I mean. The list goes on and on. So that's where, wherein lies the fear for the exporter. And there's government agencies, both local, state and federal, all of them. We want to surround the exporter, prop them up, take away the fear, shoulder the risk and get them comfortable in international business. Dave: Okay, so you may mention the one person you were talking to that said they wish they'd known about XM because they kind of lost this deal. Do you have another case study, if you will, or example and obviously you don't have to mention the specific company by name where everything did work out kind of a success story, where maybe they were not exporting much but with this credit insurance it really helped them materially increase their sales? Do you have any examples like that, just to help people further understand? Eric: Oh yeah, we have a whole list of resources on our website. There's a section dedicated to success stories of all the different companies and we like to diversify the industry and the product and we've got you name it and it's probably up there. One that just immediately comes to mind is a company and they've been kind of a strong advocate of Ex-Im Bank. They're called BuzzBalls and it's alcohol manufactured here in Texas in the Dallas area, and they were very successful domestically. I mean, you can find these little alcohol glasses basically in any kind of retail store in the US. But as they looked abroad they wanted to de-risk a lot of their open account with distributors and really I think the last I heard they either doubled or tripled the revenue by focusing on foreign buyers, distributing it to the distributors, the foreign distributors giving them credit to pay and Ex-Im Bank insuring the risk. I mean, it's just one interesting example that you know, if little cups of alcohol can move abroad, mostly anything can. Dave: Oh, that's great, I love that and thank you for that. Thank you for that example. So now let's say that a company is contemplating exporting and let's say they have this large potential order you know large for them, you say it's a $5 million company annual revenues and suddenly they have this pay for the materials from their supplier and they maybe don't have enough working capital to do that and maybe they're in a spot where you know a traditional bank loan or line of credit. They're maybe, just maybe what you'd call not bankable. What happens then? Does the whole process just fall apart? You know they've got the credit insurance but they don't have the cash to buy the goods. What happens then? Eric: Yeah, that's really the second big problem in international trade. So the US banking system in general is challenging to help US companies fill export orders, and what I mean by that is, in your example, a $5 million revenue company. It can even be bigger than that, it could be 20, 30, 40. The problem with a lot of US companies is when their foreign sales start to get significant and they go to the bank and say, hey, I need a line of credit, not just for my domestic business, I need it for my international too. There becomes a problem in the banking system. There's this view that it's high risk and, as bankers tend to be more conservative and shy away from risk, so most times US companies have problems getting the money they need to fill these export purchase orders. So government gets involved, Ex-Im gets involved and SBA also has a product similar to the Ex-Im bank. It varies according to the banker who wants to use the product, but the idea behind it is we become a guarantor of repayment to the lender. So in your example, $5 million a year company, $2 million foreign sale that we're going to insure they walk that over to the bank and they say, hey, I got insurance on the receivable. Great, it's a $2 million deal. Now I need a million bucks or whatever as a line of credit to build all this stuff or go out and buy it. The bank will say, okay, where's it going? Oh, it's leaving the country. I can't help you. But when you come back with a US purchase order, then we can get serious in our talks. The company is stranded and they can't get the money, the capital they need to fill these orders with working capital. So we get involved and we say, hey, if they're presenting financial statements and the financial statements merit the ability to borrow what they're asking for a million, whatever it is and you're only saying no because it's an export, go ahead and give them the money that they need that they're asking for again, as long as it meets the credit standards, and we'll co-sign, we become a repayment guarantor to that line of credit so they can have access to the money that they need to fill these foreign buyer purchase orders. Guarantees and insurance is really kind of what we're about here at Ex-Im Bank to enable this cross-border trade. On the finance piece, Now, with that line of credit that we guarantee, they could also use it to issue bid bonds or performance bonds or standby letters of credit. Because another problem in our banking system is when a exporter bids on a foreign tender, that tender sometimes will say hey, if you want to bid on this, you got to put up a performance bond or a bid bond and that kind of weeds out the non-serious suppliers versus the serious. And when they want to supply that bid bond and they go to the bank, put the equivalent amount of cash in your account, I'll escrow it and then issue the bond. And then the exporter you know has this confused look. And well, I don't want to pay for my own deal and block my own cash. So under the XM line of credit you can actually use borrowed money to issue those bid bonds, performance bonds, standby LCs at a reduced cash collateral, so you're not tying up your cash. Dave: Interesting. Eric: And what's the? Dave: typical I think the term like if you're factoring an invoice, it's called. I think it's called like the advance rate, like what percentage you could borrow, like on the you know the purchase order or the invoice that you create. What's that percentage? You know, through the XM financing. Eric: So we put it into two categories pre-export and post-export. Okay, pre-export is the working capital right, the inventory, work in process, finished goods. So under that you could borrow a 75% advance rate. Then post-export, once it becomes a receivable, you could borrow 90. So it's pretty generous advance rates and typically it helps exporters fill these purchase orders much easier if we weren't involved. Dave: Yeah, Cause I think I was a CFO of a company many years ago and we were growing rapidly and we're using factoring and the. It seems like the advance rate we were able to get on the factoring for domestic sales, let alone international, was only like 70 or 80%. So, and even I think I'm told that even if a company has a line of credit that they're backing with inventory and domestic receivables, that still a typical kind of advance rate is really only like I think, about 80. And so you're talking about an even higher, if I'm using the correct term, than what a traditional bank would provide to a traditional bankable customer for a domestic sale. Is that accurate, based on your knowledge? Eric: Yeah, very accurate. And sometimes you know I go back to the example of US banks don't like export orders, and they don't. Sometimes they will give an advantage. They've got a traditional line of credit set up for domestic. They may say we'll let you borrow 10, 20, 30% advance rate on the export stuff. With our guarantee we can expand that to 75, up to 90. So it could be that we expand the borrowing base or just let alone get them access to it for export orders, with our guarantee. Dave: Okay, yeah, this is really valuable and I can't wait to get the word out to our contacts. So, on the working capital piece so how does that work then? Is the process that they call up their bank and say, hey, do you guys do anything with XM and they just work purely through their banker? Or do they call you up and say, hey, we need some working capital? We don't really have a big banking relationship. Can you recommend somebody? Help me understand the logistics? Eric: of it, Absolutely. Yeah, it's a good question. We recommend starting with us. It's very easy to get lost in the banking system and trying to figure out who to talk to about getting the setup. A lot of time exporters will speak to their local relationship manager and they start talking about XM working capital and they're like you know who's XM? I don't, I don't even know what you're talking about. Slow down, so it's more efficient to start with us and if they're working with a bank that is in our lender network, we can go directly to the right person and connect them with the exporter to have those conversations. If they're working with a lender that is not inside our our network, we can still locate a lender to set up kind of a XM specific line of credit if that's something they want to pursue. Dave: Okay. Eric: Okay. Dave: Now this is really valuable. Does the bank have any other service lines besides the foreign receivables insurance and the working capital? Eric: We've got a couple others. One of them is called foreign buyer finance. Okay, this is a real interesting one. This is when a US company is selling capital equipment to a foreign buyer and when that capital equipment quotation gets to the foreign buyer, what we see often is they'll go to their bank. In some of these emerging markets, developing countries, the buyer will go to the bank and say, ok, you know, I got a quotation for, let's say, you know, john Deere equipment, ag equipment or Caterpillar, construction equipment or mining equipment, whatever. They go to their bank and they say I need to borrow to pay the US company for the equipment. And when they get a term sheet from their local bank, if you're familiar with international business and international finance, the cost can be much higher than what we're used to paying in the US as far as cost of capital Cost of capital I've seen even triple and quadruple in some of these developing markets. And then the buyer the deal falls to the wayside because the buyer can't afford to pay the bank all this cost associated with the capital. So in situations like that and kind of high cost capital markets, we can get involved and find a lender, as long as we've got good audited financial statements and they meet credit standards, we can find a lender to give that foreign buyer a term loan, a three to seven year term loan, of which we guarantee repayment of to the lender, to buy that US made capital equipment. So, in simple terms, we can finance a foreign buyer when the foreign buyer is buying US made equipment, and what we have found is the US companies that really know this product inside and out use that as a competitive advantage. They're saying, hey, sure, on one hand, here's my quotation for the equipment and on the other hand, I can get you finance if you need it. And I can get you finance if you need it. And the companies that do that well, I mean their sales shoot through the roof because now they become this finance facilitator for foreign buyers to access cheaper capital, which we've even seen companies where maybe they're 10% higher on the bid than some of the other countries, but they're saving them 15% on the finance. Dave: Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, I can see that that's really clever. I was familiar with the first two pieces, but I really was not familiar with that. I mean, yeah, that's a real competitive advantage. I mean it makes you wonder how a company in I don't know pick your country, brazil, that you know is trying to compete Like how do they compete when they can't? I'm guessing that they probably don't have the same type of capability to offer you know these, you know more attractive financing rates. Eric: So, yeah, that's a great point XM Bank we're also referred as an export credit agency, eca. So every developed country in the world has the equivalent of us. Out of, let's say, roughly 200 countries, there's 120 of us representing the nation of each country. So what we know is, as it relates to international business, there are, you know, foreign. When there's foreign competition in the tender, sometimes that foreign competition knows about their local ECA also. Right, so they could be offering the same thing. Hey, I can get you, you know, finance through my local ECA. You know name, a country, country. So we want companies in the US to be aware of how we can help them and support them, just like other member countries of partner ECAs do, because it's a competitive advantage and if they're not aware of it, it's a loss really for the exporter. And I mentioned four products. So we went over export credit insurance, the working capital getting the foreign buyer a loan, and then the fourth one. It came out about a year and a half ago. It's a new product that we're super excited about and it's really domestic project finance where there's an export nexus. And what I mean by that, david, is let's take an industry, let's take LNG. When an LNG liquid natural gas. When liquid natural gas projects in wherever let's call it Texas, when they go live and you've got a solid entity set up for the purpose of building an LNG plant maybe there's corporate shareholders, maybe there's individual shareholders, whatever it may be when banks take a look at this and they see that it's a domestic project finance structure meaning the off of any kind of contract will repay the loan Bankers don't like that. Bankers don't like project finance. If we look at a project where there's an export nexus and what we define as an export nexus is 25% of the sales will be exported we could potentially be a lender or a loan guarantor to that domestic project as long as there's going to be 25% foreign sales, and we could go down to 15% if it's a small business, so we can involve oh, that's really cool. Dave: Yeah, because I mentioned the bank is going to say, yeah, it sounds like a great opportunity. Go find some investors to fund this and then, once you start exporting the LNG, give us a call. We'll give you some working capital and you'll work with XM to ensure the receivables, but until then, hey, it's on you. Eric: That's it. That's the problem. That's where a lot of these projects get stuck in the banking system as it relates to traditional banking. They can't get the money they need to lift this project up, and it could be a great project, but yeah, banks like to see history right. I want to see your balance sheet income statement, cash flow last three years. Let me underwrite it Well, there is none. It's a new project and we're building it. Well, we can't help you Go find some investors, and that's typically the conversations. So, instead of these deals disappearing, as long as there is solid offtake agreements, we can look at that, potentially to repay the loan, and we do that on the foreign buyer side too. Dave: Yeah, and to be fair to the bankers I know many bankers and have great relationships If a bank is paying 5% for a deposit and they're lending it out at, say, 8%, by the time they pay their fees and stuff they really don't have a lot of margin left. So you know they have an imputed default rate. You know that they can tolerate of like half a percent, right, maybe 1%, right. I mean, that's just their model. Eric: Margins are thin, you're right. Dave: Yeah, and they're probably even I'm guessing even prohibited from saying okay, yeah, we'll finance this deal for you, but this is high risk. So instead of a 7% loan, it's gonna be 30%. I mean, the banks probably aren't even allowed to do. There's probably usury laws or something. Am I correct in that? Eric: Yeah, yeah. So they would definitely view the risk differently as a domestic project finance. But I would say, even more so, the regulatory issues involving domestic project finance probably prohibit the lenders from doing that. Dave: Even oh yeah, yeah, that's right. I never thought about that. Eric: There's definitely some challenges in that space. I never thought about that. There's definitely some challenges in that space. Dave: Yeah, that makes sense because really, from a holistic perspective, you would say hey, bank, this isn't your sweet spot. This is like venture capital, risk capital. Let them find a lender, like a hard asset lender, that'll charge a much higher rate, or let them raise equity capital to finance this. This isn't what you're designed for, mr First National Bank, Exactly. Eric: Okay. Dave: What are some of the limits, minimum maximums for these different products? Let's start with the credit insurance. Is there a minimum size that you all have insurance? Is there a minimum size like that you all have? I mean, I'm guessing if somebody has a hundred dollar foreign receivable that they want to insure, probably doesn't really make sense for everybody. So is there a minimum size? Is it a hard minimum or kind of a soft minimum? Eric: Yeah, that's a great question. So we don't have a minimum per se, documented minimum, but yeah, it's got to make sense right To go through the process. So I mean, we've insured receivables as low as a couple thousand bucks, so that's for credit insurance. For working capital we also don't have a minimum, but that's set by the lender. So we say hey, as long as the lender will do the loan, we'll take a look at the guarantee and most lenders that we have spoken to we probably would say that the minimum with most lenders is around a half a million for a working capital line of credit. And then on the foreign buyer side, again it's got to make sense to the lender. We don't have a minimum. Most lenders, I would say the minimum I've seen where a US lender would give a loan to a foreign buyer is also around a half a million. Maximum, no maximum, but anything above 25 million has to go to our board. The largest we did in the bank's history was in Mozambique, for an LNG facility was 5 billion. Oh wow. Dave: And then are there limits on the working capital and credit insurance, similar limits that require board approval. Eric: Anything above 25. Yep, it's the same 25 number, correct, which it's. You know it's not prohibitive, it just adds another layer to the process. Yeah. Dave: And even again, even if XM wasn't involved, I know a lot of banks, just you know, when loans get above a certain amount they want to syndicate them with other banks, just for their own risk. And I think a lot of times those syndication amounts for a medium-sized bank will start in that 10 to $25 million, as I understand it. And then what about the domestic projects that have 25% export expectations, any minimum or maximums there that you've seen? Eric: So I would say there's no hard set minimum, but the soft minimum I'm seeing is probably 5 million plus and the reason for that is the SBA, the Small Business Administration, also a federal government agency. They have similar products that go up to five, so this will take it past five and we don't want to compete with another government agency. They have similar products that go up to five, so this will take it past five and we don't want to compete with another government agency, so it's five below. Sba might be a better fit. Five above we're probably the only game in town. Okay, zero to five, taking some notes on this Five plus. Dave: You know, one of the other interesting things is we've had this conversation that if you think people have never heard of XM, they're even, I think, less likely to have heard of the ICDISC program. You know we specialize and what's interesting is how is the number of parallels? I mean, the thing that I can't, you know that blows me away is how logical everything is with XM. Like you know, there's a, you know there's a perhaps a belief that some government programs, agencies that there's no real logic to it. It was just it was some negotiation in Congress and they had just some arbitrary rules. But you know, as I kind of look at these, they just all seems very logical, right? And you know, like you know, above a certain amount you need board approval Again, just like in a bank, right, when they're doing a $25 million loan, it's probably got to go to a loan review committee or something. But the other thing is there's some similarities between XM and the ICDISC and one of them is the 51% US content. Can you explain how that works with XM, because I think it's pretty much the same as ICDISC. Eric: To my knowledge it is also yeah. So it goes back to really the mission right Creating jobs through US exports, and we want to stimulate US manufacturing. So we can't support a trade where you know Houston companies buying from China and sending it down to you know name a country in South America. There's no value add for the country. So Congress basically put a policy to the agency that says anything that we support has to be greater than 50% US content. So another way of saying it's just 51%. Right, majority of the product has to be US content, and the way that we calculate that is we look at the cost. So if they're selling a widget that they sell for $100, but it costs $70, we're going to look at the $70 and say $30 of that, 70 needs to be US content. So that's really we look at the cost and the majority of the cost needs to be US made, whether it's product. Dave: Or another way of saying it is no more than $36 foreign cost Yep, that makes sense. Eric: And if it's a service, by the way, sometimes we get these service questions, by the way, because sometimes we get these service questions where, hey, you know, I'm an engineering company designing, you know, a refinery plant for a foreign buyer. How do I look at that as far as US content? So what we do is we say, okay, start with your invoice. Right, whatever you're billing out, if it says engineering services or CAD drawings or whatever, take that and then look at the cost and greater than 50% needs to be US citizens or green card holders as part of that cost for services. So we basically look at the citizenship of the provider for evaluating US content and the cost. Dave: Yeah, and that's somewhat similar to the ICDISC really only includes two types of services that are eligible engineering services and architectural services for foreign construction projects or services that are an integral part of the sale. You know, like if you sell a product for a million dollars and there's a $200,000 installation service, as long as that's an integral part of the, you know the project that qualifies, you know that service does. But yeah, that's interesting. So let's say somebody says hey, you know, eric, I really like the sound of this and I'd like to talk to you. But you know, I just feel like you know, you're probably a lifelong government employee. You probably want to work right out of college. You don't know what it's like to sit in my shoes. You don't know what it's like to have been on the private side. You know having these foreign customers. What would you say to them? Eric: Yeah, so being a government employee is new to me also, yeah, so after college I started at a company and worked there for a decade, grew into sweat equity. I was a part minority shareholder and I was a customer of Ex-Im Bank for 10 years. Yeah, we were a company that exported capital equipment all over the world, but with a concentration in Sub-Saharan Africa. Okay, and we grew rapidly with the help of Ex-Im Bank. We used all the products of credit insurance, the working capital, getting the foreign buyer a loan and that really became a competitive advantage to the company. Because we looked at ourselves saying, hey, we're an equipment supplier, but so is the other hundreds of companies around, if not thousands of companies. How do we make ourselves different? And the finance became very important to that conversation, because you can Google, search equipment companies in the US and you're going through thousands of pages trying to find an equipment supplier. But not everybody is saying, hey, we have financial solutions too. If you need them, we can get you a loan. We can sell to you an open account with our insurance. We can get the capital we need to fill these export purchase orders. We can get the line of credit that we need to send bid bonds and performance bonds to some of these large tenders. So, going back to your question, I've been at Exxon for seven years, but the majority of my career was in the private sector and being a minority shareholder of a company that used the bank that I work for now to grow a small business. Dave: What a great story, like it would seem like you have the perfect background for your role I mean, you're actually a customer for your role. I mean you're actually a customer. So the private companies that you're trying to help you really do understand what it's like to be in their shoes. Eric: I think most employees that work here at ExxonMobil found we're very service oriented. We like to help. We like to help. It's fun for us to help. It's fun for me to help. The best part of my day is meeting small business exporters, helping them become aware of all the resources that are available to them to become more competitive and grow, like we did when I was with that company. Dave: Yeah, it's just amazing how similar our days are. That's also the favorite part of my job is when I get a phone call from somebody and they say hey, you know, bob said I should call you. You know we're. Our exports have really grown a lot, and there's this thing called ICDISC and you know, tell us about it, are we the right fit? And it's great to be able to help them. Oh, I was just going to ask you something. Oh, what about indirect exports? Do they qualify under an indirect export? Eric: Great question, yeah, so under the working capital it does. So if you have an exporter that's selling to you know name a major company, let's say a major oil and gas company who in turn is exporting that out, we call that an indirect export. That does qualify them to get the capital they need to fill that order. Dave: Yep, Another parallel with the IC disk. The IC disk is the same way. Yeah, Most of our clients are actually indirect exporters. So some of the products would not be as beneficial, you know, like the credit insurance, for example, because they don't have any foreign receivables. But you know, they don't have any foreign receivables, but they still may have use for some of the other products. Okay, so I've got just a couple more questions. Eric: Well, first off, is there anything we didn't cover that you wish I had? I would say there's other government resources that every exporter should know. Dave: Okay, what are those? Eric: Yeah, so one of them is the US Commercial Services. They're a part of the Department of Commerce and they've got an office in every major city in the US. I think there's a hundred, if I remember right, a hundred US Commercial Service offices scattered throughout the US. If you're in Houston, there's one in Houston. Great folks, we work with them closely. They've got some really good products as well for exporters. One of them is called the Gold Key, and the Gold Key it basically connects buyer and seller. So once the agency understands the company, they met with them. They understand the company, they understand what they're selling. They have to be what's called export ready. So an existing business that's already selling, let's say they're successful here domestically and they want to export. You know, let's say that to the, to our closest neighbors, first Canada and Mexico. But they're like hey, I don't, how do I even do that? How do I find a buyer, how do I find a distributor in these countries? That's really the first step in kind of the. The maze of exporting is first you got, you have to have a buyer. We're kind of second to that right. Once you have a buyer, then it's money talks and then we get involved. But even before us. The commercial services can get involved and under the gold key they can find distributors, partners, buyers in foreign markets. Wow, yeah, under the gold key. So they basically, once they understand the business, they work with the embassy in that country and say, hey, I've got, you know, bob, here's his company, been around for 10 years, successful in the U? S, but they want to start with Mexico. And can you find them buyers, can you find them distributors? And they try to play matchmaker. So they generate a list and they recommend going to the country that you want to export to shake hands, stare them in the face, sit down with them physically, because that's another important thing in international business you can't just stay behind the phone or email. You really have to go to these places. Dave: Wow, so that's amazing. Now the bad news, Eric, is you and XM may have just dropped to number two as far as my favorite government agency. I mean, depending on where a company is, that might be even more valuable, right? Because without the customers, they don't even need the other products of XM. That's really cruel. Eric: That's right yeah. I mean they need a buyer before they come to XM. They need a foreign buyer and commercial services can help with that. Dave: So be careful. You're about to list some other agencies and may further knock you down on the priority list, so be careful there. Eric: That's OK, we're here to help. So you know. Another problem with small businesses you know I'm selling domestically. You know successful I'm selling domestically. You know I'm successful. Maybe I'm running on thin margins. I don't have the capital that I need to go into all these countries and spend all this money and cross my fingers that I get business. And I just don't want to spend that kind of money and risk that kind of money because I need to keep my lights on and pay employees first. So there's something called the STEP grant S-T-E-P grant. Dave: STEP grant. Eric: It stands for statewide trade export promotion, so most states participate in it. It's federal money given to the states who in turn give grant money to companies who are looking to export, and they can use that grant money for travel you know, hotel, stay, airfare. They want to do website translation on their website from you know English to Mandarin and Spanish to. You know capture half the world. They want to. You know create design, create print flyers. You know any kind of marketing collateral that will aid them in promoting their company to foreign buyers. This is a reimbursable grant, which means you apply for it. You can say, hey, I want to go to Mexico, my airfare is going to cost this, my hotel is going to cost this, conference in Mexico is going to cost this, and all together it's going to be $10,000. So you apply for it and then, once approved, you can get up to 75% of that back. Dave: So you have to actually spend the money. Eric: First you got to spend. That's the key thing there. You got to spend the money, but you got to get it approved. Once it's approved, then you spend the money and then you come back and give them your receipts. Dave: Wow, that's pretty cool. Does that fall under one of the federal agencies? Is that kind of the ultimate umbrella, or is it really more of a state by state program? Eric: In Texas the Department of Ag is administering the fund and I think it does vary state by state on who holds the money and approves it and disperses the money, and I may be wrong, but I think it goes up to $10,000. It's either $7,500 or $10,000 max amount that can be approved. Okay, you can apply every year. Some companies do that. Okay, and what else? Are there some other? The SBA, small Business Administration Sure, most people know them for domestic business, but they also have an export arm called the OIT, which is Office of International Trade. So they have export finance products just like we do. They're not competitive to one another. They're slightly different in various aspects. They can get you working capital, usually for smaller loans, or they can get you something called an international trade loan and what that is used for is like, hey, I need to buy some capital equipment to go into my factory and it's going to cost a million bucks and it's going to generate export sales, that kind of finance structure. Dave: Is the structure kind of the same, or does the borrower have to put up a bigger percentage? Or do you know? Eric: For the international trade loan. I think it's similar. They guarantee the lender just like we guarantee the lender. The international trade loan I think it's similar. They guarantee the lender just like we guarantee the lender and lenders. You know, we like to say the lender makes the decision because our guarantees are slightly different than one another. So some lenders will say, hey, I'm more comfortable with XM, or hey, I'm more comfortable with the SBA, or hey, this is above $5 million. The only one you could do is XM Bank. So it's really up to the lender to evaluate the guarantee and what fits them best. Dave: Well, that is awesome. Any other government agencies that you tend to work with regularly those are the big ones. Eric: They'll always be in the same circles the SBA, the commercial services, and ourselves in the same circles, promoting as much as we can to our communities. Dave: That's awesome. Well, this has been so informative. I really appreciate the time. I just have two more questions, and they're really kind of fun ones, okay. So the first one is if you could go back in time and give advice to yourself, like right, when you were graduating college, what advice might you give to yourself? You know, with the benefit of hindsight, you know, if you kind of go back in time. Eric: What advice might you? Dave: give to yourself. You know, with the benefit of hindsight, you know if you kind of go back in time what advice might you give to yourself, you know? Things to do instead, or do sooner, or what comes to mind. Eric: That's a really good question, you know, going back in time, I would say, for the company that I worked for and some of the things that I don't like to say did wrong. But if we could repeat it and how we would do it differently. When the business grows and we grew fast our operational costs also grew fast and I think if we were better controlling the operational cost when there was a dip in revenue, there wouldn't be so much growing pains or slowing pains. I think getting a better grasp operationally on a business when it's going through the growth phase is key to its long-term success, because a business is not always going to accelerate up. There's going to be peaks and valleys and as long as you manage the operational cost of the company, it can get through. You know look at COVID right Nobody predicted that how many businesses went through all kinds of painful experiences. So that, going back in time, just from a business standpoint, I think that would have been super helpful in our judgment and assessment of looking towards the future. Dave: Okay, I really like that. Well, we just have one left, and this one's even more fun. Don't think about this, I just want. It's kind of a snap answer. Okay, so you're a native Texan, right Native Houstonian, tex-mex or barbecue. Eric: Oh, I got to go with Tex-Mex. I love barbecue, barbecue. Oh, I gotta go with tex-mex. I love barbecue, but you know the chips and queso and salsa and guacamole. Dave: I don't think everything competes with that. Yeah, I, I asked this question of all my guests and and I had two answers that were interesting. One answer was if it's, if I know that the food is going to be average, I, I absolutely would take the Tex-Mex, because Tex-Mex has more tolerance for averageness. Ok, they said. But if it's going to be world class, then they would take the barbecue. But they don't want mediocre, tough, dried out brisket. Ok, so I'm like, well, that's a good one. And then I had a guest telling me about I forget the name of the place, but it was a place that had like brisket tacos or brisket enchiladas, and they basically said both, they'll take both. Eric: There you go. I like that. Dave: Yeah, I am with you. If people want to get ahold of you, what's the best way to reach out? I know you're on LinkedIn. Are you very active on LinkedIn? Eric: Not super active on LinkedIn, but I'm very accessible Cell phone, email, office phone. You can always get ahold of me. Dave: What's the email address? Eric: So ericmiller M-I-L--LE-R X-M-E-X-I-Mgov gov. Dave: So eric.miller@xmexim.gov and if they want to just call you, what's the best number to reach you? Eric: at 713-306-7969 awesome. Dave: well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on here. This may be the most information dense episode I've ever done for an exporter. Usually it seems like we've got one or two good nuggets, but we may have a dozen takeaways, so thank you so much for making time out of your day and this has really been fun. And don't be surprised when this goes live if you don't have a few folks reaching out to you. Eric: I look forward to it. Thanks for having me. It's been an honor. Special Guest: Eric Miller.

Rounding Up Season 2 | Episode 10 – Place Value Guest: Dr. Eric Sisofo Mike Wallus: If you ask an educator to share some of the most important ideas in elementary mathematics, I'm willing to bet that most would include place value on that list. But what does it mean to understand place value really? And what types of language practices and tools support students as they build their understanding? Today we're digging deep into the topic of place value with Dr. Eric Sisofo from the University of Delaware.  Mike: Welcome to the podcast, Eric. We're glad to have you with us.  Eric Sisofo: Thanks for having me, Mike. Really excited to be here with you today.  Mike: I'm pretty excited to talk about place value. One of the things that's interesting is part of your work is preparing pre-service students to become classroom elementary teachers. And one of the things that I was thinking about is what do you want educators preparing to teach to understand about place value as they're getting ready to enter the field?  Eric: Yeah, that's a really great question. In our math content courses at the University of Delaware, we focus on three big ideas about place value with our novice teachers. The first big idea is that place value is based on the idea of grouping a total amount of stuff or bundling a total amount of stuff into different size units. So, as you know, we use groups of ones, tens, hundreds, thousands and so on, not just ones in our base 10 system to count or measure a total amount of stuff. And we write a numeral using the digit 0 through 9 to represent the amount of stuff that we measured. So interestingly, our novice teachers come to us with a really good understanding of this idea for whole numbers, but it's not as obvious to them for decimal quantities. So, we spend a lot of time with our novice teachers helping them think conceptually about the different groupings, or bundlings, that they're using to measure a decimal amount of stuff. In particular, getting them used to using units of size: one-tenth, one-hundredth, one-thousandth, and so on. So, that's one big idea that really shines through whether you're dealing with whole numbers or decimal numbers, is that place value is all about grouping, or bundling, a total amount of stuff with very specific, different-size units.  Eric: The second big idea we'd help our novice teachers make sense of at UD is that there's a relationship between different place value units. In particular, we want our novice teachers to realize that there's this 10 times relationship between place value units. And this relationship holds true for whole numbers and decimal numbers. So, 10 of one type of grouping will make one of the next larger-sized grouping in our decimal system. And that relationship holds true for all place value units in our place value system. So, there might be some kindergarten and first-grade teachers listening who try to help their students realize that 10 ones are needed to make one 10. And some second- and third-grade teachers who try to help their students see that 10 tens are needed to make 100. And 10 hundreds are needed to make 1,000, and so on. In fourth and fifth grade, we kind of extend that idea to decimal amounts. So, helping our students realize that 10 of these one-tenths will create a one. Or 10 of the one-hundredths are needed to make one-tenth, and so on and so on for smaller and smaller place value units. So, that's the second big idea. Eric: And the third big idea that we explicitly discuss with our pre-service teachers is that there's a big difference between the face value of a digit and the place value of a digit. So, as you know, there are only 10 digits in our base 10 place value system. And we can reuse those digits in different places, and they take on a different value. So, for example, for the number 444, the same digit, 4, shows up three different times in the numeral. So, the face value is four. It's the same each digit in the numeral, but each four represents a different place value or a different grouping or an amount of stuff. So, for 444, the 4 in the hundreds place means that you have four groupings of size 100, the four in the tens place means you have four groupings of size 10, and the four in the ones place means you have four groupings of size one.  Eric: So, this happens with decimal numbers, too. With our novice teachers, we spend a lot of time trying to get them to name those units and not just say, for example, 3.4 miles when they're talking about a numeral. We wouldn't want them to say 3.4. We instead want them to say three and four-tenths, or three ones and four-tenths miles. So, saying the numeral 3.4 focuses mostly just on the face value of those digits and removes some of the mathematics that's embedded in the numeral. So, instead of saying the numerals three ones and four-tenths or three and four-tenths really requires you to think about the face value and the place value of each digit. So those are the three big ideas that we discuss often with our novice teachers at the University of Delaware, and we hope that this helps them develop their conceptual understanding of those ideas so that they're better prepared to help their future students make sense of those same ideas. Mike: You said a lot there, Eric. I'm really struck by the point two where you talk about the relationship between units, and I think what's hitting me is that I don't know that when I was a child learning mathematics—but even when I was an adult getting started teaching mathematics—that I really thought about relationships. I think about things like add a zero, or even the language of point-something. And how in some ways some of the procedures or the tricks that we've used have actually obscured the relationship as opposed to shining a light on it. Does that make sense?  Eric: I think the same was true when I was growing up. That math was often taught to be a bunch of procedures or memorized kinds of things that my teacher taught me that I didn't really understand the meaning behind what I was doing. And so, mathematics became more of just doing what I was told and memorizing things and not really understanding the reasoning why I was doing it. Talking about relationships between things I think helps kids develop number sense. And so, when you talk about how 10 tenths are required to make 1 one, and knowing that that's how many of those one-tenths are needed to make 1 one, and that same pattern happens for every unit connected to the next larger unit, seeing that in decimal numbers helps kids develop number sense about place value. And then when they start to need to operate on those numerals or on those numbers, if they need to add two decimal numbers together and they get more than 10 tenths when they add down the columns or something like that in a procedure—if you're doing it vertically. If they have more of a conceptual understanding of the relationship, maybe they'll say, “Oh, I have more than 10 tenths, so 10 of those tenths will allow me to get 1 one, and I'll leave the others in the tens place,” or something like that. So, it helps you to make sense of the regrouping that's going on and develop number sense so that when you operate and solve problems with these numbers, you actually understand the reasoning behind what you're doing as opposed to just memorizing a bunch of rules or steps. Mike: Yeah. I will also say, just as an aside, I taught kindergarten and first grade for a long time and just that idea of 10 ones and 1 ten, simultaneously, is such a big deal. And I think that idea of being able to say this unit is comprised of these equal-sized units, how challenging that can be for educators to help build that understanding. But how rich and how worthwhile the payoff is when kids do understand that level of equivalence between different sets of units. Eric: Absolutely, and it starts at a young age with children. And getting them to visualize those connections and that equivalence that a 10, 1 ten, can be broken up into these 10 ones or 10 ones can create 1 ten, and seeing that visually multiple times in lots of different situations really does pay off because that pattern will continue to show up throughout the grades. When you're going into second, third grade, like I said before, you've got to realize that 10 of these things we call tens, then we'll make a new unit called 100. Or 10 of these 100s will then make a unit that is called a thousand. And a thousand is equivalent to 10 hundreds. So, these ideas are really critical pieces of students understanding about place value when they go ahead and try to add or subtract with these using different strategies or the standard algorithm, they're able to break numbers up, or decompose, numbers into pieces that make sense to them. And their understanding of the mathematical relationships or ideas can just continue to grow and flourish.  Mike: I'm going to stay on this for one more question, Eric, and then I think you're already headed to the place where I want to go next. What you're making me think about is this work with kids not as, “How do I get an answer today?” But “What role is my helping kids understand these place value relationships going to play in their long-term success?”  Eric: Yeah, that's a great point. And learning mathematical ideas, it just doesn't happen in one lesson or in one week. When you have a complex idea like place value that … it spans over multiple years. And what kindergarten and first-grade teachers are teaching them with respect to the relationship, or the equivalence, between 10 ones and 1 ten is setting the foundation, setting the stage for the students to start to make sense of a similar idea that happens in second grade. And then another similar idea that happens in third grade where they continue to think about this 10 times relationship between units, but just with larger and larger groupings. And then when you get to fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh grade, you're talking about smaller units, units smaller than 1, and seeing that if we're using a decimal place value system, that there's still these relationships that occur. And that 10 times relationship holds true. And so, if we're going to help students make sense of those ideas in fourth and fifth grade with decimal units, we need to start laying that groundwork and helping them make sense of those relationships in the earlier grades as well.  Mike: That's a great segue because I suspect there are probably educators who are listening who are curious about the types of learning activities that they could put into place that would help build that deeper understanding of place value. And I'm curious, when you think about learning activities that you think really do help build that understanding, what are some of the things that come to mind for you?  Eric: Well, I'll talk about some specific activities in response to this, and thankfully there are some really high-quality instructional materials and math curricula out there that suggest some specific activities for teachers to use to help students make sense of place value. I personally think there are lots of cool instructional routines nowadays that teachers can use to help students make sense of place value ideas, too. Actually, some of the math curricula embed these instructional routines within their lesson plans. But what I love about the instructional routines is that they're fairly easy to implement. They usually don't take that much time, and as long as you do them fairly consistently with your students, they can have real benefits for the children's thinking over time. So, one of the instructional routines that could really help students develop place value ideas in the younger grades is something called “counting collections.”  Eric: And with counting collections, students are asked to just count a collection of objects. It could be beans or paper clips or straws or unifix cubes, whatever you have available in your classroom. And when counting, students are encouraged to make different bundles that help them keep track of the total more efficiently than if they were just counting by ones. So, let's say we asked our first- or second-grade class to count a collection of 36 unifix cubes or something like that. And when counting, students can put every group of 10 cubes into a cup or make stacks of 10 cubes by connecting them together to represent every grouping of 10. And so, if they continue to make stacks of 10 unifix cubes as they count the total of 36, they'll get three stacks of 10 cubes or three cups of 10 cubes and six singletons. And then teachers can have students represent their count in a place value table where the columns are labeled with tens and ones. So, they would put a 3 in the tens column and a 6 in the ones column to show why the numeral 36 represents the total. So, giving students multiple opportunities to make the connection between counting an amount of stuff and using groupings of tens and ones, writing that numeral that corresponds to that quantity in a place value table, let's say, and using words like 3 tens and 6 ones will hopefully help students over time to make sense of that idea. Mike: You're bringing me back to that language you used at the beginning, Eric, where you talked about face value versus place value. What strikes me is that counting collections task, where kids are literally counting physical objects, grouping them into, in the case you used tens, you actually have a physical representation that they've created themself that helps them think about, “OK, here's the face value. Where do you see this particular chunk of that and what place value does it hold?” That's a lovely, super simple, as you said, but really powerful way to kind of take all those big ideas—like 10 times as many, grouping, place value versus face value—and really touch all of those big ideas for kids in a short amount of time.  Eric: Absolutely. What's nice is that this instructional routine, counting collections, can be used with older students, too. So, when you're discussing decimal quantities let's say, you just have to make it very clear what represents one. So, suppose we were in a fourth- or fifth-grade class, and we still wanted students to count 36 unifix cubes, but we make it very clear that every cup of 10 cubes, or every stack of 10 cubes, represents, let's say, 1 pound. Then every stack of 10 cubes represents 1 pound. So, every cube would represent just one-tenth of a pound. Then as the students count the 36 unifix cubes, they would still get three stacks of 10 cubes, but this time each stack represents one. And they would get six singleton cubes where each singleton cube represents one-tenth of a pound. So, if you have students represent this quantity in a place value table labeled ones and tenths, they still get 3 in the ones place this time and 6 in the tenths place. So over time, students will learn that the face value of a digit tells you how many of a particular-size grouping you need, and the place value tells you the size of the grouping needed to make the total quantity. Mike: That totally makes sense. Eric: I guess another instructional routine that I really like is called “choral counting.” And with coral counting, teachers ask students to count together as a class starting from a particular number and jumping either forward or backward by a particular amount. So, for example, suppose we ask students to start at 5 and count by tens together. The teacher would record their counting on the board in several rows. And so, as the students count together, saying “5 15, 25, 35,” and so on, the teacher's writing these numerals across the board. He or she puts 10 numbers in a row. That means that when the students get to 105, the teacher starts a new row beginning at 105 and records all the way to 195, and then the third row would start at 205 and go all the way to 295. And after a few rows are recorded on the board, teachers could ask students to look for any patterns that they see in the numerals on the board and to see if those patterns can help them predict what number might come in the next row. Eric: So, students might notice that 10 is being added across from one number to the next going across, or 100 is being added down the columns. Or 10 tens are needed to make a hundred. And having students notice those patterns and discuss how they see those patterns and then share their reasoning for how they can use that pattern to predict what's going to happen further down in the rows could be really helpful for them, too. Again, this can be used with decimal numbers and even fractional numbers. So, this is something that I think can also be really helpful, and it's done in a fun and engaging way. It seems like a puzzle. And I know patterns are a big part of mathematics and coral counting is just a neat way to incorporate those ideas. Eric: Yeah, I've seen people do things like counting by unit fractions, too, and in this case counting by tenths, right? One-tenths, two-tenths, three-tenths, and so on. And then there's a point where the teacher might start a new column and you could make a strategic choice to say, “I'm going to start a new column when we get to ten-tenths.” Or you could do it at five-tenths. But regardless, one of the things that's lovely is choral counting can really help kids see structure in a way that counting out loud, if it doesn't have the, kind of, written component of building it along rows and columns, it's harder to discern that. You might hear it in the language, but choral accounting really helps kids see that structure in a way that, from my experience at least, is really powerful for them. Eric: And like you said, the teacher, strategically, chooses when to make the new row happen to help students, kind of, see particular patterns or groupings. And like you said, you could do it with fractions, too. So even unit fractions: zero, one-seventh, two-sevenths, three-sevenths, four-sevenths all the way to six-sevenths. And then you might start a new row at seven-sevenths, which is the same as 1. And so, kind of realize that, “Oh, I get a new 1 when I regroup 7 of these sevenths together.” And so, with decimal numbers, I need 10 of the one-tenths to get to 1. And so, if you help kids, kind of, realize that these numerals that we write down correspond with units and smaller amounts of stuff, and you need a certain amount of those units to make the next-sized unit or something like that, like I said, it can go a long way even into fractional or decimal kinds of quantities. Mike: I think you're taking this conversation in a place I was hoping it would go, Eric, because to be autobiographical, one thing that I think is an advance in the field from the time when I was learning mathematics as a child is, rather than having just a procedure with no visual or manipulative support, we have made progress using a set of manipulative tools. And at the same time, there's definitely nuance to how manipulatives might support kids' understanding of place value and also ways where, if we're not careful, it might actually just replace the algorithm that we had with a different algorithm that just happens to be shaped like cubes. What I wanted to unpack with you is what's the best-case use for manipulatives? What can manipulatives do to help kids think about place value? And is there any place where you would imagine asking teachers to approach with caution? Eric: Well, yeah. To start off, I'll just begin by saying that I really believe manipulatives can play a critical role in developing an understanding of a lot of mathematical ideas, including place value. And there's been a lot of research about how concrete materials can help students visualize amounts of stuff and visualize relationships among different amounts of stuff. And in particular, research has suggested that the CRA progression, have you heard of CRA before?  Mike: Let me check. Concrete, Representational and Abstract. Am I right? Eric: That's right. So, because “C,” the concrete representation, is first in this progression, this means that we should first give students opportunities to represent an amount of stuff with concrete manipulatives before having them draw pictures or write the amount with a numeral. To help kindergarten and first-grade students begin to develop understandings of our base 10 place value system, I think it's super important to maybe use unifix cubes to make stacks of 10 cubes. We could use bundles of 10 straws wrapped up with a rubber band and singleton straws. We could use cups of 10 beans and singleton beans … basically use any concrete manipulative that allows us to easily group stuff into tens and ones and give students multiple opportunities to understand that grouping of tens and ones are important to count by. And I think at the same time, making connections between the concrete representation, the “C” in CRA, and the abstract representation, the “A,” which is the symbol or the numeral we write down, is so important. Eric: So, using place value tables, like I was saying before, and writing the symbols in the place value table that corresponds with the grouping that children used with the actual stuff that they counted will help them over time make sense that we use these groupings of tens and ones to count or measure stuff. And then in second grade, you can start using base 10 blocks to do the same type of thing, but for maybe groupings of hundreds, thousands, and beyond. And then in fourth and fifth grade, base 10 blocks are really good for tenths and hundredths and ones, and so on like that. But for each of these, making connections between the concrete stuff and the abstract symbols that we use to represent that stuff. So, one of the main values that concrete manipulatives bring to the table, I think, is that they allow students to represent some fairly abstract mathematical ideas with actual stuff that you can see and manipulate with your hands. Eric: And it allows students to get visual images in their heads of what the numerals and the symbols mean. And so, it brings meaning to the mathematics. Additionally, I think concrete manipulatives can be used to help students really make sense of the meaning of the four operations, too, by performing actions on the concrete stuff. So, for example, if we're modeling the meaning of addition, we can use concrete manipulatives to represent the two or more numerals as amounts of stuff and show the addition by actually combining all the stuff together and then figuring out, “Well, how much is this stuff altogether?” And then if we're going to represent this with a base 10 numeral, we got to break all the stuff into groupings that base 10 numerals use. So, ones, tens, hundreds if needed, tenths, hundredths, thousandths. And one thing that you said that maybe we need to be cautious about is we don't want those manipulatives to always be a crutch for students, I don't think. So, we need to help students make the transition between those concrete manipulatives and abstract symbols by making connections, looking at similarities, looking at differences. Eric: I guess another concern that educators should be aware of is that you want to be strategic, again, which manipulatives you think would match the students' development in terms of their mathematical thinking? So, for example, I probably wouldn't use base 10 blocks in kindergarten or first grade, to be honest. When students are just learning about tens and ones, because the long in a base 10 block is already put together for them. The 10-unit cubes are already formed into a long. So, some of the cognitive work is already done for them in the base 10 blocks, and so you're kind of removing some of the thinking. And so that's why I would choose unifix cubes over base 10 blocks, or I would choose straws to, kind of, represent this relationship between ones and tens in those early grades before I start using base 10 blocks. So, those are two things that I think we have to be thoughtful about when we're using manipulatives. Mike: My wife and I have this conversation very often, and it's fascinating to me. I think about what happens in my head when a multi-edition problem gets posed. So, say it was 13 plus 46, right? In my head, I start to decompose those numbers into place value chunks, and in some cases I'll round them to compensate. Or in some cases I'll almost visualize a number line, and I'll add those chunks to get to landmarks. And she'll say to me, “I see the standard algorithm with those two things lined up.” And I just think to myself, “How big of a gift we're actually giving kids, giving them these tools that can then transfer.” Eventually they become these representations that happen in their heads and how much more they have in their toolbox when it comes to thinking about operating than many of us did who grew up learning just a set of algorithms. Eric: Yeah, and like you said, decomposing numerals or numbers into place value parts is huge because the standard algorithm does the same thing. When you're doing the standard addition algorithm in vertical form, you're still adding things up, and you're breaking the two numbers up by place value. It's just that you're doing it in a very specific way. You're starting with the smallest unit first, and you add those up, and if you get more than 10 of that particular unit, then you put a little 1 at the top to represent, “Oh, I get one of the next size unit because 10 of one unit makes one of the next size.” And so, it's interesting how the standard algorithm kind of flows from some of these more informal strategies that you were talking about—decomposing or compensating or rounding these numbers and other strategies that you were talking about—really, I think help students understand, and manipulatives, too, help students understand that you can break these numbers up into pieces where you can figure out how close this amount of stuff is to another amount of stuff and round it up or round it down and then compensate based off of that. And that helps prepare students to make sense of those standard algorithms when we go ahead and teach those. Mike: And I think you put your finger on the thing. I suspect that some people would be listening to this and they might think, “Boy, Mike really doesn't like the standard algorithm.” What I would say is, “The concern I have is that oftentimes the way that we've introduced the algorithm obscures the place value ideas that we really want kids to have so that they're actually making sense of it.” So, I think we need to give kids options as opposed to giving them one way to do it, and perhaps doing it in a way that obscures the mathematics. Eric: And I'm not against the standard algorithm at all. We teach the standard algorithms at the University of Delaware to our novice teachers and try to help them make sense of those standard algorithms in ways that talk about those big ideas that we've been discussing throughout the podcast. And talking about the place values of the units, talking about how when you get 10 of a particular unit, it makes one of the next-size unit. And thinking about how the standard algorithm can be taught in a more conceptual way as opposed to a procedural, memorized kind of set of steps. And I think that's how it sounds like you were taught the standard algorithm, and I know I was taught that, too. But giving them the foundation with making sense of the mathematical relationships between place value units in the early grades and continuing that throughout, will help students make sense of those standard algorithms much more efficiently and soundly. Mike: Yeah, absolutely. One of the pieces that you started to talk about earlier is how do you help bring meaning to both place value and, ultimately, things like standard algorithms. I'm thinking about the role of language, meaning the language that we use when we talk in our classrooms, when we talk about numbers and quantities. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about the ways that educators can use language to support students understanding of place value? Eric: Oh, yeah. That's a huge part of our teaching. How we as teachers talk about mathematics and how we ask our students to communicate their thinking, I think is a critical piece of their learning. As I was saying earlier, instead of saying 3.4, but expecting students to say three and four-tenths, can help them make sense of the meaning of each digit and the total value of the numeral as opposed to just saying 3.4. Another area of mathematics where we tend to focus on the face value of digits, like I was saying before, rather than the place value, is when we teach the standard algorithms. So, it kind of connects again. I believe it's really important that students and teachers alike should think about and use the place value words of the digits when they communicate their reasoning. So, if we're adding 36 plus 48 using the standard addition algorithm and vertical format, we start at the right and say, “Well, 6 plus 8 equals 14, put the 4 carry the 1 … but what does that little 1 represent, is what we want to talk about or have our students make sense of. And it's actually the 10 ones that we regrouped into 1 ten. Eric: So, we need to say that that equivalence happened or that regrouping or that exchange happened, and talk about how that little 1 that's carried over is actually the 1 ten that we got and not just call it a 1 that we carry over. So, continuing with the standard algorithm for 36 plus 48, going over to the tens column, we usually often just say, “Three plus 4 plus the 1 gives us 8,” and we put down the 8 and get the answer of 84. But what does the 3 and the 4 and the 1 really represent? “Oh, they're all tens.” So, we might say that we're combining 3 tens, or 30, with 4 tens, or 40. And the other 10 that we got from the regrouping to get 8 tens, or 80, as opposed to just calling it 8. Eric: So, talking about the digits in this way and using the place value meaning, and talking about the regrouping, all of this is really bringing meaning to what's actually happening mathematically. That's a big part of it. I guess to add onto that, when I was talking about the standard algorithm, I didn't use the words “add” or “plus,” I was saying “put together,” “combine,” to talk about the actual action of what we're doing with those two amounts of stuff. Even that language is, I think, really important. That kind of emphasizes the action that we're taking when we're using the plus symbol to put two things together. And also, I didn't say “carry.” Instead, I said, we want to “regroup” or “exchange” these 10 ones for 1 ten. So, I'm a big believer in using language that tries to precisely describe the mathematical ideas accurately because I just have seen over and over again how this language can benefit students' understanding of the ideas, too. Mike: I think what strikes me, too, is that the kinds of suggestions you're talking about in terms of describing the units, the quantities, the actions, these are things that I hope folks feel like they could turn around and use tomorrow and have an immediate impact on their kids. Eric: I hope so, too. That would be fantastic. Mike: Well, before we close the interview, I wanted to ask you, for many teachers thinking about things like place value or any big idea that they're teaching, often is kind of on the job learning and you're learning along with your kids, at least initially. So, I wanted to step back and ask if you had any recommendations for an educator who's listening to the podcast. If there are articles, books, things, online, particular resources that you think would help an educator build that understanding or think about how to build that understanding with their students? Eric: Yeah. One is to listen to podcasts about mathematics teaching and learning like this one. There's a little plug for you, Mike. Both: (laugh) Eric: I guess … Mike: I'll take it. Eric: Yeah! Another way that comes to mind is if your school uses a math curriculum that aims to help students make sense of ideas, often the curriculum materials have some mathematical background pages that teachers can read to really deepen their understanding of the mathematics. There's some really good math curricula out there now that can be really educative for teachers. I think teachers also can learn from each other. I believe teachers should collaborate with each other, talk about teaching specific lessons with each other, and through their discussions, teachers can learn from one another about the mathematics that they teach and different ways that they can try to help their students make sense of some of those ideas. Another thing that I would suggest is to become a member of an organization like NCTM, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. I know NCTM has some awesome resources for practitioners to help teachers continue to learn about mathematical ideas and different ways to teach particular ideas to kids. And you can attend a regional or national conference with some of these organizations. Eric: I know I've been to several of them, and I always learn some really great ideas about teaching place value or fractions or early algebraic thinking. Whatever it is, there's so many neat ideas that you can learn from others. I've been teaching math for so many years. What's cool is that I'm still learning about math and how to teach math in effective ways, and I keep learning every day, which is really one of the fun things about teaching as a profession. You just keep learning. So, I guess one thing I would suggest is to keep plugging away. Stay positive as you work through any struggles you might experience, and just know that we all wrestle with parts of teaching mathematics especially. So, stay curious and keep working to make sense of those concepts that you want your students to make sense of so that they can be problem-solvers and thinkers and sensemakers. Mike: I think it's a great place to leave it. Eric, thank you so much for joining us. It's really been a pleasure talking to you. Eric: Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure. Mike: This podcast is brought to you by The Math Learning Center and the Maier Math Foundation, dedicated to inspiring and enabling all individuals to discover and develop their mathematical confidence and ability. © 2024 The Math Learning Center | www.mathlearningcenter.org  

The gang (Eric, Evan and Dan) is all here in a very special episode of Beats, Beards & Brews. In the second episode of their new "album discussion" format, the boys review Metric's ninth studio album Formentera II. Get ready for some divided opinions and a whole lotta foolin'. Metric songs previewed in this episode include: "Just the Once" "Days of Oblivion" "Descendants" You'll also hear some hot takes on Rolling Stone's surprisingly controversial "50 Best Canadian Musician's of All Time" list and some even hotter takes on QT taquitos. It's a vibe. As always, thanks for listening. Until next time! Eric: Oh, and as a little bonus, here's a Formentera II track-by-track breakdown that Consequence did with Metric! Just in case you happen to vibe with this album like I did. ;)

Protecting wealth, boosting investment returns, and maintaining financial security are some of the top goals for investors. But with widespread volatility and global uncertainty, how should investors allocate their assets? How can investors well prepare their portfolios from constant fluctuations and volatility in markets? And what sectors should investors look at when investing in Singapore markets? What about US and Hong Kong markets?  On Money in the Market, Hongbin Jeong speaks to Eric Oh, Financial Services Manager, Phillip Securities to find out more.    If you want to participate in Eric Oh's webinar on how to position your portfolio in an uncertain, volatile and confusing times,  Click below to register:9 May 2023, Tuesday from 7-8pm https://bit.ly/ericZoomLimited slots available for first come first serve.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Like, subscribe, and leave a review! Use code OHNO for free shipping on any item over at our Teespring store! Use code OHNO10 for 10% off over at discbaron.com Linktree: /ohnodiscgolf Instagram: @ohnodiscgolf  Facebook: /ohnodiscgolf  Twitter: @ohnodiscgolf Tiktok: @ohnodiscgolf Youtube: Search OH NO Disc Golf Patreon: /ohnodiscgolf  Notes from the Episode

Eric Liaw and Zack Willis are part of IVP, a leading venture firm with a 43-year history of partnering with entrepreneurs who are undaunted on the path to innovation. Will talks to Eric and Zack about what has made IVP so long-lasting in the Venture Capital industry, how they help companies' portfolios, and the accomplishments they are most proud of. Follow Eric on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericliaw/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/eliaw). Follow Zack on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/zwill/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/zwill). IVP (https://www.ivp.com/) Follow IVP on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/ivpvc/), Twitter (https://twitter.com/ivp), or Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ivpvc/). Follow Aarish Shah on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/adsinuk/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/adsinuk). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. And with me today is Eric Liaw and Zack Willis, who are part of IVP, a leading venture firm with a 43-year history of partnering with entrepreneurs who are undaunted on the path to innovation. Zack, Eric, thank you for joining me. ERIC: Thanks, Will. It's great to be here, really appreciate it. And I got to say, as the Giant Robot Podcast, as a kid growing up, Transformers were my favorite toys. So this may be the closest I ever get to being a Transformer by being part of Giant Robots, so thank you for the opportunity. [laughter] WILL: Love it. We love robots here, so it's perfect. All right, let's start here. For folks who may not know, tell us about IVP and what's on deck for 2023. ERIC: Well, you gave a great intro, so let me just add to that a little bit. You know, we're really proud of our history and our firm. We've been around since 1980. So we're one of the sort of original Silicon Valley venture firms. But when I speak about the firm in that context, I don't think it does justice to how the firm has expanded over the years and how our investment activity now encompasses not only the Bay Area but major U.S. markets like New York and LA. We have investments in Canada, Australia, and a number in Western and Central Europe as well. And the common theme for us is that we're focused on working with entrepreneurs who, as you pointed out, are undaunted as they innovate and are pursuing dreams to create companies that will become recognizable in households and companies across the world, not just today but tomorrow as well. So that's really what IVP is all about. And it's what we're looking forward to in 2023 despite obviously the fact that the world is a little more challenging these days, a little bit more uncertain in, particular in the venture category. But we're really excited about the things that we're working on. We invested a lot in our team over a number of years. And, believe it or not, despite what you might read in headlines around venture activity, we are very much open for business in 2023 because we think that great entrepreneurs and great ideas come together at all times, regardless of whether the stock market is up or down. And our job is to find them, work with them, and become partners for three, four, or five, six, seven years, sometimes longer than that. So really, there's no bad time to start a company and get to know venture investors like us. WILL: Yeah, definitely. Your company has been around for 43 years. Can you kind of tell me what has made you last that long, for 43 years? That's a long time to be in the venture capitalist world, especially before it was popular and fun. ERIC: You know, it's a great question. I've been at the firm for 11 years now. So a lot of the credit goes to people that...our founder, Reid Dennis, who started the firm. He's in his 90s now, so he has since retired, but a lot of credit goes to people that came before me and before Zack. And I think that's a common theme for any kind of organization or institution, no pun intended, because that's what the I in IVP stands for. But it goes to that sort of common thread. You have to evolve, especially in technology. The technology markets that were successful for IVP in the early '80s that's not really cutting-edge venture anymore. As an example, Seagate was one of our first investments ever when people weren't sure that personal hard drive technology would actually work or whether or not they're getting market demand. I mean, who would actually want storage themselves carried around with them at all times? And now, think about how much storage you have in your pocket. It's pretty gnarly to think about how much technology has advanced. But if you kept only thinking about, okay, I'm going to invest in the next hard drive, you would have really gotten stuck after that. And obviously, the things that have come since out of the minds of technology entrepreneurs have far exceeded what people at the time of the founding of IVP would have thought was possible. So I think that evolution is really important, staying fresh; technology trends evolve. In the early days of IVP and in Silicon Valley, there was a saying among venture capitalists that if you couldn't drive to the board meeting within 30 minutes, you didn't make the investment. That's just not true anymore. There's no way. WILL: [laughs] ERIC: And I think COVID has certainly proved that because investments are being made around the world. Now, maybe in hindsight, that was too fast. There was too much capital flowing around just to resume dating if you will. But the underlying theme is evolution, and I think it's teamwork. Because our founder, Reid, wanted the organization and firm to thrive well beyond his days as an active investor, and you can only do that with building a team that's multigenerational. And I'm proud and lucky to be part of an organization that's done that. WILL: Awesome, awesome. Well, tell me about you. Tell me more about your background. How did you get started in the VC world? ERIC: You know, child of immigrants who came to the United States in the '70s from Taiwan. They met in New York City. Like many other people, moved to the burbs and they started a family. So I was born in New Jersey. My brother and I were both born there. I moved to LA when I was 12. I lived in Southern California until I went to college. Had the miraculous fortune to somehow get into Stanford and went to school sort of in the late '90s into the early 2000s, as good fortune would have it, in the middle of the internet bubble. So I had kind of a front-row seat to that era of technology, innovation not knowing anything about tech when I showed up in Palo Alto in the fall of '96. I got exposed to venture capital while I was in school. There was a pretty memorable, at least for me, speech that I went to. John Doerr, now retired from Kleiner Perkins, was on stage in the engineering auditorium and gave a speech about how Amazon was going to change the world. And this was probably in the fall of '98. And he was right. I just think maybe the timeframe was slightly off, but he was right. I mean, at the time, it was books and CDs, and to some of our listeners, CDs was actually how you used to listen to music. WILL: [laughs] ERIC: But you sort of had this really expansive vision. And it was a really exciting way to understand that there are ways to be involved in the technology ecosystem without necessarily being a software engineer. Because I tried my hand at that, and I wasn't anywhere close to being top of the class, let's put it that way. And so, I wanted to be involved in the industry but also kind of think about how I could play to whatever strengths I had. And then the sort of window into venture capital sort of started to open in terms of my awareness of it. I ended up working at Morgan Stanley for a couple of years out of college, where I got to learn more about technology from a business lens. But I always knew I had an angle or a desire to become a venture capitalist. So got into the industry; it'll be 20 years ago this summer. And I've been fortunate enough to keep doing it for that period of time. So that's kind of the medium-length answer to how I got started [laughs] in the business. ZACK: I don't have quite the story that Eric does there. [laughs] But venture capital was never on my radar. I went to college to be a programmer, and that's where I started out. My first real job was at Anheuser-Busch in Los Angeles, and go Lakers. WILL: [laughs] ZACK: Me and Eric have some LA routes [laughter], so that was a great job. I had a ton of fun. And I just got a call from a recruiter one day that a VC firm was looking for a job as an IT manager. I was very unqualified for the position, went through the interview process. It took like six months. I think I met everybody at the firm, got the job. And that was, like Eric, that was about 20 years ago now. And I have just been in the industry ever since. So it's a great place to be, and I have no plans on leaving. WILL: Oh, that's amazing. I love it. So tell me this, beyond dollars invested...because honestly, when I think of venture capitalists, it is mostly about the money. Hey, how much money have you done? How much money have you sent in? What does that look like? But I don't think we ever cover the next step. What else is there? So beyond dollars, what does IVP do to help companies' portfolio? ERIC: Capital is definitely part of it. It's venture capital, so let's be real. You can't ignore that part of it. But I do think that it is only a part of it because what I think sometimes people don't really think through...because the media in particular likes to write about the day a company goes public or if there's a big acquisition like it all just happened at that one moment, but that is so far from the truth. I mean, the amount of work that entrepreneurs and people at startups put in to drive to those outcomes that sort of culminate in that moment is really one of the things I respect most and enjoy most to be part of as a venture capitalist. And so what our role in that can often be is actually quite varied because no two companies are the same. I mean, there are some common themes, but no two companies are the same. And so how we try and get involved is tailored to what a given company needs at a given point in time. Now, some of the common threads might be working with companies to help build out their teams. We do a lot of that because, ultimately, the team is who's at a company every day. I mean, investors aren't there every day and frankly, if we are, probably something's gone wrong. WILL: [laughs] ERIC: That team is important. And we like to think about getting involved in high-leverage moments. And there are a number of different ones, and Zack is part of this too. So a high-leverage hire is probably someone at the C-level or VP-level because that person then recruits and builds out a team. It's different...not to say that individual contributors aren't also important, but we're trying to think about those key players, moments where we can help, I guess, in a biblical turn, teach people how to fish instead of fish for them. That's our mentality, and recruiting is part of it. Sometimes these are partnerships that can drive significant revenue lines. Sometimes it's debating what a business model should be in a given company. A great example on some of these is at both Coinbase and Discord; there was debate around what the business models ought to look like. Coinbase is very transactional. We pushed them to sort of think through a recurring revenue component, some other services that they could have so that their revenue could be a little smoother and not just dependent on transaction volumes. At Discord, they were thinking through raising money to start an in-house gaming studio. We kind of said, "You know, that's a really competitive industry, and the content creation costs just keep going up. How about a different model? Maybe we can think about a subscription service." And that became what drives the revenue today around buying advanced features for your private servers and things like that. There are a lot of moments...unfortunately, sometimes our companies become targets of bad actors, which brings Zack back to the forefront. Part of the benefit of having a portfolio is we see a lot of these different incidents. And Zack is someone that we sort of unleash with our companies when they face some of these challenges, you know, I got a hack, or I have this going on, and Zack jumps in. You should talk about some of the situations that you've had to deal with. And the bat phone rings when those things happen, and we send them straight to Zack. WILL: [laughs] ZACK: Yeah, I mean, we definitely do everything we can. There definitely have been times where it's, all right; this happened to us; what do we do? How can we help this company? And I've really been deeply involved in security most of my career, and it's kind of where I wanted to go. And I pride myself on that. And we have great security here, and we try to instill the same in our portfolio companies. And recently, we developed these jump guides, which is another way we're helping portfolio companies. So they're kind of like how-to lists. So there would be how to hire your first CFO, how to go IPO, that sort of stuff, and I just authored a couple, actually, that are about how to keep your company safe and how to keep your employees safe. And it's all just tips. It's nothing revolutionary, mind-blowing, but it's just stuff that every company should be doing to keep themselves safe. And so that's really the message that we try to give to our portfolio companies. We definitely internalize it as well. I think really the key to good security is there's a partnership. There has to be a partnership between you with, the security team, and all the employees. You can have all the layers of defense you want. You can have your firewalls, your antivirus, et cetera, but if your employees don't understand the value of security and why they shouldn't click on that link or they shouldn't download that file, it's meaningless. It's very important to instill that, just have open communication. And what I tell everybody at IVP is that security is in your hands. We're doing what we can, but it's in your hands. So, ultimately, it falls on them. And it's a scary time, you know, new stuff coming out all the time. But, yeah, we do our best to keep on top of it and our portfolio companies as well. ERIC: Zack is being very modest. But if you take a step back, if you think about, you know, in any of our own lives, which there's a parallel, I think for companies, there are certain moments when you're facing a tough spot, and people that were there for you and helped you are the ones that are most memorable. And when there are good days, things are pretty easy. And those hard days are where we want to make sure that we're there for our companies. And some of those hard days are in times like these where companies have to make some tough decisions around their cost structure because the environment has changed; some of these are, as Zack points out when they're facing a hack or a breach of some sort. And so, ideally, some of those you're preventing before they happen. But in the moment, Zack is a great ally and asset for a lot of our companies. And some of these also happen on a day-to-day basis. It works great to have someone like Zack on our team. He can kick around and be a source for feedback for some product testing, which he does with a lot of companies that are in the portfolio. And actually, he does that when we're evaluating companies too, and sometimes they don't score so well on the Zack Willis meter. [laughter] And then we have productive feedback to give them to think about things as they refine what they're working on. So it's one of those things where there are high-leverage moments, but we really focus on trying to be involved but also available. And again, this is repetitive to what I said earlier; no two companies are the same. And these are long-term partnerships. We want to make sure that we help them succeed, and that's what it's about. ZACK: I agree, and availability for sure. It can be around the clock. You don't know when these things are going to happen. And definitely, we pride ourselves on that, on being available for our companies when they need us. WILL: That's amazing. It sounds like maybe the secret sauce is your long-term relationship with the company. It's not just drop millions of dollars into the company and see you later. Hopefully, you sell out; whatever, you make money. We'll get it back. It's not the day-to-day, but when it gets hard when we can help you when we can support you. And we kind of have that same mindset with thoughtbot. We don't just try to build software and say, "Hey, you're on your way." But, no, hey, can we help you hire developers, anyone to help you with this and make sure that it's not going to fall off as soon as we leave? But that long-term thing. So sometimes, when you're in a long-term game, it can get kind of messy. So, professionally speaking, what keeps you up at night? ERIC: One of the challenges of being an investor is that you can never be too happy or too sad, particularly when we have a portfolio. So if you think about it, to your point about being involved, it's not just writing a check or investing and then say, "Here's the money; call me later." We're active partners. We take board seats in two-thirds of the companies that we invest in. And that's not a stat I throw out there to say it's a contest to see how many boards you're on. No, it's actually a reflection that when you're on a board, you have a responsibility to be helpful and involved and help steward the entire company on behalf of all shareholders. And so that's part of being involved in a portfolio of 80 or 100 companies that are active right now. There are going to be some that are having good quarters and some that are having tougher quarters. And so, collectively, we try and be even-keeled as long as we're making forward progress. And Zack is a guy who runs sub three-hour marathons, but some miles are harder than others. And he can talk more about that. But there are going to be some periods in a company's journey that are harder than others. And so we just try and make sure we're sort of focused in the right direction and ultimately that the right goal is in mind. And right now, probably what's topical is it's harder for companies to raise money at any scale. You see, this sort of capital markets have really reversed course, and this is by design with the Fed raising rates and trying to intentionally slow the economy down for a whole host of reasons we probably don't have to get into on this podcast, but it's working. And what does that mean for our companies? It's harder to generate revenue. People are watching their budgets, whether they're consumers or enterprises, which then means that they need to watch their operating budgets. And that's why you've seen a lot of the layoffs that have happened across the technology sector, in particular over the last nine months. And it's not just startups, you know, it's Google announcing one of the biggest cuts that they've ever had in their history. Microsoft did that yesterday. So it is a more challenging time, and it's something a lot of people in the industry hadn't been through because we've had the benefit of such a long bull market run. But for better or for worse, at this point in my career, I've seen it more than a few times. And so this is, I think, an area where we can be a guide partner, sometimes just a sounding board because it's not easy to make these decisions. ZACK: First of all, I'll give thoughtbot a quick plug since you guys really helped us out. I guess this was about seven years ago now. We worked with you guys a couple years to get the first iteration of this system that we have that helps us...kind of part of our secret sauce that helps us find companies to invest in. So I'm very thankful for that. And as far as what keeps me up at night, I mean, aside from my cat, and my dog, and my anxiety, [laughs] it's going back to what we talked about before; it's really security. Did we do everything? Are we staying on top of the latest threats? Are we helping out our companies enough? There was an interesting article that just came out a few days ago that talked about how PE companies and some VCs, private equity and venture capital, are requiring security audits of their firms before they invest in them. And so before they'll make the acquisition, they'll run into an audit, and they'll say, "Okay, well, you're missing these things. We're not going to invest in you until you do these things, until you have two-factor authentication until you have this, until you have that." I think that's an interesting trend. For PE, it's a little bit of a bigger deal since they acquire the company. It's still a way that I believe that we can protect ourselves and our portfolio companies. It helps protect our reputation, helps protect their reputation, and it really gives us the chance to get in there at the beginning and say, "Hey, these things are missing. This is what you should focus on security-wise. WILL: That's amazing, amazing. MID-ROLL AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. WILL: I wanted to take a step back; when you mentioned Coinbase and Discord, and you said that you helped them set the direction going forward. Honestly, we may not even know those companies if their original plan would have gone forward. How much has your 43 years of experience helped guide that direction with Coinbase and Discord? ERIC: You know, there's a saying that history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And so I think that's probably the mentality that we try and take from our collective experience as a team that we try to bring to each company. And we meet as a team on Mondays and Thursdays, and it's a very broad meeting compared to most of the investment world in terms of who attends that meeting internally. And so we talk about companies that we're considering and contemplating. We talk about companies we've already invested in. And I think one of our core cultural attributes that is a great strength is putting our best thinking against some of these problems. Again, when things are going well, those are short conversations. But when someone says, "Hey, you know, I'm working with this company, and we're kind of facing this issue. What do people think? What have we seen that's kind of analogous?" And that's where we get some of these ideas from. So, for example, on the Coinbase example, we've been involved in a lot of marketplace businesses and exchange businesses. Those are great business models. And Coinbase has a fantastic management team. But thinking about this, this is pre-IPO and pre-direct listing, and when they want to be public one day, you know, there is a benefit to having a recurring revenue stream, a little more visibility. And so, how could we layer that on and make that, hopefully, over time, a bigger and bigger part of the business? I think in Discord; we had some perspective that led us to invest in the company. In the first place, we've had a lot of success in gaming companies like Zynga, and Supercell, and Niantic, amongst others. We could see how passionate gamers are and, how they come in all different shapes, sizes, flavors, geographies, and how having a communication tool like Discord is really a benefit. However, we also saw that the cost of producing games continues to go up. And if it's not kind of your full-time job, the likelihood you're going to nail something that a very competitive and discerning universe of gamers wants to play is probably not that high. So how do we think about harnessing that energy, and the talent, and the platform you build in a different way? So I'd say those are kind of some examples where we could think about things we've seen in our perspective but apply it to what's relevant for a specific company. WILL: That's amazing. I love it. Yeah, I've heard the gaming business can be brutal. What IVP accomplishments are you most proud of? ERIC: Well, maybe I'll break that into two parts. I think inside and outside the firm; I'm really proud of the team that we've built. And when I joined the firm 11 years ago, we were probably 20 people, 25 people in total. Now we're 65 people. And that doesn't seem like a lot in comparison to big tech companies or hyper-growth startups. But in a business-like venture capital, really what we're doing in addition to providing capital, internally, it's a lot of discussion, decision-making, ideas, thinking. That is hard to do the way that we do it if we get too big. And that goes back to the size of our Monday meetings, which is rather large and includes a wide representation of the firm. But I'm really proud of the team that we've built. I'm really proud of the capabilities that we've enhanced on the technology side. Really, Zack drove a lot of this in the time that he's been with the firm, and we're leaps and bounds ahead of where we were with your help as well. I think Zack was alluding to what we think is one of our secret weapons, our early detection system, so we're really proud of that. And then I'd say externally, or with our companies, we've had 131 of them go public. We had 15 of them do that in 2021, none did in '22. So the market's changed quite a bit. Those are accomplishments that, like I pointed to previously, they're milestone events. The pride comes in knowing that these companies that we've worked with have put in the work over years, at minimum, years, to get to that point. And that gives, I think, all of us a collective sense of accomplishment. WILL: That's amazing. ZACK: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. In my, I guess, almost eight years here now, we've grown a ton in our hiring. Our team is amazing. It's really the reason why I'm still here, why our turnover is basically nothing. We hire great people. And during that time, we've raised some great funds. We've invested in amazing companies. We've helped out a lot of entrepreneurs. It's just across the board. I've been in this industry a while. I feel like IVP is definitely a unique VC firm, and I'm proud of what we do. WILL: That's amazing. One of my favorite questions that I like to ask on the podcast is, if you could go back in time at the very beginning and give yourself advice, what would it be? ZACK: For me, it's stay relevant, I think. And to me, it just means being more involved in everything. Put yourself out there. Be bold. Learn about different areas in the company. Try to attend different meetings. Talk to different departments, and really just make yourself visible. When you do that, I think the rest just kind of falls into place. And it took me quite a while in my career to really realize that. And it's still tough now, but it's something that I'm always trying to do. Historically, I'm a very shy person, but just putting myself out there and doing the best I can in any situation that I find myself in. ERIC: I think a couple of things, balance, and patience are probably two things, not trying to force it. So I think there's a lot of Yoda Jedi wisdom that probably would be useful. So if you're sort of...when I was first starting out, you're younger and impetuous at times and want to make things happen because you have such a strong desire to try and do something the right way and make a positive impact. But the hardest thing to learn is sometimes the right thing to do is actually to do nothing in the investment world. That is a hard thing for a lot of motivated, energetic Type A people to do, and yet it's sometimes the exact right thing you should be doing. So I think it's hard to hear that when you're starting out in your 20s. And now that I'm a little older than that, [laughs] I think I can look back and appreciate it. But that's probably, as I think through that question, maybe the best piece of advice. And yet, like a lot of things, we were all taught while we were younger from people who had more experience, or age, or wisdom, or whatever, there are just some things you hear, and it's not real until you've kind of lived it. And sometimes, in some of those dimensions, you have to make your mistakes before you appreciate them. You guys probably had this experience writing code. Like, there's got to be...I could just do it this way, and it'd be fast. And then you realize it wasn't really that sound or forward-compatible or something. You had to go back and rewrite your architecture, and that's a pain. So I think it's that same approach, thinking with balance. ZACK: Just to add to what I was saying before, too, I think one of the things also would have been, you know, find something you're passionate about and do it every day. That wasn't the case early on in my career, and I turned to running, and I turned to working out. And I do something every morning, and that really, really grounds me. It helps me focus helps me plan out the day. And it's really just my time that's crucial. And whether it's running, whether it's meditating but just taking some time for yourself, you know, energize yourself, take care of yourself. And that goes a long way in the workplace as well. WILL: I love it, yeah. That's why it was one of my favorite questions, just learning from your mistakes, learning from what you did in the past. It's amazing. So I love that. ERIC: Yeah, I mean, since Zack brought up the Lakers, [laughter] and this isn't the Lakers, but it's basketball-related, you guys might remember this old Michael Jordan commercial. He talks about I've missed this many free throws and this many shots and something like, my team has trusted me 80 times to win the game in the fourth quarter, and I've missed. The tagline is something like, I have failed over and over and over and over again, and that is why I succeed. There's definitely some of that in the venture business and the advice I think we could all give to our younger selves. WILL: Oh, yeah, getting back up. Keep going, yeah. ERIC: The same thing with Dwyane Wade commercial, you know, get knocked down eight times, get up nine, kind of the same thing. WILL: Love it. What's something you would love the audience to know about IVP? ZACK: I think our team and just the way we hire. We hire amazing people. They're smart. They're kind. They're low ego. They're thoughtful. I'm not going to say it's completely different from others, but it is, in my experience, a different culture. And we all get along great. We mesh really well, and we continue to hire great. We hired almost 20 People in the last year and a half. That's a lot, but we still manage to maintain the same level of talent. We help our portfolio companies do hires as well. I think that's one of our benefits. We know talent, and we know it internally, and we know it externally. And it's just a great culture to be a part of. WILL: Amazing. ERIC: The thing to think about with us is if you're an entrepreneur building a company, it's tough. Sometimes it's really lonely. We aspire to be partners with entrepreneurs in good times and in bad. We're not the flashiest ones out there. We're not trying to see who has the most Twitter followers. But when you need something, we're there. I think that is something people lost sight of or didn't care as much about in the last couple of years when things were easy. They're not so easy now. And we take pride in these long-term partnerships, which is why we're highly selective in the number of companies we invest in every year. We're never going to be the most active, but we put a lot of our work, time, effort, energy, mental capacity alongside the capital that we bring to our companies. And I think that's been a great formula for us over our history, and it'll continue to be. WILL: That's amazing. To summarize, I know each VC firm has their own DNA. What makes IVP different from its competitors? ERIC: I'd say a couple of things. And again, I've only worked at two firms, and so there are a lot of firms I haven't worked at, so I don't want to attempt to speak too much into the intricacies of how they work. But I'd say inside our four walls, our culture of teamwork and collective outcome and benefit and effort is really special. Every investment we approach has access to the entire firm's resources and capabilities. And I think it's really different. I mean, we're very happy to partner with one another internally, help each other out, help companies that we might not be mostly directly involved with for the benefit of our firm, and our investors, and the companies that we work with. And I think that is something that a lot of firms talk about. I don't think it's always true at a lot of firms. And so, for us, it's really special and something that we've worked really hard to build as a culture, and keep as a culture, and preserve every day. Because I think it's easy to feel like you're on an island in this business at times, but we want to make sure that we feel that connectivity as a team. For our entrepreneurs, we are here to work with you and support you, probably not daily because I think, again, that goes back to having the right people, but weekly, monthly, quarterly, over years, that's our approach. We believe great things take time to build. WILL: That's amazing. Zack, I want to summarize this portion with you. How do you keep your firm and your employees safe from online threats? Do you share that with your portfolio companies? Because I know especially in the tech world and in the news, you're hearing about those scammers, those threats, summarize it for me, like, how do you do that? ZACK: There are a lot of pieces, of course. And as I was talking about before, I think the most important thing is really just getting buy-in from the whole firm. Me and my team we definitely try out the latest products, get the top-of-the-line security stuff, and really make sure that that stack is solid and that we're monitoring everything and getting the buy-in. So it's a lot of training. It's keeping them up to date. It's instilling the messages. Like, when I first started here, I did a security training. The firm had never done a security training. We were pretty light on security at the time. And so, I tried to make the presentation fun and a little scary. So I brought in the FBI. WILL: Wow. ZACK: The FBI scared everybody a little bit. And then I came on and just talked about what to do and not to do. And I actually had a song composed [laughs] about security and what employees should be doing. It was just a funny jingle that people still sing today. [laughter] But yeah, I think just making it memorable. And we have a Slack channel called Tech Talks. I'm always updating the latest information on there on different breaches and different attacks we're seeing, and what we can do to prevent that, and what our employers should be doing. And absolutely, that extends to our portfolio companies. And those jump guides, I believe they're out now with all my technical recommendations. We use those internally. I definitely gave those to the firm but also to our portfolio companies. And there's some interesting stuff in there that you may not think of, like removing your information from the internet. Like, get a company, Optery, something like that, which we pay for for all our employees, and it scrubs the internet of your information, and that's great. It cuts back on phishing, spam calls, you know, just going beyond too. We also have this product that we use that monitors employees' personal email addresses for breaches. So we're not just caring about IVP. We're also caring about what someone's doing in their personal life because that can also lead to a breach of IVP. So yeah, so someone's Gmail account gets exposed, and we're going to know about it, and we can let them know. And then, really, it's just staying on top of things. One of the things we just did, you know, passwords are the worst, everyone knows that, and so we just rolled out this product called Beyond Identity. And it's a password list provider. The difference between them and other password list providers is they offer a layer of security on top of the password list. So it's not just convenient; it's also added security, which was always my worry about going password list; it's just more convenient and less secure. But this company does it right. And it's things like that, just staying ahead of it. All right, passwords are a problem? Let's get rid of passwords. Following those trends and keeping up to date. ERIC: I mean, Zack is a very tough critic. So he's given a couple of shout-outs which means he really likes those products, and I'm glad that we have them. And I very much remember that training session that he did for us or organized. And we did a refresh of it a couple of years ago. I think we've done at least two of them now. It sounds really boring [laughs], and maybe I'm just kind of a geek in that way, but that was one of the most memorable training sessions that I've ever been part of in my time at IVP. And we had Zack's buddy from the FBI come in and give kind of an overview of all the vulnerabilities that they see, and that's obviously very, very cutting edge. And they had some footage of people sort of passing off USB sticks here and there in subways in New York City. So you can kind of see them go in in one entrance. They got a different shot of the camera while they're on the tracks, and they go their separate ways. I mean, this is straight out of some spy stuff, and it's happening. It makes you think...that's an extreme; we know we're talking about sort of most likely state-sponsored bad guys, but the ones that are commercially oriented, I think maybe they're not as frequent...they're more frequent, and so we have to be on guard all the time, especially as a firm that does have access to and move around a lot of money. I'm geeking out because I learned a lot from it. And Zack also likes to keep all of us on our toes with a lot of sort of...it's like the security equivalent of pop quizzes. He's always planting fake links and stuff to see who clicks on them. [laughter] And then he's pretty kind because he doesn't out you by name when we talk about them on Mondays. [laughter] But he says something like, "Hey, you know, there are 65 people who got this test, and the good news is that 50 of you passed. The bad news is that 15 people didn't, which means that could have resulted in a lot of different intrusions. So try and be better," so stuff like that. And it is actually kind of fun and reminds us that while we're a venture capital firm, we are people that comprise the firm just like everybody else, and we got to be vigilant. ZACK: That's a good point, too, just about the FBI and them showing us all the crazy stuff. I mean, one of the things that they really tried to drill in, and I still talk to my friend in the FBI today, is VCs are a target. VCs are absolutely a target. And it's not necessarily what you have; it's what you're perceived to have. And so, okay, they probably think we have a lot of IP and a lot of things like that that we don't necessarily have, but they're still going to try to get in. They're still going to try to hack their way in. And I think that's important, too, just instilling that message like, yeah, we're a VC firm. We're a target; you need to understand that; here's why. And that's true for most firms. We're not special. But it's definitely something you need to instill. ERIC: Oh, Zack's probably going to cringe if he hears me say this, but I definitely take the point that you know, you don't have to be faster than the bear; you just got to be faster than the next guy. So you just have [laughter] to be more secure and more of a pain to try and penetrate, and they'll move on to somebody else. ZACK: I mean, that's totally true. That's a big part of security. If they come knocking on your door, and you have that deadbolt, and the next house doesn't, then yeah, they're going to go the easier path. So that's absolutely true, Eric. WILL: Well, you're doing something right because he remembered the training, and he enjoys it. [laughter] You're doing something right. ERIC: I guess I'm just weird in that way, but it was actually kind of fun. WILL: Well, thank you, Eric and Zack, for being on here. It was amazing. Where can the audience find more information about you, connect with you? ERIC: www.ivp.com is probably the best place. It sounds so old school, but it's the most relevant. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn. But I've had a great time talking with you. This has been a lot of fun. Hopefully, you got some nuggets for your audience, too. ZACK: Yeah, I agree. Thank you very much for having us. This was a lot of fun. WILL: Yeah, I've really enjoyed it, so thank you. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guests: Eric Liaw and Zack Willis.

What you'll learn in this episode:   The difference between jadeite and nephrite, and why both are known as jade Why Chinese artisans have chosen to carve jade for thousands of years Why jade can be purchased at dramatically different price points How to spot a pseudo jade that has been dyed or polymer treated Why a healthy sense of skepticism is the most important thing a new jade collector can have   About Eric Hoffman   Eric Hoffman is an aficionado of Chinese jades for over 40 years. He is the owner and operator of Far East Gallery, which is dedicated to lovers of Chinese arts, antiques, antiquities, and—most especially—jades and snuff bottles. A member of the worldwide organizations Friends of Jade and the Association for the Study of Jewelry and Related Arts, jade consultant to the Chinese Cultural Relics Association, and contributing editor to Adornment magazine, Prof. Hoffman has written many articles and reviews on this fascinating subject.   Additional Resources: Website Introductory Articles on Jade: http://hoffmanjade.com/Adornment_Jade.pdf https://asianart.com/articles/hoffman/index.html   Photos available on TheJewelryJourney.com   Transcript: Jade is a popular gemstone that even the most avid jewelry collectors often know little about. Much of the confusion stems from the fact that two distinct stones share the same name. Enter Eric Hoffman, a jade dealer and author who is an expert on identifying different types of jade. He joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about jadeite jade vs. nephrite jade; why jade can either be extremely valuable or basically worthless; and how new collectors can find quality pieces. Read the episode transcript here.  Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the second part of a two-part episode. If you haven't heard part one, please head to TheJewelryJourney.com. Today, my guest is Eric J. Hoffman, who's extremely knowledgeable about jade. Eric is the owner of Far East Gallery and HoffmanJade.com. He is a seller and a buyer, and he knows a lot about what makes jade valuable. He's also an author. Welcome back.    But you said there's a white jade that's a nephrite, and then there's another kind of white jade that's a jadeite, right?   Eric: That's right. When you're talking about white jade, it makes a big difference whether it's nephrite or jadeite. White nephrite is very desirable. White jadeite is kind of a waste material. In fact, it's often dyed or polymer-treated to make it look like something it's not.   Sharon: When you say something it's not, what do you mean? Is it to try and fool people? Why do carvers value white jade so much?   Eric: Again, you have to distinguish between the two types of white jade. The nephrite is desirable to carvers because it can be carved thin and it's not going to break on them while they're carving. The jadeite is generally valued for jewelry, and people don't want a white stone ring. They want the nice, imperial green, apple green jadeite. Back in the late 80s, around 1989, someone figured out how to polymer treat and dye white jadeite to make it look like the imperial green, desirable jadeite.   Sharon: Wow, there's a lot to learn when it comes to stone. The white nephrite that's called jade, when it comes to carving, it's harder to carve. Am I right?   Eric: All carving is hard, but at least the nephrite's not going to break on you. It's not going to crumble. It's not going to cleave like some minerals like fluorite, for example, might do. There are carvings in jadeite as well. It's a little less tough and a little bit harder.   Sharon: But jadeite is what was in Burma. Maybe I'm getting confused. I'm trying to keep it straight. When you talk about the Chinese, that's more of the nephrite jade, and when you talk about the Burmese, that's more of the jadeite, right?    Eric: In terms of where they come from, but there's not much of an industry in Burma carving jadeite. The jadeite comes out of the ground in Burma, and it goes immediately to China where it is made into jewelry and carvings and artifacts and so forth.   Sharon: I'm just getting confused. If somebody says to me, “This is a jade bracelet,” and it's green, what do I ask? Where it came from, or is it nephrite or jadeite? What do I ask?   Eric: The question would be is it nephrite or jadeite. The answer will probably come back that it's jadeite. When you see jade bangle bracelets, for example, they're usually but not always jadeite. Usually if it's a vivid apple green, it's probably jadeite. If it's a darker grayish green, it's probably nephrite.   Sharon: What if it's white? I'm thinking of a hand-made bangle. If they say it's white jade, is that just treated jadeite?   Eric: They would probably not stop at white. They would try to dye it or polymer treat it to try to fool you into thinking it's a more valuable type of jade.   Sharon: So, when somebody says to me, “This is jade,” they really mean jadeite, right? There's nephrite, but most things are jadeite. I'm just trying to understand this.   Eric: It's a complicated subject for sure. Most of the jewelry, but not all that you encounter, will be jadeite. There is nephrite jewelry, but it's probably 10 to one in favor of jadeite.   Sharon: When I was talking to Elyse, she was saying that most of the time the carvings are too large to be used for jewelry, as you were saying, but there are smaller things such as beads and things like that. Is that jade jadeite? Why are they made into small items?   Eric: Jade is found in small quantities, so that's one thing that limits the size. It's costly material, at least the higher grades of jadeite. That would be another thing that limits the size.    Sharon: What would icy jade be? Tell us about icy jade.   Eric: That's another interesting subject. When you're judging jadeite, you're looking at the color. You look at what's called the texture, which is the fineness of the individual, microscopic crystals. It affects the kind of polish the jade can take. You look at the clarity. You'd like to find jade that doesn't have inclusions or black spots in it. There's also something called translucence. As jade becomes more and more translucent, you get to where you can almost read text through it. That's called icy jade.   Sharon: Do you look at whether it's jade or icy jade? Do you look at it under a microscope to decide if you're going to buy it or judge it?   Eric: No, you can see right away that it's an example of icy jade, but it's fairly rare material. It didn't used to be worth anything particularly more than other jades until Christie's, some years ago in a marketing coup, changed the name from water jade to icy jade.   Sharon: Water jade to icy jade.   Eric: And it took off. In the many pieces I've handled over the decades, I only have one piece of icy jade.   Sharon: That's you've handled or that you would be willing to part with?   Eric: Both.    Sharon: Putting icy jade aside, when you evaluate a piece of jade, do you look under a microscope at all? Is that part of your process? I don't know what you look for.   Eric: Generally, no. Generally, a 10x loupe is about all you need to evaluate jade. For example, with a 10x loupe, you can look and see if dye is seeping into the little boundaries between regions on jadeite. The other instrument that is sometimes useful would be a refractometer, which is occasionally brought into play to distinguish between a nephrite and a jadeite.   Sharon: Somebody brought my mother a gift back from China, and she said it was jade. Would that have been an imitation jade? I don't know what she paid for it. I don't remember. Was it a jade jadeite versus—I mean, nephrite doesn't sound like it's in the picture.   Eric: It could have been any one of those. There are some fairly simple tests of hardness and specific gravity and so forth that you can run to tell what you're looking at.   Sharon: As a collector and, as you can tell very obviously, somebody who knows nothing about jade or nephrite or Mawsitsit or icy jade, what would you say to a collector just starting out? What should they look for? What should they have with them? I got rid of my refractometer a long time ago. I said, “Forget it. I never use it.” What would they do with it?   Eric: The one thing you should always have with you is a 10x loupe. The other thing you should always have with you is a healthy sense of skepticism. I assume that any ancient jade I'm shown is a brand-new fake until proven otherwise. When you're shown a gorgeous piece of jade jewelry, you should be a little skeptical as to whether it's natural or has been treated in some way.   Sharon: Treated meaning coated with color to make it look a different color or a stronger color?   Eric: There have been examples of coating, but I was really referring to was what started back in 1989, with the polymer treatment of pretty much worthless white jadeite.   Sharon: How would I know? How would a collector know?   Eric: It's a problem. At a certain price level, you would go to the GIA. They would look at your piece with an infrared spectrometer and tell you yes or no, whether it's natural or colored or had been treated. But this test, of course, costs a few hundred dollars, so you're probably up in the $20,000-$30,000 price range before it becomes worthwhile doing that.    Sharon: If you're buying a less expensive piece that's not a $20,000 piece, what would you say a collector should look for? Should we look for translucency? If they tell me something is old, how do I know?   Eric: If you don't have a $100,000 spectrometer laying around in your basement, you should probably look for a dealer you can trust who does have access to one, either directly or through a lab like GIA.   Sharon: I can tell you're on the East Coast if you say a basement, because who knows what a basement is out here? In fact, I did see a house with a basement, and I was floored. I thought a house with a basement in Los Angeles—   Eric: No basements in Los Angeles?   Sharon: No basements out here, or maybe just a few old, old houses. So, what attracts you? Do you like the color of the jade you buy? Whatever you put on your site, do you like it?   Eric: Yes, the colors of nephrite are more subdued and softer and more subtle, but I find them attractive. The colors of jadeite are brighter and a more vivid green. There's also lavender, which is very attractive. So, yes, the color is one thing, and the extreme toughness of nephrite, what it lets carvers accomplish.   Sharon: If something is lavender, depending on price range, you could add polymers to make it lavender? Is it nephrite or would that be jadeite, or both?   Eric: That is jadeite, yes. Unfortunately, lavender is faked as well. Polymer-treated lavender does exist. It's usually so garish looking that you can dismiss it right out of hand, but a really good imitation can be a little harder to tell. Once again, you rely on an infrared spectrometer to tell the difference.   Sharon: Do you have one lying around your house?    Eric: I have no infrared spectrometer.   Sharon: In the thousands of years they've been carving jade, whether it's in China or Burma or wherever, is there natural lavender jade? What are the natural colors?   Eric: Oh yes, there is natural lavender. It's a softer, more subtle lavender. It comes from Burma along with the other jades, so it does exist.   Sharon: Are there any other colors? There's green; there's white; there's lavender. There are different shades of green, but what else? Is that it for all the jades?   Eric: There is a red. There's a reddish brown, russet and black.   Sharon: And they all come from Burma and then they're shipped off to China? Or are they in China?   Eric: The jade is all from Burma and it's almost universally carved in China.   Sharon: So, if somebody shows me a piece—I keep going back to this example of a bangle bracelet—and somebody says it's from China, it's really been dug out of the ground in Burma and shipped off to China to be made into something. Is that what you're saying?   Eric: That's correct. If it's jadeite, the raw material came from northern Burma and the work was almost certainly done in China.   Sharon: O.K. You must really take people aback when you start asking them questions. They probably think you're just another person who doesn't know anything about jade.   Eric: Once again, you want to find a dealer you have some faith in.   Sharon: Do you think you have those dealers? Because you're a dealer, do you think the people you get your material and your carved objects from, are they trustworthy? If they call you and say, “Hey, do I have a deal for you,” do you say, “O.K., let me hear about it”?   Eric: There are dealers I buy from and there are dealers I sell to. I also sell jade books, books about jade.   Sharon: Tell us about some of the things you're written about or the names of the books.   Eric: At one point, I might have been the number one seller of jade books in the world. I've written about that. I've sent a lot of the best ones to China. Even though the shipping cost can be horrendous for a big, heavy book, it doesn't seem to bother anybody in China to pay it.   Sharon: You must have clients from all over the world.   Eric: Yeah, I've probably shipped to about 20 to 30 countries.   Sharon: Besides the books, who contacts you from all over the world to say, “Hey, I saw this object on your site”?   Eric: I get that all the time, people showing pictures. Invariably it's imitation ancient jades.    Sharon: How about when they want to buy something from you? Do they come from all over the world?   Eric: I ship all over.    Sharon: Tell us what you've written about. If you're the number one seller, people really trust what you have to say about jade. Are you writing from a mineral perspective for what to look for? What are you telling them? What are you writing about in the books?    Eric: As an engineer, it's the technical aspect I appreciate the most. Telling jade from pseudo jade has been a side specialty.   Sharon: I shouldn't send my bracelet from the swap meet to you because I should just assume it's pseudo jade. That's what you're saying, right?   Eric: It pays to have a healthy sense of skepticism. I assume everything is fake until proven otherwise.   Sharon: How would somebody prove otherwise to you? Because it's old and they're brushing the dirt off of it? How would they prove it?   Eric: Perhaps the most reliable thing in dealing with ancient jades is to take a close look at the tooling techniques and looking for modern toolmarks, which would not have been used a thousand plus years ago.   Sharon: Do you often find when you're evaluating a piece for you to buy to resell, will someone tell you, “Oh, this is made with old tools,” and then you'll find a modern tool mark and hand it back?   Eric: There's no handing back. A lot of times, you have to buy in a dark, dingy corner, no recourse, no refund, cash only.   Sharon: I guess I'm thinking about a big show or something like that. You're saying they pull you aside. Do they open their raincoat or something?   Eric: At a big show, of course, the vetting has already been done for you. But that's reflected in the very high prices, so it's hard to buy anything at a big show for resale.    Sharon: As a collector, if we were going to buy or evaluate a piece and we don't have our handy refractometer with us, what should we be doing in terms of the sense of skepticism? It's like how on Antiques Roadshow you see people all the time who believe they have pre-Columbian artifacts and they're proven to be fake. Should we look for contemporary toolmarks? Is that one tell?   Eric: You've opened another new subject, and that's pre-Columbian jade. Jade was carved in Central America roughly about the time of the Chinese Zhou Dynasty. In fact, there's some thought that perhaps there was communication between China and the jade carvers in Central America because a lot of the motifs are the same. But in Central America, at that time, they were using string and abrasives and stone files, not metal tools.   Sharon: When was this?   Eric: This would have been maybe 500 to 1,000 years ago.    Sharon: Not that long ago, really, when you compare it to China or even other places in the world.   Eric: That's right. For the first several thousand years, China carved with the same kinds of tools before they had metals.   Sharon: That's really interesting. Tell us a bit more about when we should come to a person like you, what we'll find in the books and chapters you've coauthored. Are we only going to find technical stuff, or are we going to find history? Are we going to find anything else?   Eric: There are jade books that cover all of that. Unfortunately, they're not all in the same book. The book I worked on most recently was by Richard Hughes in Bangkok. It's a big, heavy book. It's costs $200 just to mail it from Bangkok to the United States. It's not the kind of investment everybody will make, and it does focus on the gemology aspects of both nephrite and jadeite.    Sharon: When are you going to be writing your book about history? You say there's not a book that encompasses it all. Forget the minerology, but the history, the carving, how it's done. When are you going to write it?   Eric: I don't think you should wait for it. I've been assembling notes for about 20 years. Elyse asks that same question about once a week.   Sharon: So, I should come back to you in 10, 15 years?   Eric: 10 years would be good.   Sharon: For somebody like me, it would be an easier book to write because I don't know the technical stuff. The history and the carving would be interesting and fast to write.    Eric: While you're waiting the 10 years, there is actually a book that was written called “Jade Lore.” I'm not sure when it was written; possibly in the 40s. That does cover, in a very readable way, a lot of the history along with a little bit of the technical.   Sharon: But isn't it out of print because it's been so long?   Eric: It's out of print, but you can find copies. It was written by a journalist who was on-site in China around the time the Qing Dynasty was falling apart, and a lot of these pieces were coming onto the market.   Sharon: When was that? How long ago?   Eric: The Qing Dynasty fell in 1911, 1912. I think this book was written either in the 30s or 40s. It was written by somebody who really knew how to write a lively story.   Sharon: Where have you been? If you're saying you look at these objects or jewels, have you been to some of the places and seen them directly, or is it mostly when somebody brings you into a dark corner?   Eric: I've been to Taiwan. I have not been to mainland China. As I mentioned earlier, the Chinese really want to repatriate and bring back into the country the best jades as well as jade books. To get pieces of jade now, you pretty much have to stumble across American collections or European collections.   Sharon: I think that's true of other pieces too. It seems that the Chinese are very interested in repatriating a lot of older jewelry. We're being told they're the ones who drive the prices up. Is that also true in jade?   Eric: Oh, absolutely. In fact, there's a book on that subject as well.    Sharon: Which is?   Eric: On the whole subject of repatriating these pieces back into China.    Sharon: What do people do with them when they have them back in China?   Eric: What do they do with them in China?   Sharon: Yeah.   Eric: Some of those will end up in museums in China. Others end up in private collections of millionaires.   Sharon: Eric, I see Elyse in the corner there. You have to go pack your bags so you can get ready for your next trip to Myanmar or mainland China. You've been to Taiwan. Thank you very much for being with us today.    Eric: It's a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.   Sharon: It's been great. We will have photos posted on the website. Please head to TheJewelryJourney.com to check them out.   Thank you again for listening. Please leave us a rating and review so we can help others start their own jewelry journey.

Book mentioned: “Powwowing in Pennsylvania: Braucherei & the Ritual of Everyday Life” by Patrick J. Donmoyer https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40605053-powwowing-in-pennsylvania Eric's website is at www.ericsteinhart.com Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com   S3E27 TRANSCRIPT:----more----   Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science: Based-Paganism. I'm your host Mark. Yucca: And I'm the other one Yucca. Mark: And today we have a very special episode of The Wonder. We're really excited to discuss urban paganism with two guests from New York City, Joh and Eric Steinhart. And so welcome to both of you. Eric: Hello. Joh: Hi, thank you so much for having us great to be here. Mark: really delighted to have you, so I guess, to get started why don't we just ask you to tell us a bit about yourselves? How did you come to non paganism? You wanna start Joh? Joh: Sure. My name is Joh. I've lived in New York for about 16 years. My path is very new. It's only about four years old. I've always been drawn to certain. Aesthetics around the occult I was a teen goth in the nineties, which perfect for that, but I never, I never really thought that I fit into any of those paths. I couldn't put my finger on why. A few years ago I purchased a, a beginner's book on, on witchcraft and developing your own identity as a witch. I got it just for fun, for a long train ride. There's a bit in there in the beginning that outlines different kinds of witches or witchcraft like green witches, kitchen, witches, chaos, magic, wicca. I'd heard some of these. Terms before, but they're described very plainly in the book and it gave me a little bit of a glimpse into how vast of a world paganism might be that I didn't know anything about, or I hadn't realized. So I started reading a lot more about developing a practice, but still didn't really feel like I fit in. I couldn't relate to the belief system parts. And in one of my internet rabbit holes, I learned about the book godless paganism, which described paganism from a more science based lens. And I just got really excited about what that sounded like. So I ordered it to my local bookstore and I devoured that book, the concepts, it taught me even more about how personal one's path can be and that there is this little corner of this world that felt like a fit and like I could belong. So then I started looking for a community because I was so excited and I wanted to talk about it with people. And I was clicking on links and links and links online and finally found the atheopagan Facebook group, which was the first active community that I had found that actually had recent activity in there. So I, I joined and I've been in that community for about two to three years, and it's just such an incredibly supportive, inspiring place that gives me ideas of how to develop my practice even more. And you know, now fast forward to today, I'm just really grateful to have found this community and group and little subset of of the path. Mark: That's great. Thank you. Yucca: Yeah, Eric, what about you? Eric: Yeah. So, I mean, I come from a very strange place. I mean, I'm Pennsylvania, German and Pennsylvania, German culture often known as Pennsylvania, Dutch, but we're not Dutch. We're Germans. And that culture is a magical culture and, you know, magic was normalized in that culture from the very beginning from its very roots. And so I grew up with a lot of that stuff. I mean, I grew up in, in a culture that was filled with magical practices of all sorts. And I mean, nominally, I mean, you know, nominally explicitly a Christian culture, but probably a lot of Christians would say, no, you know, you guys are doing some weird stuff. And, you know, I, I became attracted to science and early on and, you know, just don't really have a theistic worldview at all. So combining some of those things got me and I, you know, and I was in, I was involved sort of in, in atheist movements for a while and found a lot of atheism to be kind of, practically shallow, you know, there's, it's like, yeah, after you're done being mad at God, what do you do then? I mean, and there was like nothing. And you know, my, I would always say things like, look, there's no atheist art. You know, there's like atheist music, you know, there's just, you know, there's, there's no culture, right. Or the culture is, and more and more people have observed this. It's kind of parasitic on Christianity in a way. And so I found that very unsatisfying, right? Certainly I know plenty of atheists. I'm a philosopher, I'm a philosophy professor and I know plenty of, you know, professional atheists and all they do is talk about God. And so I'm like, look, I don't wanna talk about God. Let's let's let's talk about something else. Let's do something else. And I found that paganism in various forms, it was just kind of, kind of starting, but in various forms, you know, had a culture had art, had aesthetics, had practices, had symbols had a fairly rich worked out way of life. And as a philosopher, you know, I've got plenty of training in ancient cultures, particularly Greek and Roman but also also Germanic. And you know, I just thought, oh, This stuff, all kind of fits together. And so I became very interested in thinking about ways and I've advocated among atheists to say things like, look, you guys have to start. And, and, and women too, you've gotta start building a culture and you can't build a culture of negativity, you know, a culture of no, a culture and especially not a culture. That's essentially a mirror image of Christianity that all you're doing is talking about God. And you know, I've had a little success there, but it's a, it's a tough hall. But I think more and more something like a kind of atheopagan could really be a live option for the future of lots of aspects of American culture, right? As people become de Christianized, what are they gonna do? And some people say, well, they're just gonna be secular. But that's not really an answer and that's not a culture. And as you start looking around, you start to see these other cultures that are kind of bubbling up and developing. So yeah, I mean, I came to it from, you know, both the sort of old ethnic, Pennsylvania, German angle, the kind of philosophy and science angle and dissatisfaction with you know, sort of mainstream atheism. So lots of different roads in Yucca: Wow. That's a, that's a really interesting path to, to come on. So it'd be interesting hear more about the practice, the magical kind of practices that you talked about. Eric: well, there's a good, there's a good book by this guy, Patrick, Don moer called pow wowing. So you can check that out. It's incredibly rich and incredibly weird stuff, you know, Yucca: well, we'll find that and put it in the show notes. If people wanna take a look at it. Eric: Right. Mark: Yeah. Well, both of your stories are really very interesting that way in, in in that identification of Something being missing, but the, the main, the main offerings that are, that surround us in our culture, not really fitting that hole. That's certainly what I found as well, you know, and it's the reason that I wrote the essay that first started out a paganism. And I, I should probably introduce at this point that Eric, you, you especially have been involved with various non theist pagan efforts since long before I wrote that essay I just was, did a poor job of research and didn't find the other naturalistic non-theistic paganism efforts that were being done around the world. Until after I had already, you know, published and was starting to get attention for atheopagan So, as urban pagans living in the city what do your practices look like? Joh, you wanna, you wanna start on that? Joh: Sure. My practice may not be super urban sounding, but, but. There's some stuff about like spots in the city that, that I do. But generally my, my daily practice is in the morning. My apartment faces east and I wake up early enough to catch the sunrise every day. And I'll kind of first just stare at stare at it and kind of greet the sky every morning. I do stretches to start the day and I position my mat to face that window so that I can really connect with the day while I'm waking up. I have a small focus that I decorate seasonally. I really connect with ritual and the different physical objects around my practice, probably because I was raised Catholic and I always loved the sacred spaces, the incense, the bells, the rituals, and the regalia of it all. So it's a very tangible practice for me. And I have a. Personal calendar with the, the, you know, the solstice and the equinoxes in it. But also with other days that are very personal to me. Like I celebrate Freddie Mercury's birthday every year, for example, and, and the anniversary of when I move to New York and I'll actually take that day off of work and like use that whole day to really explore parts of the city that I love. And don't as easily make time for during the rest of the year. And then I also try to cook and eat seasonally as much as possible and really understand what the, what the ecology of this region is like. And I made this spreadsheet that tells me what's in season around here based on what month it is. It makes it easier to shop for and plan meals and things like that. Mark: Hm. Yucca: Hmm. Mark: Wow. That's a lot. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Yeah, that's very cool. Thank you, Joh. Yucca: you have any parks nearby that you go to? Is that part of your practice or more? Just the relationship with the city and the sky. Joh: There is a really beautiful community garden in my neighborhood. That's open to the public a couple of days a week, and sometimes I'll walk there or ride my bike there and just kind of slowly walk down the paths and see how everyone's set up their plots and what they're growing. And there are bees everywhere and some benches off to the side. So sometimes I'll sit there and journal a little bit, or just kind of stare into space. And, you know, the people who have plots there are required to volunteer, you know, certain number of hours every week. And there's this section at the end where you can see everyone composting and things like that. So there's that piece. And then. In the city as well. There are different ways. Speaking of composting, that you can participate in kind of that cycle. So you can go to a drop off spot and bring your food scraps and they'll compost them and, and then use that for the public parks and things like that. Yucca: Oh, nice. Joh: that's like another way that allows me to feel more connected to the public parks and spaces of nature that are kind of engineered in such a dense area. Mark: Uhhuh. Nice. Nice. Eric. How about your practice? Eric: Yeah. I mean, my practices are probably a little too intellectual. I mean, one of my main practices is trying to figure out how all this stuff can work out and how to make sense of, of, of pagan ideas and practices. Right. That's cuz I'm a philosopher. That's what I do. I mean I do have a little I have a little altar and I do, you know, things, things like that, but I, I do try to think. A lot about how what paganism means and what kind of pagan concepts are relevant, for instance, in an urban context, right? I mean, cities are not trying to be forests. That's not what they're trying to do. They're not. And, and, you know, trying to work out pagan contexts or concepts and beliefs and practices in an urban setting it may, you, you have to think a little bit differently, right. Because there's a lot of you know, what you might call mainstream paganism that has a very I think very biased view of what paganism is or should be like we're all supposed to be farmers or, or, or Amish or something. I mean, I grew up with the Amish, you know, I mean, so I'm like, no, no, I know what that is. And so, you know, thinking of the ways that that cities are natural spaces and that cities are ecosystems not because they're trying to be, you know, a national park, right. I mean, and there's more and more wonderful research among, you know, biologists and ecologists of, of how cities themselves are ecosystems, you know, they are not, they're not phony ecosystems like, oh, New York. City's great because it's got central park. No, you know, the, the city isn't eco, I mean more and more research onto this is fascinating stuff because you're finding all these species, not just humans, humans are a natural species, but you know, raccoons, cougars, coyotes, you know, and New York city has there, there's beautiful research that's been done in New York city. Right. We have herds of deer. Wandering the city. We have, you know, foxes. I mentioned the, the raccoons, I think the bird life in New York city is, you know, and so you find things like, and there's a term for this, a technical term for these kinds of critters, right. Sin, Andros, right. These are animals that have adapted to humans and now live. They flourish with humans. They flourish in cities, right? So, New York city for instance, is an extraordinary place to be a Raptor, a bird of prey, right? New York city has some of the highest Paran, Falcon and Hawk populations anywhere. Right? Because they love the tall buildings. They love the bridges. Like the bridges are filled with Paragon, Falcon nests. And you're like, yeah, these, you know, life is adaptive. And So I try to think of all the ways that we live together with all these things in the cities and how humans have made a home, not just for humans, but for, for a whole ecosystem of, of critters. And, you know, like urban raccoons are not like rural raccoons, right. They've things. Right. And it's really interesting, you know, and people study this, you know, scientists, they study like how cities are driving bur particularly birds and raccoons. Are the species been studied most to become more intelligent, they're learning how to solve all sorts of problems. Right. So, so I find, you know, so part of, I guess my practice is sort of learning about that, observing that, thinking about ways that I mean, we haven't, we have a general issue. In the United States, right. Which is that so much of our space and structure is thoroughly Christianized. And it's not an easy thing to say, oh, well, let's, we're, you know, we're just gonna do something different, right. When all of your space is structured around a certain way of life. And so, you know, I, I try to think about ways that we can think of all kind like, okay, the four elements, you know, fire earth, air and water for me, light, you know, how do those relate in an urban context, right? Then in the, in a great way in New York city, you know, you can actually go into the earth. You know, in ways that most ordinary people can't right. And you can go deep into the earth right. In the, in the subways. I mean, you can do that on a daily basis. Right. And you can, you know, I mean, being stuck on a subway, train deep in the earth right. Is a way to like, encounter something that's terrifying and forceful. So how do you think of that sort of thing in, in a, in pagan ways, right? How do you think of, I mean, New York city is also very close to water. I mean, that's the reason the city exists. Right. It's one of the greatest bays in the world. We have dolphins, we have whales in the Hudson seals thinking of that kind of life as part of the city too. And I'll mention one other thing, thinking of things like, I don't know if people know about, I mean, you know, about Manhattan henge. Right. So, so you've got, you know, you've got structures there that people recently have started to say things like, Hey, we Stonehenge, we have Manhattan henge. You know, we have a, we have a thing and it wasn't designed that way, but Mark: Eric, would you like to explain what that is for our listeners? That don't know what it is? Eric: Yeah, Manhattan henge because Manhattan, the you know, the streets are in a sort of Southeast Northwest orientation. There are two times of the year when the sun come, you know, if you're stand on 42nd street in the middle and you've got skyscrapers on either side, my head is the sun, right. And the son just comes down between, you know, vertically between the skyscrapers and sets, right. You know, across the water sort of like Stonehenge, right? Like coming down between these monoliths. And I've seen it is, is really incredible. And people, you know, thousands and thousands of people go out in the streets to photograph it. And Thinking about ways that that kind of stuff can develop. And it might not be stuff that somebody says explicitly like, oh, this is pagan, like it's Wiccan or ARU or drew it, or, or whatever, or witchy witchcraft or something, but these are cultural things that people start to do. Right. And if you start to look around, you see all kinds of little shrines in the city, you know, I mean, there are, there are some obvious big ones in the statue of liberties, like a big pagan statue. And there are statues of old Greek and Roman deities in the city. There's like, mercury and Atlas are down at Rockefeller center, right? There's a statue of pan at Columbia university there. These, you know, these things exist. And not to, I mean, I, I think also, you know, a lot of urban places in a sort of practical sense of things to do things like art museums, right. Where you can go in, in New York, the metropolitan museum, and you can see lots of in fact they just are now having a big show on what old pagan statues used to look like. Right. Because they weren't white, they weren't white Mar they were painted. Right. They were dye. And so they've taken a bunch of them made replicas and they could still find microscopic traces of these dyes in the rock. And so they've now repainted them as they looked. So I'll go see that soon. So there's lots of opportunities for people to do all kinds of things. And I, and I real, but I really do think that. There's a, still a need to develop a lot of cultural infrastructure, right? You could go out in central park and, and do some ritual on the solstice or something, but that's really not. That to me is like something that sort of slides right off the surface of the culture, cuz it doesn't have any connections to things. There used to be some larger connections before COVID there was a network of drum circles. I don't know if people had been to prospect park in Brooklyn, there were some immense, there was immense drum drum stuff going on there. COVID kind of brought an end to a lot of that. So we'll see how that starts up, but I, I think there's a lot of There's there's a lot of thing. And if you do wanna go out in, in you know, in a kind of less urban environment, you know, New York city is actually is the highest density of Woodland trails over 2000 miles of trails within a 60 mile radius of the city, cuz the Appalachian mountains just arc right across the north. Mark: Right. Eric: And so you can, you can, yeah. It's the highest concentration of Woodland parks and trails anywhere in the United States. Mark: Wow. Eric: There's a lot, there's a lot still to be done. And I think I'll just, I'll just leave off with that. Mark: I was that's. Yeah. There's so much to say there. I mean, you mentioned the met and it's that talk about sacred spaces? I, I mean, the metropolitan museum of art is one of the great sacred spaces of the world. It's like a shrine to all human culture. Joh, I, I know you live in Queens, so I imagine you get to the Cloisters which is another super sacred space for me. This is kind of out of order of the, the questions that we talked about doing, but are there specific places or sacred spaces that you think of? When you, when you think about urban paganism in your city, Joh: Yeah. One thing that New York really does well is bigness. There are a few very stereotypically New York spaces that I have like religious experiences and in their giant. So the inside of grand central terminal is one of them. It's massive. It's echoy. The ceiling is painted with this beautiful night sky scene with the Zodiac constellations on it. Part of what feels so humbling being in there is going off of something. Eric said before is knowing that it's also this hub of this massive living transportation network that enables the movement of thousands, millions of people within this tri-state area. Another one is the branch of the New York public library with the very iconic lions out front it's, it's a beautiful piece of architecture. It's also inside cavernous full of this beautiful art, larger than life and quiet. It's really like church almost. You feel like when you're in there, cuz you have this like reverence and respect and gratitude for all of this knowledge that's contained in there and that it's free. Like you can just go and like getting a card is free. It's it still blows my mind. This one is pretty kind of cliche, but the empire state building it's so tall, but the city is so dense that I never expect to see it when I do so I'll be walking somewhere, probably distracted, multitasking, and then I'll look up and it'll just be there in front of my face. And it's this like instantly calming moment for me and kind of resets me in whatever's going on in life at the time. And then there's like smaller little smaller spots. Like there's a Steinway piano showroom near times square that I like to go visit. I play the piano and it's a really silencing experience, even though it's so busy around there and, and crowded and, and loud, but just to stand outside and gaze in at these beautiful pianos that are handmade just across the river in Queens, like it's really, really cool how accessible places like this are because of that, you know, that network that connects, although the parts of the city, so well, the subway. So yeah, those are, those are a few that come to mind. how about you? Eric: Yeah, I think, I think Joh says some great things. I mean, one point there is like the urban sublime, right? Like these, you know, towers that rise to infinity. I mean, it, you can have a kind of experience. That's hard to get anywhere else. If you go like up to the observation deck on the, you know, the freedom tower that replace the world trade centers or the empire state building or Rockefeller center, right. You go up on tops of these things and you see, you know, from a. Point, and that kind of space is you know, I mean, it's commercial, right? You pay, you're going up to the top of, of a skyscraper, but you, it can induce kinds of experiences that are hard to get elsewhere. And sure, grand central station, that's like a great example of a kind of space that's already, you know, sort of semi pagan in its kind of classical thing. Like the Zodiac is there and it's this immense space and you can, you can go in and just be you can experience awe and, and, and humbleness and things like that. A lot in the city. And I think, you know, especially when I first started coming to the city and, and probably a lot of people would have a similar experience. You, you just feel overwhelmed. I mean, the, the sheer size of these things that are around you and unlike I mean, other cities have some of this, but you know, it's not like in New York city, you can walk, you walk a few blocks and you're out. Right. I mean, if you're in Manhattan, you can walk for like 12 miles through this amenity and you're sort of like, I mean, it's, it's humbling. So I think that, I think, and I think there's a lot of symbolism that goes into that. I'll mention that there have been a couple of urban terror decks, right? That use, I mean, if you think of the tower and you think of just, well, the tower, you know, or you think of things like that, there have been some there have been, there are a couple of urban TA decks, some better than others, but you know, people are, and this is what I think about the cultural infrastructure. People are starting to build that kind of thing. Right. And start to see these symbolisms in these, in these places. So, yeah, that, I like, I like that. What Joh said about sort of the urban sublime and what mark, you said about kind of these museums that hold all this, this cultural stuff and. You know, I often think of, of paganism in terms of the symbolic, right. Rather than you know, I'm not much for, for ancient, ancient roots. That, that seems a little racist to me. I'm more into thinking about the future and thinking about things like, you know, if I think about superhuman minds, right? I mean, the city itself is like a high of mind. You know, the city itself is a super organism. It's a superhuman intelligence. Right. And, and things like me, I'm just like a little sell in this organism. I'm passing through contributing something to it, but the, the amount of energy that flows through San Francisco or New York, or, you know, something like that is astonishing. Mark: Yes. Eric: And it's it's information too. I mean, places like, okay. New York, Tokyo, you know, San Francisco, you know, are, are some of the most information rich places on the planet. Mark: London, Hong Kong. Eric: Right. And, and so if you think of like, you know, you think of a deity like mercury or somebody like, or thought, or Glen, you know, these, you may think of these divine minds and these patterns of information. I mean, I prefer to leave those Dees in the past where they lived, but now you look at super, if you want a symbol, cuz for me, a lot of this is symbolic. If you want symbolism for superhuman intelligence, you know, superhuman mind a superhuman agency, right? I mean the place to one place to find that there are other places, but one place to find that is in the, you know, the rich information flows the density of information flows in cities. Mark: Mm-hmm Eric: Right? You, you can really, you can, you don't have to think like, I mean, Okay. I lived in New York city. This means I am part of something that is immense it's 400 years old. It's I don't know how long it'll last, but you know, so many people have contributed to it and you're there you feel it you're like, yeah, I there's this thing, you know, it's immense, I'm a tiny little part of this huge thing. So. Mark: and, and I think that's really well said, and it also, it extends beyond the bounds of New York city so much. I mean, I, I think about watching old movies where pretty much everybody came from New York or their immediate family came through New York. It's like the entire culture of the United States is deeply informed by this urban collective experience that then spread throughout the rest of the country. I was thinking about, you were talking about culture and of course, city is where the culture is, right? I mean, there's culture everywhere, but big cities are there're places where it's easier for people that are cultural creatives to make it. There are more opportunities for them to, to make a living. And it reminded me, I've lived in two big cities in my life. I've lived in San Francisco and in Barcelona. And one of the things that attracted me the most about both of those places is busking in the underground. Eric: Oh  Mark: the, the caliber of musical performance that you can experience. Just at random, you know, by stepping off of a train and suddenly finding yourself surrounded by it is it's like this, this spontaneous moment of, you know, truly religious kind of joy to me. And it's, it's one of the things that leaps immediately to mind to me, when I think about my fondness for those cities, right. Eric: Yeah. I mean, I, I think, and maybe Joh can speak to this too. I mean, the you know, thinking of those of those spaces where you can go and, and, and hear music and often the, the cultural thing is, is mixtures of cultures too, like in San Francisco or Chicago or New York. I mean, I can, you know, there are all these little I think, was it, Joh, did you mention Centia, did somebody mention that somebody mentioned that, but you know, there are all these, there are all these, you know, Afro-Caribbean cultures that have come into New York city and you could find all these little things, like all over the streets. You know, and they have some, you know, Afro-Caribbean significance and there they are. Right. And so you already find lots of, you know, there are lots of alternatives to a dominant, this sort of dominant Christian narrative. There are lots of alternatives already in these urban spaces, right. That come from from other other sources. Joh: I was actually also thinking about the, the mixture of different cultures. When thinking about some of the places that I like to visit there, there are a couple of neighborhoods in downtown Manhattan that I like to just I'm drawn to them. And I just like to walk around in and think about. The history and evolution of culture in those neighborhoods, like the history of music, of counterculture, of the different immigrant communities that settled there over time and everywhere you look, you can see little remnants of all this history from like a German inscription in the brick facade of a building or a plaque telling you that Charlie Parker lived in that building a 24-hour Ukrainian diner founded by refugees in the sixties that like still you know, still you can't, you it's always a weight. So there's that, there's that kind of magic too. And then I think just walkable urbanism in general, like increases the likelihood that you'll have chance encounters with not just different cultures, but like different kinds of people who are living different lives from you. Like. There's a community of local businesses and neighbors, and then the city workers, and it's all happening all in the same space. Like there's no alleyways in New York city. There's like two in the whole city. And so all that stuff is, and activity is just running up against itself and like keeping the environment running and thriving and kind of with this magical energy all the time. Mark: Yeah. And, and when you think about that, when you think about all those different cultures and different sort of value systems and so forth, all kind of coming together and finding a way to coexist, then it's no surprise that it's the cities that are the blue parts of the United States, right? It's like in the cities, people have figured out how to get along, cuz they have to, there's no choice about it, Joh: Yeah. And to coexist peacefully. Mark: And eventually to thrive. I mean, not, not just to coexist, but I to actually have melding of cultures and you know, new and interesting combinations of stuff like jazz, for example in new Orleans and New York and Chicago. Anyway, I, I don't know where I was going with that, but it, it occurs to me that the, the values that we associate with paganism, right? The inclusiveness, the tolerance, the the appreciation for beauty and culture and diversity and all those things, they really thrive more in the cities than they do in the, in the rural areas, which we think of as more natural, right. Eric: Yeah. I mean, that's a weird, you know, you find that kind of, to me, very, almost paradoxical or contradictory view in a lot of paganism, which is like, oh, the rural environment is the pagan environment. And you're like, no, the rural environment is filled with fundamentalists, man. Mark: Well, not entirely, not, not Yucca. Eric: nah, well, I mean sure, but, but still it's it's yeah, I mean, if you have a sort of polycentric culture where you've got lots of different cultures and lots of different religious ideas and lots of TISM lots of mixing of different religious ideas and you've got, you know, intelligent raccoons and, and you know, sparrows and yeah. Racoons have little hands, you know, they're learning to work stuff. They're gonna, that's what we're that's what's gonna take over after we're gone. You know, so, so I think that that's already seeing the multiplicity. I, I think of paganism often in terms of multiplicity, instead of, you know, unity, it's like, yeah, there are, there are many perfections and many ways to bring those together and, and integrate them into a system without, you know, reducing 'em to a, to like everybody has to act the same, you know? And I do think so. I think in, in that sense mark, what you said yeah. About cities having that, all those combinations right. Are really good. Really good. I don't think we're quite there yet in trying to figure out what, you know, the sort of next culture is gonna be, but won't happen in my lifetime, but I, I hope it will happen. So. Yucca: One of the things to kind of shift a little bit that, or some qualities that are usually not associated with urban environments that sometimes are, are highly valued in certain pagan circles are things like solitude and stillness and quietness. And those are things that I'm curious. Do you feel like. It is a fair assessment. That that's not something that really happens in urban environments. And also, is that something important in your practice? If it is, how is that something that is a pagan you, you search out or cultivate in your life? Joh: This made me think of something really specific. So it's actually, I feel like one thing that happens here is there's so much stimuli going on all the time. That it's actually, for me, at least fairly easy to, to, to be find myself in solitude. I, I live alone and You know, during the pandemic, especially, I didn't see anybody. And it was, it was very quiet. Actually, if you, you know, if you live in a more busy part of the city and you have an apartment facing the back of the building, that's like a sign that it's gonna be quiet. It actually can get really quiet here, surprisingly. But one thing that I don't know, I think this happened in multiple places around the world, in the beginning of the pandemic, but this, this thing started happening here where at 7:00 PM every day, everyone would leave their apartment and go outside and start clapping for the healthcare workers and essential workers who were actually having to still leave their apartments and help the city run. And this happened for months and months, every day at 7:00 PM, everyone would go outside and start clapping and, and it really helped, I think with the. Precarious kind of mental health situation that we were all finding ourselves in because we were trapped in these tiny boxes for so long, like scared of going outside because of the density and everything. And it helped us feel kind of alone together in a way. So that, that goes veers a little bit off of what you were asking, but I think it's actually not that it's pretty easy to find that piece and that, that that quiet and solitude if you if you try, like, not during a global pandemic, but but yeah, that just my mind kind of went there when you asked that. Eric: I think that was, that was a, a great place to go. I mean, I remember that we didn't go outside, but we leaned out our windows and banged on pots and pans, you know? And that's that was kind of a collective ritual. Mark: Yeah. Eric: I mean, it kind of, I mean, it was a collective ritual and I think, you know, I, I wonder about some of that solitude or something. I mean, certainly in, in lots of urban areas, there's a lot more, I think maybe I'm maybe I'm wrong here, but you know, a lot of collective action, there's a lot of political awareness political activity. And maybe that solitude, isn't quite what people are wanting. Right. Because it's not like I'm gonna go into myself and, and I'm gonna go, I mean, cities face outward, right. I mean, and that energy gets radiated outward. And I, I probably, if I had to think of my most well, you know, the two very pagan moments in New York city, both were musical. One was when I heard the band high long in New York, which was. You know, almost surreal in the, in the, the juxtaposition of this, this high, long shamanistic, you know, whatever they're trying to bring up. And it's in, it's in a theater in Manhattan and there are thousands of us there and we're all chanting and clapping and dancing and stuff like that. But probably even, even a little more, you know, pagan than high, long was like one time when I went to a Patty Smith concert in Manhattan. And that was just an, you know, an, I don't like to use this word, but that was intense. You know? I mean, that was something that was, I've been to a bunches of concerts and that was, you know, everyone just collectively this was, I think the 50th anniversary of her horses album and that's what they played. Mark: Oh, Eric: Right. And everyone knew all the words of course, and everyone was simply. Well, like in this unison and that's already you know, Patty Smith's already like, what space is she in with with these kinds of cultural things? You know? So I, I think there's a lot of opportunities for those kinds of collective mu I mean, music is one, art is one political, you know, political gatherings are be they protests or just activist gatherings.  Mark: Dancing thing. Eric: Dancing. Yeah. All those kinds of activities really happen in, in cities. So I wouldn't go with the no, I mean, yeah, like, I mean, Joh was right. You can be solitary in the city if you want to. I mean, it's probably more solitary there than anywhere else. Right. Because it's certainly in New York because you know, if you're not engaged, like nobody's gonna talk to you. Mark: Yeah. Eric: Right. I mean, they're gonna leave you alone. And but I, I do think that there is an enormous amount of col I mean, that's the point of a city it's collective activity. Right. You know, I lived on a farm. I know what I know what rural isolation is. Like I, you know, I don't wanna do that ever, ever again, so yeah, I dunno if that answers that, but there you go. Mark: You know, it occurs to me when you talk about that. When I was, when I was in late high school and, and into my first couple of years of college, I was really into punk rock. And of course I was living, you know, very close to San Francisco and there was a huge punk rock scene there at the Maha gardens and some other places. And so I saw a ton of shows and one of the things that always struck me was these bands never come 60 miles north to where I live. They, they don't leave an urban environment. Right. Because punk lives in the cities and and many of those concerts were truly ecstatic experiences. Eric: Right. Mark: I, I mean, the mosh pit was just this glorious experience of mutual trust, where we knew we weren't going to hurt one another, but we were going to fling one another around. My partner NAEA tells a story about being in a pit in Philadelphia where somebody lost a contact lens and the entire pit sort of went who to make a space so that they could find their contact lens. And they actually did find their contact lens. So, you know, it very, I mean, there's a, there's a very abrasive kind of quality to the punk aesthetic, but really people who cared about one another and, you know, were, were part of something. And that was very much an urban experience. Yucca: Hmm. Eric: Right, right. I mean, I think you, can you get that kind of you get those kinds of energies and a lot of that so far is kind of aesthetic, right? Music, art, dancing, things like architecture, you know? And, and it'll be interesting to see, you know, people translating that more. You know, that's why, I mean, I think for instance, sort of the pagan music is really interesting and the ways that that can go. And different kinds of artistic expressions. And one of the things we didn't really talk about, which I think of as kind of pagan is sort of the, the visionary community, right? The transformational festivals and, and, you know, visionary art and that stuff, which to, to my mind, is in entirely a pagan culture, a pagan subculture. And that's, that's there too. Right? A lot of that is in urban areas. Also in New York city, there was an San Francisco too, I believe, but they're a big, you know, I think of stoicism as, as a pagan movement, contemporary stoicism, and there's an enormous enormously rich stoic groups in in New York. San Francisco comes to mind and a few, there are a few other cities that have, but yeah, San Francisco certainly has all this transformative tech stuff.  Mark: And the, the whole burning man phenomenon, which is really interesting when you think about it. Because a lot of the people who go to burning, man, don't come from urban centers, but they have to build a city Eric: right. Mark: in order to have. The kind of crucible of creativity that they want. And burning man is a very pagan experience in, in at least the one time I was there. It definitely was not necessarily in a worshipful kind of way, but in a, in a cultural way, the, the kind of mutuality and celebration and expressiveness and creativity that you have in those kinds of environments are they remind me of the pagan community. And of course there's a lot of people there who are pagans. Eric: Oh yeah. Yucca: A lot of rituals. Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Eric: Yeah, that's gotta be like a paradigm case of how to do religion differently than it was done before. Right. And yeah, I mean, I teach a lot about burning man and you know, I always say to my students, I'm like, well, what do you think a new religion would look like? It's not gonna look like the old ones, you know? And you find, I mean, there's a lot of that around, I mean, that's, that's obviously closely connected with San Francisco, but there is a lot of that around not just burning man, but there's a, there's lots of places around New York city that are filled with that kind of stuff. I mean, yeah. I'm thinking in particular of like Alex Gray's chapel of sacred mirrors, Mark: mm-hmm Eric: which, which used to be in Manhattan, Joh, did you ever see that? Joh: No, I didn't. Unfortunately. Eric: It used to be in Manhattan. And now it's moved up the river into the Hudson valley and COVID kind of shut it down, but that guy used to have like weekly I'll just say raves at his place. Right. Wa in Weiner's falls check an hour north of the city. So, so that stuff is all around. Right. And it will be interesting to see if it gets more, you know, as things go on, if it gets, I mean, maybe it will just remain at a kind of level where it's people doing aesthetic things. Right. And they'll come together in these kind of groups and maybe it'll get more organized. I don't know. Mark: Hmm. Eric: Yeah, go to go to, Wappinger go to the chapel. I can't wait till the chapel sacred mirrors opens up again. I went with my, my friend, my friend of mine, Pete, and there was something about, I don't know what, you know, iowaska or something. And Pete looked at me and said, I didn't think this guy would be into drugs if you know, Alex Mark: Alex Gray. Really? Eric: yeah. It's like, Mark: the man who envisions gigantic halos of color all around the human form. Eric: you know, like 47 eyeballs, you know, like yeah, right. A little irony. But you know, that's, that's you know, it's all around and you know, maybe people don't conceive of it as pagan in a unified way, but maybe they should. Right. So we'll, we'll see where that goes. Mark: And I think, you know, the other part of it is that people are looking for rituals for, for shared communal experiences. Some of which we've just been talking about, but even people that are doing rituals in a more formally pagan kind of way, they have a much easier time finding others of like mind in a city than they do in an area like mine. For example, even though I'm close to San Francisco and there's a pretty large population of pagans here there's exactly one atheopagan other than me living in my county to my knowledge. Oh, that's not true four, there, there there's four of us, including me. And that's a, you know, there's half a million people living in my county, so yeah. Cities become this focus of such energy and, and collaboration. Eric: Yeah, I think they might. I mean, I, I, you know, there's probably like, you know, 7 million atheopagan in, in New York city. They just don't call themselves that. Mark: Huh? Eric: Right. And I think that's an inter I don't know if that's quite true, but it's, I think an interesting point, right? That you have people that are maybe nominally secular, but yet they do all these kinds of things. Right. And they don't I mean, I make contact with this through my students. Right. Who don't identify as, you know, pagan or atheists, but yet they're doing all sorts of they, you know, if you ask them, do they believe in God? No, but they don't identify as atheists. It's just, they just, they just don't do that stuff, but then they do all kinds of other things. Right. And you know, they, they do all sorts of, I mean, witchcraft was a kind of popular thing. I don't know if it still is, but they do things right. And they have all sorts of little rituals. Some of which are, are, come from family, traditions, others, you know, they do strange things with crystals, with their cell phones. Right. Those kinds of things could easily become more you know, a little deeper and a little more widespread where people start to think organically like, oh, what? And sometimes they might just not say, no, I'm not doing anything religious because they think of religion as Christianity and maybe they're right. And maybe that's right. And so I do find it an interesting point. That you say like, yeah, there might be a lot of atheopagan around you. They just don't call themselves that, Mark: right. Eric: you know, and they don't, you know, I mean, I know Masimo is a big leader of the stoic community and we just have this debate about whether or not he was a pagan. He'd be like, no, cuz that's like star Hawk. And I was like, no, dude, you're reviving, you're reviving an ancient pagan way of life, which is, oh, by the way, your own family history by your own admission, you know? And he's kind of like, like, guess that's true, you know? But he wouldn't call himself a pagan. Right. But he's doing the thing. So I, I do. And all those people out in San Francisco who do like the transformative text stuff and. A lot of the kind of consciousness hacking and things that goes into like some Americanized forms of Buddhism and things like that. That's, you know, there just might not be a single word for it yet. Mark: Sure sure. And all the, all the tech millionaires going to south America for iowaska ceremonies, you know, I mean, these, these are not the, the men who founded IBM in the 1950s and all wore an identical blue suit with a white shirt and tie. You know, this is, this is a very, very different culture that we've got now. Eric: Yeah. I think so. Was there, Joh, were you gonna say it, that it looked like you were gonna say a thing. Joh: The thing you were the thing you said about, you know, there, there might be 7 million Athens here, but they don't call it that. I just keep thinking about that because there's so many parts about like the set of values and the just human universal human needs, or like seeking for community for for ritual. The I've, I've seen acts of service, like in the past couple of years, like just becoming more community based here, like mutual aid, community fridges things like that. And, and what you were describing, like not, not your IBM founder, you know, people kind of looking for more right. Trying to. To look for more meaning it's all these little pieces kind of just existing at the same time, but not being named in any way. Eric: Yeah, or people aren't quite sure. That's why I think that, you know, building a cultural infrastructure, you know, some way to fit things together that says, oh, you guys are all have a lot in common. Right. I don't Joh, maybe, you know, maybe you're tapped into the secret networks. I mean, I don't know, like allegedly there's a zillion you know, iowaska rituals, like all the time in New York or there were before the pandemic. I don't know what the Panda, I mean, the pandemic transformed so much. There are big psychedelic conferences in New York, right? The the horizons which I've gone to. And but I, I don't know if this stuff is all, is all, you know, secret or, or not. Mark: Well, it seems as though we're at a time where culture and particularly the monopoly of Christianity has really shattered. And of course it's rebelling right now and trying to lock down everything it possibly can, as it loses its grip on the population. But there are all these fragments of things that are kind of floating around. It's like the accretion disc around a star, you know, Those things are going to, to glom onto one another and get bigger and bigger. And some of them will just spin off into space and be their own thing or dissolve. But I feel like nontheistic paganism is a kind of an organizing principle that a lot of these things can fit under because it provides meaning it provides pleasurable activities that people find joyful, provides opportunities for people to be expressive and to create family in whatever form that is meaningful and helpful to them. So it's, it's kind of an exciting time and I, I agree with you, Eric. We're not gonna see the outcome in our lifetimes. I don't think, but this, I think we're at a really pivotal time in this moment. And so working to be a culture creator is a really exciting thing. Eric: Yeah, I think that's true. And I, I mean, sure. I mean, I think that you know, and I don't know what to make of this as a, you know, an American who's growing older, but yeah, the, the sort of angry Christian nationalists trying to lock down what they can. And I don't know what it's like to live in, you know, Tennessee or Georgia or Indiana. I lived in the Northeast and, you know, Pennsylvania's an interesting case too, but I mean, you know, New York and north and east, it's like, Christianity's gone. Mark: Yeah. Eric: It's like, it's not here anymore. And I don't know if California or the west coast is that way. Certainly you have pockets here and there, but what a strange, yeah, that's just strange, Mark: After 2000 years of complete hegemony, right? Eric: Well, right. And you know, how are people living their lives around that? I mean, one of the things I like to do is catalog the existence of stone circles in the United States, you know? And like they're all over the place. I just found one like three miles from where I am now, Mark: Wow. Eric: know? I mean, and so what are people doing? Like what, Mark: It's a lot of work to build a stone circle. They must be doing something. Yucca: Is this is this in a park. Eric: No, this is on private land, up in the Hudson valley, you know, and I, and I just, just learned about it and you know, so I, I, I think we're all gonna, my prediction is we're everybody's gonna smoke weed and look at birds that's gonna be the, that's gonna be the thing, you know, bird. Now he's a bird, you know, now that now that weed is legal, but yeah. Where's this gonna go, Joh? You're young. It's up to you. Mark: Yucca is young Eric: Yucca is young too. That's right. You guys are young. Not, not is old, old foggy like us. Mark: Yeah. Eric: So what are you gonna do? I telescopes you got it all there. Yucca: Oh, yeah, I'm a science teacher. that's this is my classroom back here. Yeah. Eric: Oh, all right. Mark: Well, this has been an incredible conversation and I know we could go on for hours. But I think it's probably a good point for us to kind of draw down for this episode. And I would imagine we're gonna get a lot of really positive response from this episode. And we may ask to have you back to talk more about these things, cuz it's, it's really been just wonderful and super interesting talking with both of you. Yucca: Thank you for joining us so much to think about. Eric: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having Joh: Yeah, thank you so much. Us on, this was super fun to, to reflect on and think about, and talk about in this group. So thank you. Mark: You're very welcome. And of course we welcome feedback and questions from our listeners. The email address is the wonder podcast, QS, gmail.com. That's the wonder podcast, QS, gmail.com. So we hope to hear from you have a great week, everybody, and we'll be back next week.  

On this installment of The PAPER STREET Podcast, Becky and Shawn chat with veteran Director of Photography Eric Oh about his background, career, and all things cinematography: what it is, what it isn't, and why it's more than just knowing the technical aspects. Some folks may have heard of The Five C's of Cinematography (Camera angles, Continuity, Cutting, Close-ups, and Composition), but Eric suggests a few additional C's that are equally important to a DP's success: Collaboration, Compassion, and Communication. The hosts also talk with their globe-trotting guest about filming around the world, shooting during the pandemic, and some of his upcoming features, including recent Fantasia Festival selections THE FIGHT MACHINE and THE BREACH, as well as Paper Street Pictures' horror-comedy SORRY ABOUT THE DEMON. Plus, a fun round of 'Rapid Fire 15' with Eric, Becky's Deep Cut Slasher of the Week, THE SOUND OF MUSIC, the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, the tastes of Toronto, and more! For show notes and more on this and previous episodes, please visit paperstreetpdcast.com.

00:00.00 Max Shank Welcome back folks to Monday mornings with max and mike hope you are kicking your week off the right way I'm excited to have you here I'm excited to have my buddy mike here with me today. We're gonna talk about something which I think is a pretty cool thought experiment which. Will lead to your greater action. It's what would you do with a billion dollars and 1 of the things that's useful about this is that it gets you to think about mission instead of business it lets you think a little bit bigger and then. Ideally, what you'll do is once you have a clear set up for how you're going to use that billion. You redo the thought experiment on a new sheet of paper with what would you do with 1 million. What would you do with 1 hundred thousand. And you work your way down into what the core importance overall is and then what the core important thing for you to work on right now is so thank you for joining me mike what's up. 01:07.55 mikebledsoe Yo? Yeah, ah this is a fun is a fun thought experiment. It reminds me of a similar thought experiments I've done in the past and usually it's at a conference where there's some speaker on stage that's trying to inspire you to to. Higher action and it works um another couple other questions I've heard is it that are in the same vein but are different so we're gonna run with this but a couple I'll throw out there is what would you do? if you couldn't fail and then what. 01:41.22 Max Shank The. 01:45.39 mikebledsoe On the flip side of that. What would you do? if you were going to fail no matter what? So if you were going to fail no matter what? what would? what would you do? and so I think a combination of these questions really can fill in a lot of gaps around. 01:50.66 Max Shank Well. 02:03.70 mikebledsoe You know what you stand for and what you're excited about and I especially like the 1 you know what would you do? if you were to a billion dollar question is really fun because I think as kids we we all thought about you know what? if I won the lottery. What would you do with the lottery winnings you know I remember doing that as a kid. 02:18.22 Max Shank Right. 02:21.99 mikebledsoe And ah, but the if you're going to fail no matter what is like well now you really have to go after what? what? you just truly enjoy So Not as dark of a. It's not.. It's much darker than the billion-dollar question. 02:40.72 Max Shank I Mean what would you do? if you couldn't fail I mean I suppose I would appoint myself God King of the earth and then ah everything else would just boil down from that pretty naturally. 02:55.13 mikebledsoe It's it's kind of like the you know if you had 3 wishes first wishes and limited wishes. Ah problem solved. Ah yeah, so what would you do with a billion dollars max. 03:00.94 Max Shank Right? That is kind of like a top out. 03:08.40 Max Shank Well, ah you know of course you have to set aside some of that for filling your yacht with the venezuelan gymnastics team. But then there's still plenty of money left over to. Ah. To invest into Steady. So this is where the practical mind comes in right? Is you you put you got to put some of it away and you figure out what percentage you're comfortable with ah in my case I would say you got to I would probably take 1 hundred million of that. So ten percent and I would invest it into. Um you know power companies food water maybe some sort of technology as well and probably I would have that managed by someone else. So I would have like that investment professionally managed and then beyond that the question really gets me thinking about what I can give to the world and usually what you think you would like to give to the world stems from what you think is wrong. The world and so the things that come to mind are sustainable communities and also schooling because if anyone has listened to any of our shows so far I think it's pretty clear which side my bread is buttered on. When it comes to schooling especially public schooling especially K through 12 or specifically K through 12 because I think it is such a colossal failure and such a waste of 12 years of your life. So I start thinking about how I could. Implement a different system of schooling that would be based on using simple language and learning about values and creating value and I would really have to rebuild it from the ground up so that kind of goes. The reason I don't do that now is it's a tremendous amount of work that requires a huge amount of capital. But I think as a kid you probably need to do more playing you need to do more wrestling you need to do more basic movement and gymnastics I hand coordination. I'll tell you what you would not be sitting in a desk for long periods of time. No chance you would learn history only within the context of why history is important. You know I think that history is done so badly because it's just a bunch of. 05:59.89 Max Shank Random facts to remember with no reason why we're remembering them because history horrifically bad right? It's not practical. You know, ah a pie Chart fractions percentages. Ah you know eat That's like ah. 06:03.44 mikebledsoe Well mathematics is taught the same way. Yeah. 06:19.32 Max Shank Even with how you would invest. You know? what's the yield on what you put in versus what you get out and that should be applied to how you use your time how you use your money all of these different resources. Um, how to interact with other people. The difference between. Voluntary action and coercion. These are things that are like really really important and of course the purpose of turning a child into an adult or the difference is that an adult can take care of themselves and a child is dependent. Essentially so. 06:51.80 mikebledsoe I Like to say it as it. Ah, you're not an adult until you can parent yourself and that's that's who's parenting you. 06:57.30 Max Shank Ah, well then I guess I'm not really an adult. Ah anyone ah I'll take anybody. Ah no, 1 ne's been able to do it yet. Um. 07:12.90 mikebledsoe Well the the education thing is interesting because the there's 3 categories in all of ah, the capitalist world that are the most that people spend the most money on as Health wealth and relationships And. Ah, So if you're for instance. Ah a coach. There are coaches for those categories and and the reason is is because well the fastest way to learn anything in my opinion is to hire a coach to teach you and the a good Coach. Ah. And the reason these categories are so popular if you're if you're a health a wealth or relationships Coach. You can charge premium dollar and the reason is is because no 1 was taught that shit in school and if they had that edge. Yeah. 08:02.30 Max Shank And those are the only important categories like what else is really important. 08:08.64 mikebledsoe Everything that you learn in school should be in should ah be ah the context should be set by Health welfare relationships I don't think there's much else in that context is missing. 08:18.81 Max Shank It should be yet. It should be clear what the value is of what you're learning like we're learning this because blank blank blank in your life is going to improve your life in this specific way. So just to. Wrap up what I was saying about history is history is the story about how humans clump together pretty much how they group together and then they divide apart so with regard to history like most of it is a waste of time. The specific examples should be given. To reinforce principles and I think principle based learning is what's actually important because then you'll have a framework for where to put all of these examples the difference between anarchy and totalitarianism and the pros and cons of both of those things. So it would really I would want to prepare more for this conversation to specifically lay out how I would change schooling but that would be how I think I could make the biggest. Improvement because I think that the only the only like true war or the only true battle is within the hearts and minds of people. You know everything else is a result. Of that lost battle. The fact that a person can't sit quietly for ten minutes means they're going to be easily um, distracted by something else. The fact that a person can't think critically is the reason they're going to get easily swindled and the more you look to an authority. To compensate for the fact that the individuals are let's say stupid or gullible or whatever instead of buy or beware and a fool in his money are soon parted now. You have this gargantuan bureaucracy who. Only will grow in size and that's where that's where like all of the evil stuff actually happens. It's not jeffrey dahmer it's the stalins and the mao's and the things like that like no no serial killer even though it sounds like viscerally bad has. Even come close to the damage that authoritarian governments have done to people. 10:52.90 mikebledsoe Yeah, they're responsible for the murder of the the most amount of people homicide outside of War is minuscule. 10:57.76 Max Shank Um, and not just murder not just murder like huge amounts of suffering like a lot of people survived, but it was horrific suffering. 11:07.33 mikebledsoe Right? right? Yeah things that people should learn. You would you would improve the education system come. 11:11.78 Max Shank So that's what I would do to 1000 million hundred I would create a new 1 I wouldn't try to repair the old 1 I I don't think there's a chance to repair the old 1 There's so much. 11:22.11 mikebledsoe That's ah, that's a good idea Buckminster fuller would agree with you. 11:29.63 Max Shank Ah, special interests at play and so many Palms being greased through Nepotism I don't think Prussian you told me this. 11:35.42 mikebledsoe Well you know school was I think the the the modern school was ah russian. Yeah yeah, and yeah, the the yeah the King at the time was. 11:45.48 Max Shank Convince the troops to go to war. 11:51.15 mikebledsoe Was trying to figure out how do we get these peasants to fight for us because every time we try to recruit them to fight for us. They kind of just run away. They don't really care. Um, and yeah, if you can indoctrinate somebody from as early as the age of five I mean I know I know parents that put their kids in school 3 or 4 years old 12:08.74 Max Shank Her. 12:10.29 mikebledsoe Just the you know I'm ah I'm a patriotic guy I love I love american values and principles I believe that the you know the the founding documents and philosophy that the United states was founded on are extremely sound I don't think we're really. Anywhere near what was intended. Um, but when I look at schools and I see people you know pledge allegiance to the flag. You know it's very very interesting because you can go all over the world and find them doing that in every school to their flag and. If you do that every day you're programming the mind to be in agreement with whatever the government says so it doesn't I think I think the education system you know, ah people always say that. Ah you know the the. Children are the future and we need to invest in them. Ah, but I don't think really people people don't actually understand what that means they usually just think that they need to throw more money at the situation but the reality is is yeah something completely new needs to be built because yeah, there's a. It's a system of memorization and regurgitation versus the actual understanding of of principles and the beautiful thing about principles. Yeah yeah, well how would you incentivize better learning. 13:29.31 Max Shank Well the incentives are in the wrong place. 13:38.32 Max Shank Um, there has to be some correlation with the performance of the students to be able to take care of themselves after the fact. So if you focus on those important skills and then you demonstrate like let's say you know. 13:48.99 mikebledsoe So but. 13:57.48 Max Shank Ninety percent of our graduates are self-sufficient by age 18 ah, that's that's really something because there are a lot of ways to make a dollar I don't understand why it's set up so you you just enter the workforce at eighteen rather than. Like you could become an electrician in like six months if that's how you want to go about it and right now there's such a bougie ah disdain for crafts and trades not everybody has to be like a ah. Professor of some kind you know what I mean so I think the the idea should be helping kids become valuable teach them about it's it's really value and values and so that would probably be the best way is if. There was some sort of and incentive structure based on the ability of the students to be able to be self-sufficient and something like that I'm just riffing here. But um, you need you need incentives. In the place of those who are responsible for the actions. 15:13.83 mikebledsoe Beautiful. That's how you do with a billion dollars. 15:19.30 Max Shank Um, yeah, ah a yacht with the venezuelan gymnastics team ten percent professionally managed put in safe investments and then the rest of it to develop ah sustainable communities and better schooling and that could all kind of. Work together. But I think it so the reason I think that way is I think most adults are too far gone to like really change. Um, they're like a little bit too stuck in their existing beliefs and it's it's just a harder battle. You know, um. I think Dr. Seuss realized that he started out with political cartoons and then switched over to children's books he has a lot of funny political cartoons about world war 2 that are worth checking up if you haven't seen him. Ah yeah, oh yeah. 16:02.19 mikebledsoe Um. 16:09.39 mikebledsoe Interesting. There's there's a there's a company called tuttle twins that you can check them out on Instagram I invested in 1 of their movies at or it's a tv series. Ah yeah, yeah, ah they they teach. Ah. 16:17.39 Max Shank Very cool. Yeah. How cool. 16:29.21 mikebledsoe Kids the value of capitalism and how to thrive in this world and and and and ah educates them on the dangers of communism socialism and things like that. Ah, anyways, anyone should go listen. Go follow their Instagram account they put out really good stuff. Yeah, but I saw that and I go this is this is something I believe in I don't know if I'll get my money back them being capitalist I bet I will but the I find it really cool that they're there. Breaking these concepts down into picture books and cartoons and things like that that kids can can digest because I mean I'm fortunate enough that I was I was raised by a father who had he understood principles and so ah. 17:06.73 Max Shank Ah. 17:18.81 Max Shank H. 17:22.78 mikebledsoe Didn't matter the topic that came across my plate I understood what rights were and what rights were not and I was able to smell bullshit from pretty far away because of that. 17:33.75 Max Shank Yeah,, that's pretty cool I think there are so many lies told all the time and you need to understand that every interaction between 2 people is either going to be a win win a win lose or a lose lose. And when you have voluntary action. It's always a win-win. Otherwise the person doesn't make the choice like if you get to say no, That's essentially what freedom is dependent on the freedom to say no or yes. 17:59.63 mikebledsoe Right? but. 18:07.80 mikebledsoe Yeah, if everyone has that power then the world's a much better place but most people don't even know they have it. 18:13.42 Max Shank And and you get a lot more variety too. I mean think of all the wonderful different types of cuisine. There are think of all of the different types of exercise that you can do you can dance you can do Pellotis you can do Crossfit you can do Kettle belt I Mean. You have just a much wider range of choices and and you also have more um agency you know like the locus of control is something that's closely correlated with ah happiness and meaning and things like that and if you are. 18:36.40 mikebledsoe Yeah, yeah. 18:51.93 Max Shank In control over your resources which are both um, energetic time financial. Um, you'll feel a lot more empowered and you'll feel a lot less hopeless. So. 19:03.92 mikebledsoe Um, you know. 19:08.45 Max Shank Yeah, it's kind of like teaching someone anything you know if someone tries to learn a language as an adult. It's a little harder. It's possible. But if you learned it as a kid. It becomes a bigger part of you. Yeah. 19:18.73 mikebledsoe Absolutely less less deprogramming needing needed. You got to unlearn a lot of stuff start a religion. 19:24.75 Max Shank Maybe your religion would be better. Maybe your religion would be better. Maybe I'm like ah yeah, maybe school is not the right word for it. 19:34.50 mikebledsoe Ah, yeah, it's got to be a whole new. You know, just create a new word I Think that's the way to go? Yeah, new word for a new system. Yeah yeah. 19:38.72 Max Shank Yeah, and a new word. Not a school or religion. Okay I like that off to think about that a little bit anyway. So That's my my billion dollars is about safe investments a splash of hedonism and then the lion's share to. Writing what I believe are the wrongs which seem obviously wrong and pretty easily Solvable. You know, physically mentally spiritually things like that. So anyway, what about you? mike. 20:04.00 mikebledsoe Yeah. 20:11.54 mikebledsoe Oh mean I we're aligned quite a bit but um you and I are aligned on a lot of things. My approach would be a little bit different and ah so I would take ninety percent and put into to save investment so 900 million dollars. 20:15.66 Max Shank You and I think. 20:30.63 mikebledsoe And a safe investment something that would guarantee at least a ten percent return 20:31.29 Max Shank Um, you greedy bastard are. 20:37.47 mikebledsoe Ah, well I've got a good explanation. Why so. 20:43.10 Max Shank Ah, explain to the folks at home. Why you're such a greedy bastard. 20:48.94 mikebledsoe Ah, well because if I invest ninety percent with a guaranteed ten percent or greater return. That means that I'll have a Hundred million dollars deposited to me each year is is what's possible. So ah and I doubt I would need. 21:00.70 Max Shank To the. 21:05.45 mikebledsoe All hundred million dollars every year so some of that would compound and so um I would well the thing is is I think I would have a hard time even knowing what to do with 100 million dollars. So billion dollars seems a little outrageous ah but i. 21:22.16 Max Shank That's the whole point. That's the whole point is it's supposed to be. You can't just be like I would invest nine hundred and ninety million and I would spend 10 million on a ranch where I teach kids how to raise cattle. 21:26.46 mikebledsoe Me. 21:31.96 mikebledsoe No, no, no, but this there's there's a strategy here. So the strategy is I may I may dip into that money. But here's the thing is 1 thing I've learned in business is if you can't manage a business that's doing a hundred thousand dollars a year well 21:38.46 Max Shank Um, like. 21:49.44 mikebledsoe You're not going to manage a business that's doing a million dollars a year will and it's better to make the mistakes and learn things with a small amount of money and and have all the it's a less expensive expensive lesson if you do it that way. So I would want to do a lot of innovative things. And so tying the money up and something ninety percent of the money and up in something that's going to guarantee me a Hundred million dollars. A year is very very attractive because with 100 million dollars I could do a lot of things 1 of the things that I would would do that 1 hundred million dollars with the if I if I achieve. Massive success and having more money helps us move faster I'll start sweeping that money that's invested and is something that is so I have more direct control over. But yeah billion dollars in my account I would I wouldn't do anything but I would I would start. Interviewing the the best financial consultants and and create some type of accountability with those things because people get shady sometimes um and have it invested safely but take the other 1 hundred million would buy a home I'd get like fancy. Fucking penthouse here in austin texas just overlooking the City. So I'd be 1 um, and then I would get a ranch outside of town about forty five minutes away then I would get a home in the mountains maybe flagstaff arizona get a home in the mountains. And then get a beach house in in Florida and probably some type of property down mexico probably somewhere like wahaca or something like that. So ah I would get I would have my four new homes and then and some some rovers at each 1 and pools and indoor pools and all that stuff we just go into I mean I get I could talk for hours about what I would put in my home but we'll leave that alone and. 23:56.31 Max Shank Full of all the adult toys. You could possibly want. 24:00.63 mikebledsoe Yeah, that So that's my that's my hedonistic desire is is multiple homes different locations being able to fly private to from 1 place to another seems like the way to go. Ah. Yeah, just like basically like Swedish spas set up at every single 1 of them and and then I would I would invest in Community I would buy properties for the purpose of of putting ah people that I that I hold dear and in the same location. Ah, and ah be self-sustaining. 24:35.70 Max Shank So a concentration camp for friends and family. You group them all together. Ah. 24:40.84 mikebledsoe Yeah, whether they want to or not, they're coming. Yeah so I would I would do that and and for the purpose of um, what I'm really interested in is I as I look at the world is how do we decentralize. Food distribution. So 1 of the things that have become very apparent to me in the last couple years and and I've gotten on the phone and discussed this with you before max which is there's a there's a lack of high quality food distribution and so we have a. Ah system set up where due to subsidies. It makes it more difficult for someone who's doing good farming work to get their food to market and it makes it easier for shittier product to get to market and so it it makes some food. Ah, artificially. Inexpensive and cheap and it makes other food artificially expensive and so what I would really like to see is to empower people who want to get into sustainable farming and sustainable regenerative farming practices. Creating land for that giving them a place to do that I would love to invest in Blockchain technologies for the purpose of removing a lot of the administrative load that that comes with food distribution and yeah would I would. Like to create some type of crypto token that people could use to buy their food and and fund the farms and things like that. So I imagine to kickstart a project like that you really need. Farmers and some land and distribution channels set up first. So that's that's 1 of the things I would like to tackle when I look at when I look at the world I'm 1 hundred percent with you on the education front like when I have kids they're gonna be homeschooled and they're gonna be learning from a very principal. Perspective and always having context and they're gonna be my kids will probably be adults by the time they're 12 so ah, the that's the plan who knows until you have kids I don't think you can really tell. But. Education's important, but like you were noting trying to get adults to change behaviors via education extremely difficult. They're they're very entrenched in what they want and 1 way that I've seen to make both adults and children move but especially adults. 27:27.27 mikebledsoe Is just economics. There people are driven by this exterior environment of economics where things are incentivized and certain things aren't incentivized so I would really like to go to work on how to create an economic structure. That is that will Improve. People's ability to make good decisions. So Good decisions around food would become easier and more convenient because the the reason a lot of people choose what they choose is because simply convenience so that would be. 28:03.90 Max Shank Oh really I don't know if I agree with that I know that people choose based on convenience but I would argue that it's maybe even more convenient to buy in bulk and eat healthy. 28:06.33 mikebledsoe That would be that would be my main. You don't think people choose based on convenience. 28:22.54 Max Shank Than it is to eat crap at the drive-through. no no no no no I think both like I think um, if you if you put like 6 or 8 cups of rice in an instapot with some. 28:24.80 mikebledsoe Well I mean short term convenience. Not. 28:41.55 Max Shank Bulk chicken. It requires no effort but you have you know, maybe 10 meals available for the average person and requires no extra dishes or anything like that I think it's kind of a fallacy that eating healthy is more expensive. It's just that you have to learn the skill of cooking and back to the economics point I think that's where seeing the difference. Like cost per meal and cost per calorie.. There's actually a funny website I can't remember the name of it off the top my head but this ah this really? um, Clever nerd. Put together this whole website that was like cost per calorie cost per gram of protein and he took like all these different foods and put them in like a big old ah spreadsheet and it it was really illuminating to see how you could. Eat the cheapest and then there are different levels in terms of how much you want to spend so I I think food is ah crazy important because we need food and in fact, we are food so it's it's 6 what?? What's a more important lesson. 29:59.57 mikebledsoe Yeah, well I think the drive throughugh is more convenient I mean if you have to cook either the the energy cost of of cooking people don't have the foresight. 29:59.71 Max Shank Than that. 30:08.95 Max Shank But it will require you less time it will require you less time and less money like you just have to show the math to someone you buy an instapot at 60 bucks. 1 time you buy 25 pounds of rice you buy twenty pounds of chicken at a time and you throw it in the pot. And you slather it in spices and maybe cheese and it's delicious and it's much cheaper per meal and it's less time investment per meal but it does require? Yeah, but I mean it's still going to be a better result. It's just like a savings account. It's the same idea. 30:35.59 mikebledsoe Big guy playing ahead. 30:46.68 Max Shank As a savings account. Are you going to save the money. Are you going to spend the money on bullshit. 30:49.24 mikebledsoe Are you definitely going to get a better result and and I remember. 30:53.13 Max Shank But is all I Just want to be clear that it is cheaper timewise and it is cheaper moneywise to eat healthy if you buy in bulk than it is to do the allegedly cheap convenient thing. 31:07.33 mikebledsoe Yeah I was at a nutrition seminar once where 2 people left the ah the the venue at the same time 1 went to go get a fast food item another 1 popped in the grocery store the closest grocery store picked up strawberries almonds and. And some meat some deli meat because they were they were going for. You know the convenience and not having to cook and they show back up and ah the woman who was getting healthy food showed up just a couple minutes before you know it was a little bit faster and the price was the price was about the same. 31:40.46 Max Shank Ah. 31:46.00 mikebledsoe And because you so I bring that up because I mean you're not wrong, but the idea that I think the the thing that's expensive to people is that they have to think in order to to make their own food. Get their stuff so education has to be a component to that. 32:00.40 Max Shank Earth. 32:05.42 mikebledsoe Because if you do just get people healthy food at ah at a better price then you know they still don't know what to do with it I mean they put I remember I was studying in school I was taking like ah 1 of those health classes like Health For. Um, what they called like health administrators people who who try to impact the health of entire populations cities and stuff like that. There was an experiment done where they put a lot of really healthy produce into the poor part of town. They go Wow. All these all these. 32:32.46 Max Shank Yes. 32:43.86 mikebledsoe Poor people are in this food desert and you know when you go into the convenience store where they're doing their grocery shopping. There's no produce. There's nothing healthy, no hot healthy options available and they put a bunch of produce in there and it went rotten and. People just chose not to buy it and I think a large part of it has to do with a lot of people just don't know what to do with food. They don't know how to prepare it. They don't know um and the idea of having to learn how to do that or the fear of screwing it up. Is is really huge. 33:20.27 Max Shank Well and of course that's not 1 of the subjects that's taught in school and you know if you blame there's no end to the blaming. But if somebody has a problem ninety nine percent of the time. It's the parent or whatever authority figure taught them beforehand right? so. 33:36.60 mikebledsoe Yeah. 33:40.90 Max Shank If You don't have the understanding of food like look you can eat garbage food and as long as you don't eat too much. You won't be obese you might not be healthy, but you you can eat the worst possible. You could eat big Macs every day. And not be obese as long as you don't eat too many of them like there's there's a it's like I say all the time you know 99 percent of people's problems come from having bad security at their lips. The words that get out and the food that gets in. 34:00.87 mikebledsoe Yeah, what. 34:14.63 mikebledsoe I yeah, that's very true. It's very true. Yeah, so I think that yeah you say you bring up that good point. Lot of it's education is not necessarily not cheaper or less convenient. Um, and I think that some people are just Goingnna be That's just where they're gonna be they're they're never going to change. Yeah and and. 34:41.42 Max Shank And I don't think it's wrong to let them choose that be obese eat fritos and big macs all day like you you die in a blaze of glory like chris farley on cocaine with a couple of horse like there's no shame in that game. 34:56.78 mikebledsoe Yeah, yeah, so I think that. Ah yeah, I'm not here to save the world but I do think that there's there could be ah I look at the landscape of what's happening in the food industry and I see you know. These really big corporations that make really port food and do a lot of gmo and they're they're robbing the soil of minerals and and they're doing a lot of mono cultural crops and it's just not good for the soil. Um and some people suspect. That you know we're just creating deserts here in the United states and a lot of deserts around the world. There's been um, stories of there was a huge agricultural boom that preceded it being a desert. So. 35:53.77 Max Shank Huh. 35:55.59 mikebledsoe Places in like egypt and where there was a massive amount of people a lot of monocultural farming going on so I don't know here's the thing is we don't know if that's actually true or not but it's ah it's a compelling story. And I can tell the difference when I eat food in other countries versus the Us. So I really? Ah what I see is we're going into a dangerous zone of having too much monocultural farming happening too many pesticides being used all these things. 36:18.82 Max Shank E. 36:33.71 mikebledsoe That are harmful to the the soil and the environment at large which we live in that environment so we're going to poison ourselves. So I think that systematically creating 1 being decentralized is important because you want. 36:38.46 Max Shank Ah, right. 36:52.42 mikebledsoe You don't want a single point of failure with your food system and decentralization will allow people to have more to be more empowered to make the food choices that are good for them instead of being given the limited food choices that are delivered to them I think it also put people more in touch with their food. Um. People people who who tend to shop local when it comes to food and other other items too tend to be more they care more about the product that they're getting and so I think that there's a really cool incentive there in and making it decentralized and local. Ah, and I would really like to proliferate the regenerative farming movement as a whole to offset some of the the bullshit that that I see as bullshit going on and I think also a lot of young people want to get into. 37:38.23 Max Shank The. 37:49.73 mikebledsoe They they feel the same way they want to get into regenerative farming and want to be closer to nature and things like that. But they don't have the money to buy the real estate and the way that the economic system set up right now is about to get very difficult to come by real estate because the big boys are. Buying it up as the interest rates will be going up next year 38:10.79 Max Shank Oh we'll see how that goes. Yeah I got a friend in Montana actually who's working on some of that regenerative farming including like a little power plant. That's the centerpiece. It's like a biological power plant centerpiece. 38:22.40 mikebledsoe I Know a guy is doing it wyoming I don't know no Evan. Ah yeah. 38:28.42 Max Shank His name Eric Oh well, we should link him up then ah yeah I agree with you I mean look I think ah farm subsidies are bad just like ah most things with good intentions. Ah, end up being destructive I think having lots of options is always better. Um, some of the best meat some of the best produce we get now is from Walmart so just being attached to a big corporation. Doesn't mean the quality has to go down In fact,, um, yeah. You know, certified organic Grass-fed Beef grass-fed bison at Walmart That's organic I mean that's um, pretty cool I think um I think food is such a big part about the health of these society So I'm definitely with you on that and it does. Come back to education I Like the idea of like I I guess crowdsourcing or crowd investing ah with with the sustainable agriculture would be a really cool idea. I Could totally get behind something like that. 39:43.48 mikebledsoe Yeah, 1 of the things I've been looking at closely are Das daos decentralized autonomous organizations and um, when I first learned about ethereum the cryptocurrency and I started understanding what smart. Smart contracts were I started imagining what may be possible that now that that I didn't there's no way that I with my knowledge base I and going to go in there and be able to create something off the backbone of Ethereum I'm not that level of engineer I'm not sure I'm any level of engineer. 40:18.19 Max Shank Um, doesn't seem like it. 40:22.38 mikebledsoe But the ah no I you know I'm an audio engineer I can engineer audio and that's about that's where that that ends I'm a relationships engineer like that. 40:32.11 Max Shank Um I can make noise is that the same thing audio Audio engineer. 40:40.73 mikebledsoe Ah, ah so ah like I can play with audio and postproduction that's about it that would be an audio engineer. So. 40:48.81 Max Shank But you could find an engineer to help you with that if you if you so desired. 40:52.80 mikebledsoe Totally but 1 of the things that's happened with these daos that have come out is there's a platform called aragon where you can start your own decentralized autonomous organization and then now what they have is like oh do you want it to be a membership. Oh. Do you want it to be. Ah, ah to build your reputation in the market. Are you doing fundraising so they've got about 6 different categories of really popular tas that you can start and then basically um, it works with Nfts so I'm sure. Everybody's heard about and nfts at this point and the a lot a lot of how these das work is you have to buy an nftt in order to say it to membership because that's what I've been looking into the most is how do you create a membership dao. And people would purchase. There would be a limited amount of tickets to be a part of the dawo and say I'm looking at starting 1 with 100 and fifty members. There'll never be another once these 1 hundred and fifty nftts are Meanted. There's no more. And nfts that will be created and if you want to be a part of this club or whatever it is you buy this nft. It might cost 25000 dollars but it's a lifetime membership if you ever want to sell it in the future you can sell it on the market and the idea is that you could purchase a membership to be a part of a club. 42:16.40 Max Shank P. 42:22.92 mikebledsoe And you can also and an investment You can also sell that later so you own a part of the ideas you own a part of the organization. You're not just you're not just purchasing membership. You're you're purchasing ownership in a way. So yeah. 42:35.87 Max Shank So it's kind of like a corporation selling shares a little bit. Yeah. 42:42.42 mikebledsoe Yeah, and so what it what it allows for is things that would if if done by a business by with with typical technology would be a really heavy administrative load there would to account for everything. So. 42:56.75 Max Shank Right. 43:00.88 mikebledsoe The the cool thing about the blockchain and smart contracts is you can create a lot of if then rules in the real world and and as these things are met things like accounting like the modern accounting like what we're using in like the conventional accounting and baking when you look at what's possible with blockchain seems very ridiculous. 43:05.74 Max Shank Ah. 43:19.79 mikebledsoe Like Wow this is really antiquated by Comparison. So when when I think about accounting and well when most people think about Accounting. It's like Okay, what's the what are the financials and that's usually what's being accounted for but true Accounting. Um, a more global accounting is are you accounting for everything. Are you accounting for things that may not necessarily be monetary in nature even though you know. 43:42.33 Max Shank Well like a farm for example, right? like the whole idea of let's say having 1 hundred and fifty shares of a farm and having a bunch of if then rules so conditional rules for if this then do this? um. 43:55.88 mikebledsoe Me. 44:01.70 Max Shank You know that it it probably does get pretty tricky like you have to be very clever to figure out how to run that organization. Um, autonomously and you probably can't account for everything which is funny like you can't account for all of the um potentials. Well and that's um. 44:09.39 mikebledsoe Yeah, and I Think. Now we can try. 44:21.37 Max Shank You know it kind of shows the evolution of computer science in the beginning there was if then and ah, it's very similar to the way that law has developed from the code of Hammurabi which was if you blind a man's eye then. 44:26.84 mikebledsoe And. 44:41.18 Max Shank Then your eye shall be blinded as well and I don't know hardly anything about computer programming. But I know that if you relied only on if then it's kind of like a caveman style programming where it's going to be so many conditional statements. Rather than the more elegant and sophisticated rules and algorithms and operations that they have available Now. So um. 45:07.81 mikebledsoe Yeah, Well yeah, and that's the 1 thing I see about the dao is like I'm I'm watching and I'm not hot to get in right now because I think that a lot of people 1 of the the really big mistakes that I'm seeing being made in the. Consciousness of a lot of people who are excited about this and taking action on it as they go decentralized autonomous Organization. We don't need hierarchy anymore. There's just gonna be. We're gonna be able to vote on everything and I'm going. Oh you guys are go for it and you know watch us watch this go? um. And I had ah I had a woman that was wanting to do ah a dow that was wanting to do community and all this I'm like cool I'm interested and then she was like all right and we don't need any hierarchy and I was like whoa Whoa Whoa Whoa. Ah, you're defying nature. 45:55.25 Max Shank Impossible. 46:01.22 mikebledsoe By by saying that we're not gonna have a hierarchy. You trust me, you don't want to define nature she will slap you like a bitch you got to ride what is right? So yeah, there's somebody needs. 46:13.11 Max Shank Someone needs to have the call someone needs to be able to make the call. 46:20.32 mikebledsoe There needs to be response and and um. 46:23.31 Max Shank Roles and responsibilities operating agreement. You know a lot of the things from more traditional. Yeah more a lot of these things from right? but a lot of these things from traditional organizations still ring true. Um. 46:25.73 mikebledsoe Well they think they can have a lot of that without without the hierarchy. 46:40.69 Max Shank For something that is as autonomous as possible like I think you might agree that a lot of the role of a leader or manager is to delegate and automate and. The more you automate the less you have to delegate but it still has to be somebody's Responsibility. You know, even when you're putting together a phone call script or something like that. It's going to be if this then this if this then this and the more you can automate that process. 46:57.84 mikebledsoe Most. 47:12.95 Max Shank The more you can multiply that process that you've created and that's why computer software ah has such a huge premium because the exponential val the exponential return is so high just the same as um. You know selling ah a program. You know it's it's no coincidence that it's called a fitness training program when I write 1 I think about I am literally um, uploading a program and you are installing it into your brain. And you are executing that file. And for example, if you execute the ultimate athleticism program you're going to get better at handstands deadlifts airborne lunges front levers that sort of thing if you execute the primal athleticism daily practice. You're going to get better at bouncing rolling. Um, carrying things crawling climbing these you know wider array of things. So it's no surprise that it's called a program because that's literally what you're doing is you're implanting a program and that's also why it's so Scalable. You know I can sell. Um, a million copies of simple shoulder solution and there's no extra administrative cost to doing that. It's still just a few percent for the the credit card fee essentially so that's why software so is so powerful and. 48:44.38 mikebledsoe Yeah. 48:50.69 Max Shank It can be code or it can be like a written program. You know even religion you can think of as a program. 48:54.55 mikebledsoe Now. 49:01.62 mikebledsoe You're gonna freak some people out. Ah so totally it is. 49:02.18 Max Shank I mean it. It is a program is it not I mean some of them are some of them are effective like I think mormonism is an effective program. It even has like a built in um generator which is the mission that they go on. I mean look mormonism is what like a hundred ish years old more less, not sure 200 can we get a fact check around this. Okay, so let's call it 2 hundred. Let's call it 1 hundred and 50 years right yeah please 49:27.30 mikebledsoe I'm not sure I think it's the late Eighteen hundreds. No I'm not yeah, there's a mormon listening please let us know. 49:41.19 Max Shank Yeah, we can't google right now. Ah that religion has more members than judaism and judaism is like 10 times longer. Okay, and it's because that that program is more geared toward. 49:52.68 mikebledsoe Yeah, like twenty or 30 times longer. Yeah yeah. 50:00.84 Max Shank Toward Growth. You know what? I'm saying So Um I think both of those religions are yeah are typically like pretty effective at making people wealthy so that program is effective from that standpoint it. I'm not saying it will necessarily make you the happiest because Mormons seem a lot happier than Jews but I Also don't think they're as funny and this is these are just my ah, ah blind observations right? Jews seem funnier Mormons seem happier. They both seem pretty Wealthy. So I just look At. Whether the program is constructive or destructive right? So Religion Fitness training program. Ah actual code or a dao or something like that. It's all it's all programming humans school. Programming humans and if you're able you said that an adult is able to parent themself. Maybe that's also a good analogy for the master slave if you are the administrator of yourself then you can program yourself as well and that's. Really high level. Um adaptability. 51:16.57 mikebledsoe Yeah, and you can't program yourself. You can program your own subconscious mind these are there's countless techniques for doing that I think it's the most effective way of making progress towards what you want is if you're not if you're not doing something. 51:24.12 Max Shank Tap. 51:32.65 mikebledsoe To program your subconscious mind. You're really missing out. Ah oh I brought I brought the dow up because I brought the dow because we're talking about what would we do with a billion dollars and the. 51:38.39 Max Shank Absolutely. 51:47.14 Max Shank Is that what we were talking about I forgot. 51:51.40 mikebledsoe Something like ah so so it got me if this takes me back to a conversation you and I were having a year ago or or more and how do we have a a community and and. Decentralized communities that can interact with each other so they're all, there's these sovereign little cities and they can interact with each other and do trade with specific cryptocurrencies and all that and what I what I'm seeing with the dao is the real possibility because before I was thinking. I would need a billion dollars or I would need a hundred million dollars in order to start this project but now with the these fundraising dows and and all what I'm seeing emerge I don't know if it's quite ready for what I want to do with it yet. What I'm seeing emerges. Maybe if you have a solid enough vision and you have a good enough program then you can get your investors and now you can make it you can make it happen so it's very exciting times a little bit different than a business. 52:55.76 Max Shank Oh yeah. 53:02.92 mikebledsoe Ah, typical business that gets investors I think that there's a lot of excitement around right? This is just like it's the future. It's how things will be managed in the future will primarily be through blockchain and so I think if you do something in blockchain people are more likely get on board. The other thing is. Ah, you're less likely to have ah, it's a lot easier to have visibility of what's going on and there's a lot less opportunities for Fuckery. So I think it it makes it for an easier thing for people to invest in because ah. Things are so transparent with a lot of the blockchain technologies so you can set things up where everything's just very visible. So I think that raising money for those types of ventures are a lot easier, especially when you look at some of the you know what's happened in the last couple decades with. 53:46.79 Max Shank Oh. 53:58.83 mikebledsoe You know enron and that guy who was it that did that ah Bernie madoff and he had that dude that the fire the fire festival guy. Ah, who actually did some time but all all those things had had it existed in. You know a dow instead. 53:59.91 Max Shank Bernie made off made off with all their money. 54:18.83 mikebledsoe Would not. It would probably just wouldn't have even happened because people would have been able to spot it and I think that there's gonna be a lot of people and people have done this with cryptocurrencies they they write a white paper and they launch it they get investors and then disappear. So I'm not saying that that there's no fraud. 54:35.71 Max Shank Oh yeah. 54:38.63 mikebledsoe There's no fraud in these things but over time what I see happening is the fraud will will become minimized because people will know what to look for and there's also the the ability to create transparency where it's necessary is also going to be there. 54:54.23 Max Shank Oh. 54:59.73 mikebledsoe So yep, crowd crowdsourcing that's the way to go. 55:03.87 Max Shank Yeah, if you have a good enough idea and a clear plan. Um I don't think it's difficult to get investors. Um. 55:12.30 mikebledsoe Yeah, all right? Well it sounds like it. We don't need a billion dollars for ideas. So we just need to create it now you get? yeah, get you start working on yours I'll start working on mine. 55:18.33 Max Shank Now you just need other people to have a billion. 55:32.61 Max Shank It's interesting. How a lot of it comes back to education a lot of it comes back to it doesn't necessarily need to happen in a school but a lot of it comes back to educating people. And a lot of similarities with food I think we both realized just how important food quality is not having a single point of failure having um you know that decentralized decentralize is a way better word than. Not having a single point of Failure. It's much more exciting right? now is decentralized. Ah. 56:10.30 mikebledsoe Um, but decentralized means a lot of different thing like it. It encapsulates that plus many other things yeah increase in choice. 56:14.95 Max Shank Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, um, so as far as how to execute this strategy for our listeners. Um, what's a good way to go about it. 56:37.28 mikebledsoe Ah, you know I think I think write write down what you would do with the billion dollars and I would also there you go. 56:44.99 Max Shank And then maybe write down what you do with a million after afterward I think that's the way to do It is start out with a billion so you're like in the blue sky version and then you snap back to a little bit closer to reality with the million unless there are any ah billionaires. Listening in which case ah get in touch with us. We have plenty of ideas for your money. 57:07.69 mikebledsoe My mike at the strongcoach dot com is my email. Yeah, yeah, and I think it's also worth you know do the I like doing the pie in the sky first billion dollar million dollar and then what would you do? if you were guaranteed to fail no matter what you did you were gonna fail. What would you do so. 57:31.44 Max Shank Ah, what I don't understand the question but I do like it I I don't even know how to if I was guaranteed to fail Fail Why would I do it at all I Would if if I knew I was going to fail. 57:38.67 mikebledsoe Yeah. 57:45.26 mikebledsoe Ah, well a lot of things you wouldn't do Well I think that gives insight into what you enjoy not necessarily what your purpose or mission is but what what you like is like all right if I was gonna fail I might as well just set myself up in baha on the beach and surf you know, like if I'm guaranteed to fail. 57:50.40 Max Shank I Would do nothing. 57:53.97 Max Shank Oh. 58:04.63 Max Shank So so what? what would I do if I'm guaranteed to fail is more like what it. What would I do if I could do like nothing ah professional is that is that what it is like how would I fuck off. 58:04.91 mikebledsoe Least I'll you know live life like that. 58:17.97 mikebledsoe Ah, yeah, yeah, that's where my mind goes when I hear that question. Well yeah, what would I do if I was guaranteed to fill. 58:26.67 Max Shank I've never heard that question before um, maybe it what it really is what would you do? if you could never work again. Does that sound like ah the spirit of the question. 58:33.75 mikebledsoe Um, yeah, doesn't sound as exciting. Yeah, same spirit but the other 1 seems a little more jarring. 58:43.33 Max Shank Well, the first 1 I would do nothing the first 1 I don't understand it makes no sense to me. What would I what would I do if I knew I would fail if I knew I would fail I would not do the thing like the only reason you would do something is if you thought it had a percentage chance of success and that's. 58:59.70 mikebledsoe That. 59:02.15 Max Shank That's human nature that's desire. That's hunger. That's that's hope that's the only reason anyone ever does anything is because they think that there is at least a chance that it will be better if they do that thing. So if you know you're going to fail. You would never do it to. Non -question as far as I'm concerned. However I'd be happy to replace it for it. I think everyone will agree with me on this 1 um I think I think what would you do? if you could never work again. 59:22.99 mikebledsoe Ah, it hit me up. Let me know let's see if everyone else receives it that way. 59:39.56 Max Shank Is a good way to identify how you like to spend your time though. Um, and and do it detached from the result as much as Possible. You know, maybe you would sing. Maybe you would do some woodworking. Maybe you would do. Ah you know you would just surf all day. Maybe you would play music something like that I think that's a really good. Um I Think that's a good way of looking at it is like what would you do? if you couldn't work and what would you do. If ah, you could only pick 1 career and do that those ah those extremes feel like a good way to sort of surround your your truth. You know what? I mean. 01:00:16.12 mikebledsoe Um, like that. 01:00:29.80 mikebledsoe Ah I don't have a truth. No. 01:00:30.94 Max Shank You don't have a truth I mean I think the truth is that we're the most adaptable creatures so you can change any time. It's just scary. It's just scary. That's that's the truth that I live by. 01:00:41.93 mikebledsoe Our graph. 01:00:48.71 Max Shank You know I see people do it when they're under huge amounts of strain they change dramatically and unless provoked that way they often don't people just ride the momentum and that kind of goes back to that programming thing because what we're doing is we're talking about programming ourselves for. Ambition essentially with this question and we're setting that ambitious intention and if you are able to program yourself every single day but you choose not to then you are relegated to. 01:01:09.69 mikebledsoe Yeah, yeah. 01:01:27.51 Max Shank The momentum of whatever the stories and stimuli that you've had and believed up to now. Yeah, anything you'd like to ah yeah, anything you'd like to add. 01:01:34.70 mikebledsoe Well said wrap this bad boy up. 01:01:47.28 mikebledsoe Ah I Love this exercise. What would you do with a billion dollars, get this dream. Big can be fun, especially if you're looking at the hedonistic aspects of what you can do with it. But when you get into the purpose and mission of Things. Ah. And like what max said going from a billion dollars to what we do with a million dollars and then looking at Wow is is this something that enough you know it being 20 coming into 2022 ah it being something that. You might be able to fundraise through a dao. Ah you know, maybe it's possible. So Hopefully this inspires you to do something that that ah excites you and and helps other people. All got how about you any final thoughts we good in. 01:02:40.90 Max Shank Cool. Um, program yourself or pick a good program I think the exercise will help you discover where your ah truest desires really are and yeah, that's about it. You can find me at maxshank dot com at Maxshank. Mike you work and they find you. 01:03:05.11 mikebledsoe Ah, mike underscore Bletzo on Instagram and the strongcoach dot com. Ah yeah, and you can jump in my program if you want if you want to program your business there. You go all right brother. Love you. 01:03:18.00 Max Shank There you go Awesome! Thanks brother. Love you Bye everybody. 01:03:24.39 mikebledsoe Enjoyed the talk.

Eric Johnson is the host of the Follow Friday Podcast. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Not all of us but most us are struggling with some form of social media addiction. I certainly am. And that's why today's advice is very refreshing and helpful. ERIC: Yeah. So my advice is to mute people aggressively. Specifically on Twitter but I think this applies to any sort of social media. And my reason for that is part of the way I think you have a good experience online is to curate who you follow to really seek out the best people and try to and just focus your time on the people who are most interesting to you who also represent a broad range of your interests who are not just one thing. But, a necessary compliment to that is that I think you should also be muting, un-friending, un-following...generally speaking policing what else gets into your feed and really trying to be vigilant about not letting too much in that's going to unnecessarily wind you up. There are good reasons to get angry. There are good reasons to get sad but there's a lot of crap on social media and the most effective way to maintain your sanity is to just, you know, mute people, block people, move on...not them drag you down into their swamp, you know? ZAK: Not them drag them down into their swamp. That's really good. Why are we diving into other people's swamps voluntarily? There's no reason to do that. There is the promise of social media that you can learn about divergent points-of-view and stuff and this isn't necessarily what you're talking about. What's the criteria for, if I'm gonna go onto Twitter today and mute the swamp people. What am I looking for? ERIC: Yeah, I think it is really important to distinguish between, I disagree with this and this should be muted. It's not a complete overlap. My main criterion is, is someone acting in bad faith? Are they saying something just to get a rise out of people? Are they saying something that I think they don't really mean? It's a gut call. I don't perfectly know for sure. If you spend enough time online, you can get a sense for when someone is earnestly trying to represent how they feel about something versus when someone is playing the game. Right? When they are playing the algorithm or when they're ramping the all caps or the exclamation points or the adjectives they use to really wind people up and get attention. ZAK: And now after having done this for several years now and ramped up over the last year, how do you describe the difference in your spirit now that you've done this? ERIC: Oh my gosh. It's so much better to really be taking control. I do think that there should be more more intentional proactive efforts made on the part of Twitter and Youtube and Facebook and other platforms to let everyone have a saner experience...to make it easier and more transparent of how to use these tools, how to mute people but as someone who has dove into the settings and taught myself how to us them I do feel so much happier when I go online. To your point earlier when you're talking about the difference between what you disagree with versus what you're muting...I don't think people should be getting all of their news, all their information from social media. I think that a healthy news diet comes from all sorts of places and not just online, not just any one website or social app but the reality is that we spend a lot of our time on these apps. This is how, especially during the pandemic, a lot of us have been doing our socializing is just hanging out on these apps and so I think, you know, the more control you can exert over it, it really does have a profound impact on your sanity, your happiness. At least that's what I've found. It really works for me.

Join hosts Brittani and Seth as they bring you news and discussion about all things theme parks, as well as their thoughts on the latest movies, television, and video games on The Attractions Podcast. This week on The Attractions Podcast, Brittani and Seth discuss the recently-announced cast of "Obi-Wan Kenobi" on Disney+, Sesame Street's Julia making her debut at SeaWorld Orlando for Autism Acceptance Month, the opening of Sesame Street Bay of Play at SeaWorld San Diego, the newly-opened Fantasyland Forest Theatre at Tokyo Disneyland, the opening of the new Universal Studios Store at Universal Orlando, the return of the Epcot International Food & Wine Festival, Universal Studios Hollywood's reopening date and new additions, plus an interview with theme park reporter Eric Oh! We welcome your suggestions and want you to be a part of the discussion. Please send your comments to info@attractionsmagazine.com with the subject line “The Attractions Podcast.” Statements or opinions herein are those of the hosts and advertisers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the producers, Dream Together Media LLC, or staff.

Ask and you shall receive! We did a survey of our audience a few months back, and the number one requested topic was influencer marketing. And for good reason! Influencer marketing has infiltrated every industry and has the ability to drive large ROI if done correctly. But many new or smaller brands are wondering if they can take part in this marketing channel. And the answer is yes! Eric Lam, is the co-founder of AspireIQ, and he is here to explain how the industry has become democratized and any brand can take part in it, as long as they go about it the right way.On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he gets into all of that and more, including why he bet big on the idea of influencers when it was still a radical idea used mostly by large companies with large celebrities. Today, Eric says that there are certain mistakes that many companies are making when it comes to working with influencers, and he details exactly how you should go about measuring the ROI from your influencer strategy. Plus, Eric explains why he thinks platforms like TikTok are undervalued and he predicts the future of how the world of influencer marketing will grow. Main Takeaways:The ROI of the Storm: Understanding the attribution funnel of influencer marketing is a key metric to determine the ROI of your efforts. But what if there are other aspects of the partnership that should be considered, that many brands are missing?Can I See Your Manager?: One of the biggest challenges of influencer marketing is managing the various influencers you work with and the logistics of tracking and shipping the products your influencers are promoting. Building a platform and communication structure that solves that problem is what sets influencer community management companies apart.Democracy Now: Part of what social media has done is democratize content creation. Previously, brands and those with money were in control of what content was created, when, and who could see it. Now, individuals have the same capabilities in the palms of their hands, which not only leads to better content, but opens the door to revenue streams and opportunities for regular people to become influencers.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:Welcome to the Up Next In Commerce Podcast, I'm your host, Stephanie Postles. Co-Founder at mission.org. Today, we're talking all things influencers, but the co-founder of AspireIQ, Eric Lam. Eric, nice to meet you.Eric:Great to meet you as well. Thanks for having me.Stephanie:Yeah, I'm excited to have you on so no pressure, but we did a survey of our audience, and the number one thing that everyone wanted to hear about was influencers. Early, like we got dozens of responses of [crosstalk 00:00:32].Eric:Love to hear it.Stephanie:Yeah. This is the perfect interview.Eric:Fantastic. Well, that's really helpful for me to hear, especially for my team work in sales.Stephanie:There you go. Tell me a little bit about what is AspireIQ.Eric:We're a platform for brands to build and engage communities of influential people from traditional social media influencers to top customers and brand fans to experts and more. We actually started back in 2013. Even though it's mainstream now, back then, influencer marketing was a pretty new concept. Frankly, the idea of businesses using Instagram back then in a meaningful way was pretty rare. Of course, now 93% of brands and kind of based on your survey, it sounds like that's increasing, are using influencer marketing as a core part of their digital and social media strategies, and we're lucky to be partnered with over 300 brands on the platform from some of the biggest names like Samsung to leading [inaudible] brands like Glossier and Purple Mattress.Stephanie:Amazing. Tell me a little bit, how is the platform design? If I'm a new customer, what would I experience when I enter a platform and what do I get out of it?Eric:Yeah. Even back in the day, I think pretty much from the beginning, some of the biggest problems we've tried to solve in influencer marketing have come down to three parts, finding the right influencers to work with in terms of creating content and promoting your brand, to managing the complex workflow between your brand and potentially hundreds of influencers in your community, to analyzing the impact of these influencer communities on your marketing goals. I think that where we've really made our bread and butter is that second one, the building workflow. That's because if any of your listeners have built influencer marketing programs, and actually in our early days, probably our first two years, we didn't have our own software, so we experienced this ourselves when we were running influencer campaigns for our clients.Eric:The real work that goes into this is all the communication and the cumbersome project management, the data organization, the contracts, the product shipping, the payments, and just keeping track of all this stuff in one place, especially if you're working with more than, say 10 influencers at a given time, like that's where the real work is. That's where we really focused on building a platform that can provide meaningful scale to clients building this in a sophisticated way. I think at this point, we've got a range of sophistication levels from fortune 500 companies who have seven different teams working across different countries with outside agencies and the corporate office, to some of the biggest DTC brands in the world who have kind of built their secret sauce in influencer marketing, and almost need to design this customized system within our platform for how to do influencer marketing. So, it's come a long way in terms of the sophistication level that a lot of our clients have had.Stephanie:That's awesome. Since 2013, what kind of shifts in the market have you seen? Because when I think about influencers, especially back in the day, it's like, if you don't have a Kardashian, you don't have an influencer. Now it seems like way more about like micro influencers who have a trusted audience and people actually buy what they want. What kind of things have you seen like shifts in the market?Eric:Yeah, it's evolved in a lot of different, really interesting ways. You're exactly right. I think in the early days, well, frankly in the really early days, when we first started, almost no one was doing influencer marketing, which was obviously tough for our business because we were trying to go to every brand and convince them to spend even like a hundred bucks on an influencer.Stephanie:They're like, no, thanks. Out of budget.Eric:Yeah. I think that was already like pulling teeth. I think, back then, I think the only brands doing this were probably these emerging ecommerce brands where ... they can't compete on traditional advertising, so Instagram had become this place where they discovered already consumers were coming there to learn about what to buy, what to do, where to go. That was true, even though back then Instagram wasn't this kind of commercialized or sponsor place the way it is today. But even in our early days, what kept us going is that we talked to so many ecommerce brands and consistently what we heard was the biggest channel that they were focusing on was social media and specifically influencer marketing.Eric:Then I think, yeah, after a few years, maybe like 2015 and 2016, the industry kind of evolve to what you were talking about, where everybody was trying to work with Kardashians. It was all about working with the biggest fashion bloggers, the biggest celebrities. The bigger, the better. And you're thinking about these vanity metrics, like how many followers someone has, or how many likes they have, regardless of if they saw meaningful returns on investment. Those were the early cowboy days of influencer marketing. I think because of a lot of the mainstream brands got involved there, you started to then see an evolution of how a lot of the DTC, a lot of ecommerce brands were starting to think about influencer marketing because they were kind of getting priced out of these big macro celebrities.Eric:So, they started honing in on more specialized micro influencers, like you mentioned, who, they might not have as big of a following, but they were a lot more targeted, a lot more focused in the concept of created, which meant they were a great fit for more personalized experiences, more authentic content in terms of the segments they were trying to reach among their customers. I think the second thing that was really interesting about the way this evolved is that these same ecommerce brands started using influencers for more than just trying to reach their audiences like in an advertising way, and they started looking at them as holistic content creators, because when you think about what an influencer is, they're kind of like this studio photographer model all wrapped into one person, whose literal job it is to make engaging content for this generation.Eric:These brands started re-purposing a lot of their content and using it in all their different channels, from paid advertising, to ecommerce website, to email marketing and more because content became this King of everything they wanted to do across digital. Today, I think that's kind of even more the case where you're looking at even more long tail influencers, and even people that aren't considered traditional social media influencers, but are really important to the brands and their strategies from marketing perspective. Brands might be building programs where they're combining influencers, but they're also combining those with top customers, power users, experts, working professionals who do customer referrals, whichever groups of people who have the greatest word of mouth impact on the customers and trying to win over, regardless of if they have a social media following or not. I think it's a really exciting phase of influencer marketing we're heading into, where it really includes, even democratize, where brands are kind of looking for these authentic voices, no matter where they come from.Stephanie:Yep. I love that. Yeah, I was just going to say, it feels like now there's so much more opportunity for anyone to have an influencer if you find the right person, whereas before, not so much. But if you're thinking about finding an influencer in your space or finding someone to partner with or using your platform to find some, what kind of metrics would you look at to make sure they're a good fit? What should a brand be looking for to be like, "ah, this is my perfect person?"Eric:Yeah. I think a lot of it comes down to what the goals of this influencer program is. But I think, at the end of the day, a lot of that comes down to subjective type of qualities. Obviously, you can see if they have a big following, you can see if they have really high engagement rates, but at the end of the day, you want to look at, what are people talking about in their comment section? What's the type of narrative they're kind of build with their audience? And does that really resonate with the type of nuanced audience segment that you're trying to build with your audiences? Because that tells you a lot about how they're going to co-create this narrative with you.Eric:That's really what we tell people when we give them advice is, you should really be building relationships with these influencers and treat them as a part of your community rather than looking at it as a transaction. I think that one of the biggest mistakes I see a lot is that, people will look at influencer marketing almost as like buying ad space, and it's really not like buying ad space because content creators are people.Stephanie:Yeah, these are people.Eric:Yeah, these are people who have these like nuanced feelings about the content they make, what they feel comfortable with, what's authentic to them. This is like their livelihood. Communicating with that level of empathy is really important, and if you can find people that really match your brand values and are going to be true advocates for you, that really translates into the authenticity, both from what they're saying, but also the kind of content they make because influencer marketing is pretty mature now and audiences can smell inauthenticity from a mile away. So, it matters a lot to find people that really believe in your brand.Stephanie:How do you go about making sure that a relationship is built on your platform and that someone's not just going through and being like, "Okay, bye. I want this." How do you develop or encourage a relationship to be built before they start working together?Eric:Yeah, I think a lot of times, frankly, sometimes it starts not necessarily with a kind of a official collaboration or with an official contract or anything like that. A lot of brands, what they do is they'll do what's called product seeding, and they'll send these gift bags out to influencers or micro influencers. A lot of people try out the products. If they like the products, they'll have them give feedback, they'll invite them to some events, they'll have them be part of some community activities before they really kind of like level them up into true ambassadors for the brand that have these more formalized contracts and agreements and payment structures and things like that. I think, obviously not all of that is necessary, but it kind of creates this much more organic experience, where ambassadors almost like come to you or are built with you, rather than just saying to every person, hey, we've got this $10,000 campaign and here you go, who wants the money? Kind of going based on much more of a transactional experience.Eric:That's one way to go. I think other ways to go are influencers who can come to you and are creating a more of an inbound experience. What we see a lot is brands setting up kind of these programs and looking for new ambassadors and new influencers to the program. A lot of times those might be smaller, but getting people to kind of sign up when they're small, when they have smaller followings is a great way to almost like build this farm system of up and coming influencers that are working with you in their early days so that when they become really big and famous. Obviously they've been kind of long-term supporters, long-term advocates of your brand for quite a while.Stephanie:Yep. That's great. Yeah, I think I've mentioned a few times in different episodes that I was ... I forget who I was listening to, where they're discussing influencers and how to pick them, but they said you should zero in on the comments and how their followers are actually engaging, because if they're engaging in one way where it's just like, oh, that's pretty, I like that shirt or something, that might not actually be an influential person you should work with versus someone who's saying, "Where can I buy that shirt right now?" If you see a lot of that in the comments, even if they're small, like they have people waiting to buy whatever they wear. I thought that was always a good reminder.Eric:Yeah, totally. I think that a lot of times, that that comes from some of these smaller influencers, because they're so focused on the type of content they make and their audiences really trust them with that messaging. I think a lot of influencers just understand that when they take these sponsorship deals, they're doing it in a way where they really need to make sure it looks, and it is the fact that they really care about this brand. They believe in the values, they believe in the product. I think audiences are really attuned to that, and I think they can pick up on that.Stephanie:Yep. I agree. In previous episodes, we've had a lot of guests tell us that it's been really hard to accurately measure the ROI of an influencer campaign. A couple of people have tried it or quite a few of them have tried it, but they just didn't know if they got the results or they didn't know how long until I see results. What do you advise around, how do you make sure to measure things in a way that you can see an ROI or not, and when should they expect to see some kind of success?Eric:Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, it is actually challenging. I think it's because, the reason is because I think influencer marketing sits at this unique intersection of brand and performance marketing where it's a little bit of both. I think if you're looking at as only one or only the other one, you're almost like undervaluing what you have in your influencer program. We actually have this internal marketing strategy team that works with all of our clients, and their job is basically to design this type of thing. Like, how are you going to measure the overall ROI of your program? Because it's so unique to every client. In terms of brand awareness, obviously that stuff is relatively straight forward. Like, how many views am I getting? How many video minutes are watched? How much engagement there are? What's the audience demographics that I'm trying to reach?Eric:Obviously this is an ecommerce podcast, so most people are interested in, how am I generating sales? That's where it gets really interesting, because like you said, it's not the easiest thing in the world to build the full attribution funnel for influencer marketing. Why is that? It's because all of this content sits somewhere that isn't pixel. It sits not on your own channel, and not even on your own Facebook. It sits on the influencer's Instagram page or their YouTube, and not all the time there's easy ways to click out of links. What we typically do is we build a combination of indirect and direct metrics to give you a sense of how your program is performing. There's definitely lots of ways to measure direct conversions. There's link tracking, coupon code redemptions, affiliate links, landing page sign-ups.Eric:Typically, those are very good ways of seeing directly attributable sales. Especially if you've built kind of this really great long tail of ambassadors who are all doing, like I said, whether your product seeding them, you're seeding them these gaskets, and you're not necessarily asking for anything, where you're building potentially hundreds or thousands of ambassadors who are ... you might not have a ton of following, but they really believe in the product and they're kind of posting about you. You'll start to see a lot of return in terms of referrals on that program, just based on kind of their channels clicking into those links and go into your website and buying things, something like that. But a lot of the times, when you're talking about influencer posts, because there's not an easy way to click out of this, of the posts, we tend to look at more indirect measures because a lot of times what happens is a consumer sees a post, they see the brand and then they exit to a browser and they go directly to the website.Eric:We say is that, hey, look at the indirect measures like referral sources from social channels, and that includes things like the Instagram shopping and checkout, which Facebook is investing a ton of money into all types of ways of commercializing your social channels. Then of course, there's the value of the content itself, which has been really interesting. Like I said, a lot of ecommerce brands are looking at these influencers as content creation vehicles, and so there's obviously the cost that it would've cost to create, potentially hundreds of purpose-built photos and videos, but what's even more is, what's the value of having 10 times the number of assets to personalize all these digital customer journeys from your paid ads, your ecommerce, your email marketing, and almost always what we see is our performance marketing clients will have an overall increase in their ROAS, but thanks to this kind of ongoing pipeline of constant.Eric:I think the last one that's super interesting thing has been really game changing over the last couple of years is actually using influencer channels themselves as paid ad vehicles. There's actually ... obviously there's easy functionality to boost posts that perform well, but there's actually, for in channels like Instagram, if an influencer has a business account, there's an option to grant advertiser access to a third party so that you can actually run a wide diversity of paid ads using the influencers content, where the ads are coming from the influencers channel themselves. This actually gives marketers almost this infinite number of channels to test on and has been an absolute game changer for brands looking to build more sophisticated paid social strategies. All those things are kind of like in combination, obviously are this complex web of how do you value the ROI of an influencer, but it's because there's this huge diversity of the ways that you could utilize them depending on your marketing strategy.Stephanie:That's great. Yeah. That's a really good summary, especially that last point. I don't think I have heard that, or I was not aware that you could leverage their accounts and kind of post from under their accounts. Yeah, that seems to be interesting.Eric:Yeah, it's little known, but it's become a lot more popularized, I think recently. Obviously you want to make sure that you have a firm agreement with the influencer. This is something that in our platform we kind of wrap up in a bow for you to be able to request, but obviously you're using their content, you're getting the right approvals from them, so they don't have their channel advertising to people or using content that they're not comfortable with. But assuming that they are, it's actually a win-win for both parties, because essentially what's happening is, as a brand, you're kind of leveraging them as a voice for your brand to kind of new audiences. For them, they're reaching new audiences themselves and in a way that can kind of get them more followers and more reach.Stephanie:Yeah, that's great. I could see there being a bit of like, making sure that whatever you write is in their voice, or is it like pretty transparent that this is a brand takeover of their account?Eric:I think it's typically a collaboration, and a lot of times what we'll advise is that, definitely having the influencer sign off on all the language and making sure that they're comfortable with what they're saying, because you don't want to get ... definitely don't want to misrepresent what they're saying, and it is in a partnership between brand and creator.Stephanie:Yep. Got it. All right. A little story time. First, we'll start with, what are some of the biggest missteps that you've seen brands experience when they've tried to set up their own influencer partnerships? What are some horror stories that you've heard in the industry? You know I like failure.Eric:Yeah, definitely I think a couple of common things that I see, and again, they kind of relate to this idea that, hey, these influencers are ads basically, and that leads to behaviors, like I said about not building relationships. I talked about that one already, but I think another one is basically taking too risk averse of an approach in the creative process. I won't name specific brands, but I think, especially when you're talking about like the bigger brands in the industry, the Fortune 500 brands, a lot of them struggle with the idea of kind of like merging their influencer strategy with their creative strategy, because they typically have this really rigid process of guidelines and brand safety that they apply usually to kind of $25,000 to $50,000 photo shoots, and they want to apply that same framework to influencers.Eric:And they're like, cool. They have to do this set of 20 guidelines, they have to check all these boxes in terms of what they're going to say, they have to say it in this way, and in this tone. At the end of the day, that just doesn't work because people are smart. Consumers are smart. Consumers know when something is super forced and inauthentic. At the end of the day, the whole point of working with influencers is that you're co-creating a narrative. You're supposed to be harnessing the personality and the creativity that's unique to each person, and by forcing them to kind of fit in this tightly defined box that is so clearly branded, that just leads to poor performing content. It's kind of defeating the purpose of using influencers in the first place. I would say that's the biggest misstep I tend to see, and it is typical among, I would say like the bigger brands in the industry.Stephanie:Got it. I could see brands, especially smaller ones, trying to find, of course, untapped influencers. What industries do you think there are a bunch of influencers that maybe you guys haven't even tapped into, and what's maybe bringing this question about, as I just did a recap episode with one of my coworkers around like the first 50 episodes, and we were talking about shoppable gaming and unreal and how there's influencers in these game worlds and how shopping is going to be in there soon. I was like, oh, it seems like there could be a lot of virtual influencers that maybe aren't tapped, but are there any industries like that where you're like, oh, we're exploring this or we see this being big in the future, but we haven't actually fully gotten it yet?Eric:Yeah. Well, I would say, even though it's been incredibly popularized in the last year or so, I would say TikTok is still wildly undervalued. I think not enough brands understand that TikTok has this enormous breadth and depth of not only audiences, but content creators, because I'm 38 years old and I look at a lot of like Parenting TikTok, I look at a lot of the Home Depot TikTok. It's so different than I think most perceptions are of, oh, it's just funny videos or teenagers dancing and things like that, because there's such a diversity of content and audience within TikTok that I think only a handful of brands are really taking advantage of. That's definitely, I would say a big focus for us going forward, is kind of getting in deep with tech talk and making sure that our brands can be successful there.Eric:I would say more to specifically your question around industries, I would say a lot of industries that we've seen that have kind of more emerging, I would say "influencers," not necessarily traditionally defined influencers, are more like professional fields. For example, one of my friends from business school named Trina Spear, she's founded this company FIGS Scrubs. I think they've had the strategy probably for ... maybe since they were founded, where they've almost created influencers out of nurses and doctors where, when they first started, there were no nurse influencers or doctor influencers or anything like that. But they started partnering with all these people that could just create really great content, and they might just be people in that professional field people that might have 500 followers, but posted really cool content and they would send the product, get them involved, get them bought into the mission and the vision of the brand.Eric:Now a lot of those people, they have tens of thousands of followers because of the partnership they've done with FIGS, and FIGS is an incredibly popular brand among the healthcare industry now, and has a really, really loyal following across ... up and down nurses and doctors and everything else.Stephanie:That's really cool. Yeah, I think we had FIGS on our list. I have to check with Hillary on that, but I think we had them potentially coming on maybe so. Yeah, that's really cool to hear how they do that.Eric:They're great. I look forward to listening to that one.Stephanie:Cool. How do you onboard new influencers, and who are some names of people that I would know? Because even though it's kind of vanity, I'm sure everyone listening is like, well, who are some names that I would know in your platform?Eric:Yeah. Interestingly, we don't really take that kind of approach when it comes to influencers, because a lot of times our influencers are brand-driven. What we try to do is we try to provide a system of record and a platform for our brands to manage all of their influencer programs themselves. This is actually an industry choice we've made, I think back in the founding of the company, where we decided pretty early that we were not going to win based on us having the most influencers or us having access to talent agencies or communities of people, because frankly, we were basically four guys who came from either a gaming company or a hedge fund, and so we were not going to win based on who we knew.Eric:What we decided to do is we said, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to build a platform that has incredible workflow and ability to scale up these influencer programs and have brands build the tools they need to manage them, and those brands will essentially onboard and essentially, almost onboard the influencers onto our platform themselves. It's actually played out pretty well where we now have hundreds of thousands of influencers on the platform. I think in a 95% of cases, those influencers were brought by some brand that we had on our platform who essentially invited those influencers themselves to the AspireIQ platform. This has been a really great way of feeding.Stephanie:Oh, that's smart.Eric:... a marketplace where when ... in [inaudible] teach about like, when you start a marketplace, you have to create standalone value for one of the sides, and that was our [inaudible] standalone value for the brands that they would essentially attract the influencers to the platform because we just didn't have them.Stephanie:Let's talk about the early days a little bit. I saw that you had worked at Pocket Gems, and I think it said you led a very large team who was mostly accountable for like 80 million in annual revenue. I want to hear a bit about your background and what you did at Pocket Gems that maybe helped influence AspireIQ.Eric:Yeah. I started my career in finance actually before business school, which is really disappointing for my dad because my dad was a computer science professor, so I didn't get into technology immediately the way that he wanted. But yeah, after business school, I went to Pocket Gems. Yeah, started as a product manager, built a couple of games there. Pocket Gems, for some background, is a mobile app gaming company. Really, it was an incredible experience because gaming, especially back then, I mean, you think about like, this pre-Zynga IPO and all the kind of the rise of mobile gaming, and everything was extremely data-driven and fast paced. It was a great environment to learn about how to build products that can grow and scale really quickly.Eric:But I think the biggest thing it taught me was essentially how much mobile and social were going to change the world, and pretty much changed the world so much more than I had ever conceptualized, I think, before joining, in almost a similar way with the way the internet changed everything in the late '90s. It's because of the fact that we have this super computer in our pockets that's like a high-definition video camera that makes any of this stuff possible. I think, as we were building games there, as we were building apps, as we were doing user acquisition, I could tell, based on the things that were working and the channels that we were working for, for our own growth, that all this was happening here organically. When you looked at social media, everyone can create this amazing content that's just as relevant and meaningful as what's done in studio, and it's completely democratized, giving a voice to anybody with a mobile phone and social media.Eric:I wanted to work on something following that, that could take advantage or basically capitalize on the fact that the world is essentially changing from what I call companies to people. Because when you open your phone, you look at most content nowadays, chances are it's something that a regular person made. It's not a company. It was kind of obvious, at the time, to a lot of us that were founding the company that people were going to be at the center of how these businesses or brands were built. That's what we were focused on doing. We didn't have it all figured out in terms of what we would do or the product we would build. We started with social media and went from there, but we just knew it was around this idea that brands and building a brand, building a marketing strategy needed to be much more people oriented, and around this idea that mobile and social were going to change the world.Stephanie:When you launched into aspire IQ, what were some maybe hiccups or missteps that you guys made in the beginning when trying to figure out this marketplace and building the platform, anything happened there of note?Eric:Yeah, it was funny because again, it was for people who didn't come from the marketing industry and we're trying to get into ... which I think, when I gave people advice, people would always ask me like, "Hey, are you going to ... should I start this company? I really want to do a startup." A lot of times the advice I give is, "Look, if this is something you have to do, it shouldn't matter what I say, that you're going to do it." I think this was really interesting thing where we all had this intense belief that this was going to be a thing, that this would work, even though none of us had come from the industry. I think, because none of us had come from the industry, that really put us at this disadvantage for, who to talk to. We were really scrapping trying to find our first sales and talk to any ecommerce brands that would listen to us, talk to any brands that would listen to us.Eric:It was such early days that we couldn't even charge any money for the product we made. We built this product in about a year, and we basically had to give it away for free because people just didn't value it. They didn't understand why they should pay a platform for influencer marketing. I think we actually had to create ... is really funny. In our first outreaches to influencers even, we were trying to scrape together these first influencer campaigns where we had to pretend that we were the platform, but actually underneath, it was just the four of us trying to run and match-make with different influencers. But we were saying like ...Stephanie:[crosstalk] service.Eric:Yeah, but we were saying like, oh yeah, there's something really like technological going on under the hood. Don't worry [inaudible] the brands. But it was actually just us trying to run the different influencers saying, "Hey, look, can you please join this campaign?" We had to use the pseudonym actually, because nobody would respond to our emails among influencers. They didn't believe that we were a real company. We had to use pseudonyms of people that sounded more legitimate to make sure these influencers would respond to us.Stephanie:Oh, that's crazy.Eric:In the early days, again, not only were brands not really doing a lot of influencer marketing, but the influencers themselves weren't doing a lot of "influencer marketing" among sponsorship opportunities. This wasn't as much of a business for them, where they're already and set up to take a lot of these inbound requests. In the early days, that matchmaking process, like you said, was quite difficult. Of course, nowadays, it's almost like a machine where everybody ... if you have like 5,000 followers, you might even have a manager at this point. Yeah, in those early days, it was a lot of a lot of talking on the phone to explain who we were and what we were trying to do.Stephanie:Yeah. That's great. I think that also is such an advantage that when you don't come from the industry, it reminds me of like us building up this media company like none of us really knew what we were doing in the early days, but from your perspective, I could see a lot of people thinking about building an influencer company and being like, I need to partner with Hollywood, I need to go to CAA. There's a certain way things are done around here. I think that's actually a huge advantage when you don't really know what you don't know and you just move forward and figure it out, and maybe do it differently.Eric:Yeah. I think that, that definitely helped us, I would say in the later stages of the company, because by the time, like I had said, in 2016, 2017, when this took off as an industry, we were one of the few companies that have built this as a true software platform, because all of this came from technology. So, how are we going to win? We weren't going to win because again, we were connected to the right people. So, we were just heads down, really building as much of the product we could essentially understand based on our own running of these campaigns. When the industry took off, we had assembled this immense product advantage versus a lot of our competitors that were essentially glorified agencies. Back then, I think a lot of companies were effectively ... because you might come from an agency, so you think that an agency is the way to solve this problem, this matchmaking problem.Eric:But what we saw was something much more nuanced, which was, okay after you've solved the matchmaking problem, what are you going to do with these influencers, and how are you going to make this a scalable program that will last the test of time? All those things were built into, essentially how do you create almost like a CRM workflow with analytics and all the different automation that we built into it that would be relevant, frankly, for people that weren't really doing anything back when we first started. We were basically lucky that we survived the first few years with almost like making no money, that we could make it to the maturity of the industry when our product became more relevant.Stephanie:Yeah, that's good. Because some people are a little too far ahead and you guys were ahead, but you ended up making it work, which is awesome.Eric:Yeah, absolutely.Stephanie:Now that we're talking a little bit about the future, I want to head into the future. What do you think the future of influencers looks like maybe in like five to 10 years?Eric:Yeah. I think that, like I said, I think influencer marketing is going to keep diversifying to ... just not people who necessarily have social media following it. I think it's going to be around who is influential for your brand specifically? Again, it could be professional, it could be experts, it could be customers. I think a lot of the brands we talk to that are on the bleeding edge, like a Glossier for example, is the gold standard, I would say, of this, who's one of our favorite partner customers. They figured out, I think first that, it doesn't really matter if you have this massive social following. They've built this community of fans, employees, even healthcare workers, things like that, and regardless of who you are, they do an incredible job of making you feel like a part of the community, probably because the brand started out of this shared love of Emily Weiss's beauty blog.Eric:Regardless if you have a following on social media, they highlight a lot of their community members in their marketing. They give them exclusive first looks so they can get feedback and build buzz around new product launches. They take an active interest in pretty much what all these different communities, how they respond to products, and that shapes a lot of the strategy that Glossier has as a brand. I would say they're one of the first, I would say community led brands. I would say that that's going to be, what I would say is the future of, not just influencer marketing, but building commerce brands in general, because what you see now it is there's such a dependence on third parties for a lot of ecommerce companies on generating leads from places like Facebook ads.Eric:That's almost becoming this increasing tax on the cost of doing business of running ecommerce. When you've built an advantage for a brand like Glossier, where you almost have your own channel of your community that generates all this buzz and brand awareness and referrals that, that becomes this competitive advantage, because you can build growth without relying on third parties doing all of your lead generation. I think that's what I'm really excited about as kind of the future of influencer marketing, but also the future of kind of commerce in the way brands will start to own their own communities and their own channels.Stephanie:Yeah. That's a great answer. I think that's the gold standard that a lot of brands probably want to figure out is like, how do you build that community that you can leverage and not always having to rely on external customer acquisition? But it'd be interesting to dive into their model of like, how do they actually build that up and build that community of fans to then have that network to launch to with their products and whatnot?Stephanie:All right, cool. With a few minutes left, let's dive into the lightning round brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to throw a question your way and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Eric?Eric:Fantastic. Ready. Stephanie:What's up next on your reading list?Eric:Ooh. I think that one book that I really love and just read is a book by Carrie Melissa Jones called Building Brand Communities. She goes into a lot about how you ... similar to the Glossier example, you really need to co-create an experience of communities with shared values, kind of mutual benefit, how is your community going to interact with you as a brand? I love that book. We actually sent it to I think all of our customers.Stephanie:Oh, nice. I'll have to check that out. That sounds like a good one. What is the best piece of advice you ever received?Eric:Yeah, I think the best advice I ever received was either from like a personal or professional level, are you growing as a person? Are you scaling? Are you developing new skills? I give that advice either to employees at the company or people who are asking you for advice. A lot of it has to do, its just kind of acceleration in any way that makes sense or is meaningful to you.Stephanie:I love that. That is good. What's up next on your Netflix queue. What are you enjoying these days?Eric:Oh, wow. Netflix. I just started watching Killing Eve. I think it's an older show, but that's ...Stephanie:Okay, is it good?Eric:Yeah. I love that show. I don't know if I'm as big of a fan of Sandra Oh, but it's a BBC show, and I love pretty much all BBC shows.Stephanie:Okay. I'll have check that out. I have not even heard of that one. What do you wish you understood better right now? It could be a trend, it could be a piece of tech, anything.Eric:I think the thing I wish I understood better is how Silicon Valley works. What's funny is we've never been kind of the favored child, I would say, of the tech industry here and in terms of raising money and things like that. I think marketing has never been the sexy object, the way crypto and those things were. I think I wish I understood the way VCs thought better.Stephanie:All right, Eric. Well, this has been a really fun interview. Where can people find out more about you and AspireIQ?Eric:Yeah. Definitely you can check out aspireiq.com/upnext. Yeah, we've got some interesting reading there. We've definitely got a case study on Purple Mattress and a bunch of other cool stuff to read.Stephanie:Ooh, nice. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining. We will have to have you back for round two, maybe even in person in the studio in the future.Eric:Hopefully the world works out that way. Thank you so much, Stephanie. It's great to be on. Fun time.

There is an evolutionary process for every business, and Beardbrand is no different. When Eric Bandholz co-founded Beardbrand back in 2012, all he had was a Tumblr blog with a modest amount of followers and an Ecommerce shop selling other people’s beard products. Today, Beardbrand is a seven-figure business with multiple high selling products of its own and an entire catalog of content that customers gobble up with each new release. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Eric tells us how he fortified his brand, and how success in the digital world is all about going beyond offering just a product in a box — it’s about delivering value and the best possible experience to your customers Key Takeaways: Move away from the strict focus on simply selling as much as you can and instead aim to find the ways you can add value to your customers’ lives. That will lead to more loyalty and, in turn, more lifetime sales When you're cash-strapped, you must think of creative ways to grow the business without capital. One way to do that is word-of-mouth — you can't incentivize word-of-mouth. You have to just focus on creating an amazing experience that your customers want to talk about Site speed is more important than other features. Achieving that  means cutting out pop-up ads and other third-party plugins, which data shows often do not provide consistent or meaningful ROI 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: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles. Today, we have Eric Bandholz on the show, founder of Beardbrand. Eric, welcome. Eric: What is going on, Stephanie? Stephanie: Hey, hey. Thanks for hopping on here. Eric: Yeah. I'm excited for our conversation. It's going to be a lot of fun. Stephanie: Me, too. You are a true brand. You're rocking an awesome beard. Just what I expected when I was hoping to see you on video. I'm like, "He better have an epic beard, or this conversation won't go well." Eric: Well, it was funny because, actually, I shaved it all off in December, the beginning of December, of last year. That was kind of a big deal for us. That was the first time I shaved my beard completely off. Stephanie: Oh, man. Eric: She's like, "[crosstalk 00:00:44] your beard," or something like that. Stephanie: How many customers did you lose when you did that? Eric: Well, I'd like to think that we actually added a lot of customers, because Beardbrand is not about the beard. It's about the man behind the beard. We kind of support a guy's right to grow his beard as much as his right to shave it off. I really wanted to make that point, especially today, with a lot of our competitors challenging people's masculinity by not having facial hair. We want to kind of say facial hair doesn't matter at all. It's just a style. Stephanie: Cool. Eric: We did some YouTube ads on it as well, which was a lot of fun to do. Stephanie: Awesome. I'd love to dive into the background of how you started Beard Brand and the story behind that. Eric: We're in business, I think it's got to be, eight years now we launched. Stephanie: Wow, congrats. Eric: We launched in 2012 after I had grown a beard out for about a year. What happened is, at that time, I was trying to do this graphic design business or design business, and I would go to networking events and everyone would call me Duck Dynasty or ZZ Top or Grizzly Adams. Those are super cool dudes. They've got epic stories as well. As an individual, I don't identify as those kind of guys. I've got the softest hands you could ever imagine. I never touched an axe. I ended up attending this event where I met other dudes like me who are other entrepreneurs and designers and doctors and lawyers and dads. I realized there's this whole community of guys that do not fit the traditional stereotype of a bearded guy. That was the inspiration to kind of call myself an urban beardsman. Stephanie: I like it. Eric: Beardbrand was going to be the community to unite urban beardsmen and give them the tools they needed to feel confident about rocking a beard. To us, the tools don't mean just the grooming products. They mean, videos. They mean blog posts. They mean style inspiration. They mean community. Over the past eight years, we've been rolling all that out. We've gotten an epic blog and a YouTube channel with over a million and a half subscribers. We've got a private community where we connect with people. We've put on conferences for our customers to be able to connect in person. We've really worked hard to support our audiences, support our customers. I've got two business partners. We're completely bootstrapped. We have no debt. We have no outside funding. We've been able to grow to a nice size seven-figure business. Stephanie: That's amazing. Congrats on all those YouTube followers. How do you think about utilizing your content to sell your products? Was that an idea and a strategy from the beginning, or was it more organic, where you started on YouTube, and then you're like, "Well, now, we have all these followers, we should launch a product as well?" Eric: Yeah, if we'll hop in our time machine a little bit more. We launched 2012 as a blog, a Tumblr page, which I don't think anyone's ever heard the word, "Tumblr," five years [crosstalk 00:03:53]. Stephanie: Long time. Eric: We had a Tumblr page. Then, we also had our YouTube channel. This time, it was just me, as kind of a side project. I'll make a couple of posts on the blog. Then, I would just re-blog some things on Tumblr to make it look active. I think I did six videos on YouTube. It's not like, in that first year, we really built this thriving community. I think we had 300 subscribers on YouTube and just a couple of thousand visitors to our blog. It was enough that a reporter from the New York Times saw the blog and kind of quoted me as an expert. Stephanie: That's awesome. Eric: We utilized that opportunity. I convinced two of my friends to go into business with me, and said, "Hey, why don't we turn this blog into an e-commerce store?" We found a product. We started reselling it. We literally launched the website a day before the New York Times article went live- Stephanie: Wow, perfect timing. Eric: [crosstalk] a couple of days. That was kind of the spark to the business to really give us the energy to continue. Then, I had the vision that Beardbrand, the Urban Beardsman, is going to be like how Lululemon is to people for yoga or Vans shoes is to skaters. Beardbrand and the Urban Beardsman was we're going to serve these urban beardsmen. I always visualize that as apparel or accessories or clothes. I really didn't have the industry knowledge to be able to do that, and the margins are so tight on there, and some seasonality that we found grooming products was going to be that product that united the community. Eric: After, I guess, a year or two of failure after failure after failure of trying to get apparel up and accessories up, we finally admitted that we're a grooming company. For us, the content that we've created was more of not to drive sales. The products we have allow us to share our word more. We sell products as a way to kind of expand our voice and to grow our content, not as a way to create content to sell products. I think we're one of the companies that kind of view it a little bit differently. Stephanie: Got it. How do you utilize newsletters and reaching your subscribers once you have them or engaging with buyers or prospective buyers? I think I've read about some newsletter strategy that you have from day one, everyone kind of starts out in the same place to go on the journey with you. Is that still accurate? Eric: Yeah. We utilize Klaviyo to, I think they call it flows, where you have these series of emails that you send out when people join your email list. We've launched that, I think, in 2015. That's been really good. When you think about building a business, as much as you can automate and build systems and processes, then the more you're going to be able to scale your business and the more traction you're going to be able to gain. Eric: This series that we opened up with is really like an education series. I think it's a 5 or 10-part series where we teach them how to care for their beards, teach them how to care for their hair. A lot of guys still don't know how to shampoo and condition your hair. Basics like that where, honestly, they've been doing it wrong, but there's opportunity for them to improve their techniques and, ultimately, get better outcome through their journey. That's been big for us. Then, at the end of the flow, we give them a little thank you product, or free shipping, or something like that for taking the time to invest in themselves. Stephanie: Got it? Are there any best practices you would recommend other e-commerce sites when it comes to utilizing that newsletter or where you're like, "Conversions were high when we did this," or, "They were lower when we did this," or, "That thank you product really does help drive future sales," any insights around that? Eric: Yeah. A couple of things that we've found that work over the years is we have a product that is not available on our navigation. It's kind of a hidden kit that is only available to people who join our newsletter. Stephanie: Interesting. Eric: The retail value of that kit is $50. We give them a pretty aggressive price point to be able to get on board. It's kind of like a tester kit, sample kit, so they get exposure to a lot of our products. We found that that works really well because we can say, "Hey, get this tester kit, try all of our products, use these products as you're learning about the things that we're telling you, then, in two weeks or a month or whenever, when you go through the products and look to re-up them." We found that that works really well at getting people into the ecosystem and trying our products. Stephanie: Very cool. Eric: What other best practices do I have? For us, it's so much about content. I think a lot of people really err towards sales and discounts and buy from us and chest thumping. That's really not our style. I would challenge people out there to think about how you can bring value to your audience's lives. Then, if you bring enough value to their lives, then, kind of the whole Buddhism karma thing, it will come back to you. People will end up buying from you. We kind of have that outlook on the world, that if you do good things, good things will come back to you. Stephanie: Love that. How do you think about your buyer experience and making that personalized and unique to all your customers as they come in? Eric: We've invested a fair amount into our packaging to our products. The unboxing experience is nice. We use nicer primary packaging, which is going to be your bottles and your labels and your caps and all that. Then, we use nicer secondary packaging as well. When they actually get the boxes and they open it, it's pretty nice. In addition to that, we're working with our own 3PL or a third-party logistics, our own fulfillment center. We make sure that we work really closely with them that they wrap it kind of to our specifications. There's a nice little unboxing experience, a little bit of tissue paper, and a Beardbrand sticker. Then, we have what's called a thank you kit. Within this thank you kit, we have a little booklet. The booklet usually changes every quarter. For instance, one quarter, it was a book of reminders, which are kind of my nine reminders that I tell myself in life as I face adversity. Stephanie: That's great. Eric: Daily planning. It's all tied around our core message or our tagline, which is keep on growing. We're trying to, again, bring more value. You buy from us and, not only did you get great products, but we brought you a little more value outside of what the products can do. Hopefully, by delivering this experience, we can grow through word-of-mouth and loyalty and customers who want to stick around, rather than kind of going on to the next hot thing. Stephanie: I was just going to say I could see that adding to that viral experience by giving people those little presents that are really fun to share, then, just engaging with more customers because of that. It's really interesting to hear about. Eric: I'll tell you this. If you're trying to build a bootstrap company, the reality is you've got more time than money. When you're cash-strapped, you've got to think of creative ways to be able to grow the business without capital. One way to do that is word-of-mouth. You can't incentivize word-of-mouth. You have to really just truly focus on such an amazing experience that your customers want to talk about it. When you have that mentality, not only is it healthy for your business, but it's going to be healthy for your growth. It's just kind of a win-win, and the world's a better place because you're bringing that much value to the customers. Stephanie: I completely agree. Are there any success stories or big failures that you've had come from trying to generate that word-of-mouth and getting people to spread the word? Any advice around that? Eric: It's actually not a metric that we really track or keep an eye on. It's just more of a philosophy internally of just being customer first. I think, to a certain degree, you do have to integrate data. We used to include a little sample of products for people. We found that those samples weren't driving any additional sales of those products in a significant way. When you look at that, you're like, "Well, are you actually bringing value to customers if you're giving them something for free that, maybe, they didn't want or they didn't want need? Stephanie: How do you track that, or how did you know that people weren't really using it or that wasn't helping drive sales? Eric: We would send a beard wash, a little sample, a one-ounce container. Then, we would look at if there's any increase in sales of beard wash. Your data is always going to be muddy, especially when you're a company that's our size and really small. We fundamentally can't get the data. You do have to go off of a certain gap. You have to also look at, "Well, every sample is costing us," let's say, it's $1. Every order is going out, five orders is $5,000 a month. Then, if we're not seeing a boost of really $10,000 in sales to justify the cost of that, then the margin and the future order, then, you're not building a sustainable practice. Again, as a bootstrap company, you do have to think about your marketing efforts being sustainable and being able to exist on their own for a long time. Stephanie: How do you think about creating these marketing campaigns, whether it's YouTube videos? How much do you guys put out per day or per week? To me, that feels like it could be not sustainable if you don't have the right team in place, the right video crew. Especially right now, I'm thinking everything with COVID-19. Has it been hard to keep that content going out and recording the videos and launching them on YouTube and everything? Is it still pretty good, because it's a remote team doing that? Eric: It's been a really long, hard journey. To the listeners out there who are hearing our story now, eight years in is like we've had eight years to build these processes and systems and relationships. You're not going to be able to do all the things that we've done on day one. We're still cranking out about six videos a week. We've been able to do that by leveraging multiple personalities, just like you guys have multiple shows. We're kind of the same thing. It's not all on my shoulders, and worrying about me getting burnt out. Eric: We have four different regulars on our smaller channel called the Beardbrand Alliance. Then, we have, probably, maybe 4 to 10 barbers who will hit on to do these kind of barbershops style videos. We've been able to really spread the burden of the YouTube channel. Then, we have an in-house video editor who is constantly video editing. He's a machine. Then, in addition to creating these YouTube videos, we do a fair amount of advertising in the video form as well. We do have video editing handled by our ad person as well, our advertising coordinator. She'll be cranking out content that way as well. Video is great, man. I would highly suggest anyone listening that if you invest in video, you could have a pretty good competitive advantage in the marketplace. Stephanie: I completely agree. Video is where it's at. How do you make sure that your videos and your content is found? A lot of people create some really awesome stuff and then be like, "Now what? I've only had one view on it," or, "I don't know how to get people to view this video, and then take the action that I want afterwards, which is, probably, buying one of the products that I'm highlighting?" Eric: There's two answers to that. One answer is you pay for it. Really expensive, but if the content is truly remarkable, for instance, when I shaved my beard off, we filmed it. We created a 45-second ad on YouTube. To get exposure on YouTube through their advertising system, if the video is engaging, it's extremely cheap. I think we're paying a third of a penny per view. Stephanie: Yeah, that's cheap. Eric: A million impressions was, I don't have the calculator in front of me, what does that look like? Stephanie: Something great. Eric: Yeah. It's astronomically inexpensive. At the same time, you may not be targeting the right people. Now, organically, I think YouTube is going to be the platform to go, because of how they recommend videos. It's a little more evergreen than Facebook. There's certainly opportunity on Facebook and Instagram, but I'm not as strong on how to perform there. It comes down to, in the early days, the reality is no one's going to watch your content. You think that sucks, but the reality is it's awesome. Maybe, you'll have one person or two people or 10 people watch it. Then, you'll get a couple of comments. Well, you'll use those comments to get your content better and better and better. Then, by the time you've built a larger audience, you've kind of figured a lot of these things out, so you're not really damaging your audience. You think what you create is great, but the reality is it's not. Stephanie: I agree. Eric: [crosstalk] will be shared. By creating and by doing, you get the hang of it, you get more natural in front of the camera, or you get more natural on the editing process and telling the story. As you learn, it compounds on itself. If you're thinking about getting into organic video on YouTube, then plan on having, really, 20 or 50 videos that you want to produce before you really even see any kind of traction. I think it took us three years before we got 10,000 subscribers. Then, again, it compounds and you learn and create more content. You create more content faster that's more in line with what people want. Then, all of a sudden, we're able to grow to daily content and getting 10,000 subscribers a month. It takes time and it takes learning. There's a lot of insights in YouTube that you'll need to learn as well. Stephanie: I think it's really good as a reminder to kind of detach yourself from the content, because when you put something out there, it's like, "It's my baby. That was my best one yet." I remember when we were starting our company, the first couple of episodes we did on Mission Daily, Chad and myself, it didn't get any downloads. It's a brand new podcast. No one had heard about it. We didn't know how to grow the podcast at that point. I remember thinking, "That was my best episode yet. I'll never be able to do something that good again." Now, I look back on it. I'm like, "I'm very glad no one was listening to those episodes because they were not good and the audio wasn't great." It's just a really good reminder to put stuff out there more in the learning phase. Then, eventually, you can move into the really trying to find those subscribers and followers, once you get to the point where you're a bit more experienced and you've tried a bunch of things out. I love that. Eric: Yeah. So much of it is just the process, for a podcast, making sure you can line up those guests and you can post it early. That's hard work. It's easy to get the first one done, or maybe, the first couple and queue it up, but to also record and organize and plan is a very big challenge. Those are the things that you'll be solving when your audience is small. Then, as you solve those, that allows you to grow your audience. Stephanie: I agree. When it comes to solving problems when you're small, when you got the visibility from, I think, you said New York Times, and I think I read Shark Tank, when you got that visibility, were you ready? Was your website ready, your product ready, your fulfillment strategy ready? How did that go when you got those bumps in visitors? Eric: New York Times drove about $900 of sales. Stephanie: That's huge, just kidding. Eric: It actually is. I think we had $100 worth of product. It was nine times our inventory. Fortunately, we were able to solve all that. You have a lot of growing pains, I think. This is my first successful business. I had no relationships. We didn't know where to get our wooden boxes made. We always dealt with supply chain issues. Really, the first two years, as we were growing rapidly, it was just always like a fire was being put out. Then, eventually, we moved to quarterly planning, which has helped significantly in managing our inventory. Stephanie: What was the Shark Tank experience like? I haven't talked to anyone who's been on there yet. Eric: Oh, no. I'm your first breaking your show. Stephanie: Yeah, you're my first. Eric: That's virginity. This was 2014, I believe. Yeah, it's got to be 2014. Halloween 2014 is when the episode aired. A lot of things may have changed since that time. I know Shark Tank was really popular at that time. A lot of people were watching it. It's a very stressful process, because during the whole campaign, not only 80% of the people who go through the whole process are going to end up on the show. You could end up investing a lot of energy, a lot of time. You could pay a lot of money to build out this fancy display case. You could fly out there, step away from the operational needs of your business in a time where your business really needs this stuff. Then, do all that and not make it there. Eric: We always knew there is a good chance that we didn't make it there. Subsequently, we didn't put too many resources into Shark Tank. We kept our display stand, I think, we paid $300 to rent some furniture. Then, we put out some products there. It's just me going on show. It wasn't my business partners, so they could kind of focus on building the business and I just kind of focused on the Shark Tank pitch and stuff like that. Then, you get up there and it's stressful, not just because of pitching to the Sharks, which is how they make the show seem, but also knowing that whatever you do is recorded in front of seven million people. If you make a mistake, you're like, "Seven million people want to know about that." Stephanie: It's replayed over and over again, and reruns. Eric: Yeah. And, fortunately for us, I feel like Shark Tank, they did a pretty accurate representation of how I felt the conversation was. They're cutting down 45 minutes to seven minutes. They're trying to craft a story in seven minutes. Then, the hard part is all five of those sharks, they talk to you all at once and you don't know that on the show coming in. They all ask you a question right at the same time. When you see the people pitching and they're looking all over the place, it's just because five people are talking at once and they're just trying to figure out who to talk to. Stephanie: Wow. Sounds very intimidating. I do love Shark Tank, though. I hope to try and find your episode and see if I can watch it. Eric: Yeah, do it. It was a fun experience. It was like how your heart can race and go on through a roller coaster. It was really that. The whole time, it's just like the adrenaline is pumping. I'm not very good with words. I'm kind of dyslexic. I'm just hoping I'm not saying anything too stupid. I think it was a great experience all over. I think what they're doing for entrepreneurs is great, too. Stephanie: I completely agree. In early days, were you completely selling on your website? How much of it was selling direct to consumer versus wholesale, versus, maybe, utilizing Amazon would your sales strategy look with your brand? Eric: We've done a little bit of everything. We started off direct to consumer. We actually started off, as I said, as a simply an e-commerce retailer. Another people's products in the early days, until we're able to develop our own products. As we were able to get traction, we had passively, companies like barber shops and salons and pharmacists who would want to sell our products. We would kind of sell to these smaller retailers. It was never a core focus of us to bring on wholesale retailers. Eric: Then, we would get on the Amazon. This was the early days of Amazon. Hindsight is 2020. We probably missed a fair amount of opportunity on there. We really always focused on selling on Beardbrand.com. Amazon was never more than 10% of our sales. After a couple of years, we ended up pulling off of Amazon completely. You can't get our products on Amazon now. That's been a great decision for us. Then, we also brought in Target as one of our wholesalers. That happened 2018. Today, we're about half the retail and half direct on Amazon, and on any other market. Stephanie: Very cool. How do you think about separating yourself from your competitors? Not that I watched the beard space often. I don't have a beard that I know of, but I have seen a lot of beard oils coming on the market and just things focused around that. How do you separate yourself from the competitors, especially since you're an e-commerce site and you don't have a bunch of retail locations or not in a ton of places? How do you show that value on how it's different from other products? Eric: The reality is, you're always going to have a competition. If you have no competitors, then your competition is ignorance. We've kind of always embraced competitors and knowing that we're going to have competition in the sense that it's going to force us to elevate our game and provide such an amazing experience to our customers, that they'll have no option other than to go with us because we are the best. With that mentality, we've also come to terms with certain things, like we're not going to be the low price product on the marketplace. If that's the game you want, then we're not going to be a good fit for you. Eric: We try to be really clear about the value that we bring and the things that, maybe, we're not great at. There's always going to be trade off. To us, I think we do a great job because we bring all that value to our customers. Like we talked about earlier in the show, the content marketing, the education, the blog articles, the email flows, the YouTube videos, the customer service experience, the unboxing experience, I think, all of those things are what makes Beardbrand a different company and why someone would want to buy from us. If they're just some dude who doesn't really care and they just want whatever's cheap, then Beardbrand probably isn't going to be the best product for them. Stephanie: I like that idea of being upfront with, "Here's what we sell. If you don't want quality, then, maybe, go somewhere else to find something different." Do you market differently based on that? Eric: To be fair, there's other quality products out there as well. I don't think there's quality products out there that also do the education, that also do the packaging, that also do the customer experience. There's so much more to a business than what's in the package or what's in the box? I think a lot of companies get so focused on their product. Anyone can rip off your product. They can exactly copy your product. They can come down to an exact tee. Then, if that's all you're standing on, what do you have there? Then, it becomes a race to the bottom for the price. Eric: When you build a business, you have to think beyond your product. You have to think about, "How can I really bring value to my customers that is beyond the product?" The product alone is not going to do it. Stephanie: Got it. I love that. How do you think about building better business models for other e-commerce companies? I was looking at, I think, on Twitter, you had an experience with West Elm. I guess they had marked down a table. You kind of went through how e-commerce companies need to figure out how to develop better business models. What is your advice around that? Maybe, you can highlight that experience a bit, because I didn't read the whole thread. Eric: Yeah. A little background story. I bought that table, that table I'm actually using for my podcast studio. 25 days later, they put on a sale where I could get the exact same table, but it cost me 75 days, or excuse me, $75 less. As a consumer, that's kind of frustrating, because you kind of feel like an idiot for not waiting out. I would have waited 25 days to save 75 bucks. Personally, I don't think that's a good experience. I recognize they're doing sales, they're doing weekly sales, and some sales are better than others. To me, I feel like, have some kind of policy in place where, within a certain time frame, whatever you feel is appropriate: two weeks, a month, two months, whatever, that you can guarantee the offer that you're giving to them. Eric: It doesn't even have to be a money back guarantee. It could be a store credit guarantee. Then, I think that's going to encourage a lot more confidence in the consumers. Also, consumers will be more likely to buy from them again, because if you have the alternative where you're just like, "I know you screwed; you missed out on this one; you already bought it," then, it's like, "Well, next time, I'm just really going to wait. I'm just going to wait until I know there's an incredible deal," or, "I'm just not going to buy at all because I don't want to feel like I want to be made a fool again." Eric: You run the risk if you're running sales all the time and they're not the exact same sale. Not everyone will feel this, but some people will subconsciously be feeling this. There's quick and easy ways to really just guarantee the experience about it. I don't want to tell people how to run their business and their policy. I'm not mad at them. I'm just kind of calling them out that I think they could do better. Then, to be fair, West Elm reached out to me on Twitter and they offered me store credit. Stephanie: That's nice. Eric: You don't want to have to really fight and argue for that. You just want them to make it right. Stephanie: I think that's a good point, though. Also, that big brands are looking to smaller companies and the individual consumer to kind of learn from. That's a really good point of making the consumer feel good after a purchase and not having buyer's remorse. I've definitely had that experience before of buying something and then seeing a discount afterwards, and then waiting the next time, and then there's no more inventory. Then, I just never go back again. Those little moments definitely matter. Eric: Well, then you think about, the whole West Elm experience for me is, I couldn't do a live chat or email them about it. I had to call them. Then, I called them and I was on hold for 25 minutes. Then, after 25 minutes, they pretty much told me I could ship the thing back and then buy a new one, but shipping would not be reimbursed. Financially, it wasn't going to make sense. It's like, "Okay, this is how you're going to do it." Then, as a small company, you think that these large companies have all the advantages because they can buy in bulk and get better prices. Well, a lot of people don't buy based on products. They buy because they want to be able to reach out to you and talk with real person, not be on hold for 25 minutes. Those are the things that I want you to think about as you build your business, how you can compete with Amazon and how you can compete with West Elm and Walmart and these giant companies out there. Stephanie: I love that. What's one thing that you wish online sellers would start and stop doing? I'm asking you this question because I see you're big in the e-commerce community, always talking and highlighting different e-commerce stores. You've probably seen a lot of best practices that sellers do, and some things are like, "You should just stop. That's not good." Eric: Going back, I don't want to tell anyone how to run their business. There's a lot of ways to build a business. It kind of comes down to who your audience is and what they're okay with. A couple of things that we've always avoided is we don't want to do pop-ups. There's no pop-ups. There's no tricks. There's no immediate discounts. One of the things that is a pet peeve of mine is, "Here's a pop-up. Do you want to save 10% on your next order?" Then, they click x or, "Close out of this if you don't want to save money," something kind of condescending like that; or, with the little spin wheel. I think a lot of these has become a little hokey. Eric: The people selling those software as a service thing always claim that they work. We've actually cut a significant amount of our third party plugins, just because it made our websites so bloated. Stephanie: I was reading about that, how quick were you able to get your website down? I think I saw four seconds. Eric: Oh, my god. We were doing a speed test on our old website. The homepage on the desktop, I think it would have been in the 40 range score. Then, I think the mobile side would have been in the 20 to 25 range, the score [crosstalk 00:34:34]. Then, we essentially rolled out a new website template, a new website theme, killed all the third-party plugins. The new speed is now around 77 for the desktop and around 40 or 45 for the mobile. Stephanie: That's great. Eric: I don't know what that is in actual load times, but in terms of data, according to Google, it's a significant increase. Some of our blog posts would take 10 seconds to load. We really just went and found the stuff. It wasn't just the theme, too. We had some images that we uploaded, which were two megabytes in size, something ridiculous like that. It's just kind of like eight years into having a business and a lot of people putting their hands into the business, it gets a little you lose sight of things. It's always good to circle back every once in a while. Stephanie: I think doing that audit is really important, because like you said, after many years, people are implementing their own things without thinking about the long-term strategy of it and how it might impact things. I think, web chat is one thing where a lot of websites have the digital chat, but that increases the website's load time by a ton. Maybe, people don't even fully utilize it. They would rather call or send an email. It's good to just do that audit, I'd say, at least yearly. Eric: We had one of those live chats. I think it presented some issues because, sometimes, a little pop-up would block information or block the "Add to Cart" button. Stephanie: Oh, man. They're like, "I'm just trying to buy and you're not letting me." Eric: Exactly. It's just like as templates get uploaded or themes get updated, things get reverted. We killed it. We no longer have that JavaScript burden of loading. Those chat bots are fundamentally the things that slow down your page load speed the most, I've seen. We haven't seen any drop in conversion rates or sales. Then, in addition to that, the alternative, what we did is we just moved to a phone number that people can text. I think what we're getting is people who are more serious about needing advice rather than just kind of casual looky-loos who see a little pop-up and they're like, "Oh, yeah, da-da-da-da-da." Stephanie: I that, looky-loos. Eric: That's what my mom calls them. Stephanie: That's good. What metrics are you paying attention to most? You've mentioned conversion rates. Now, we've talked about website speed. Are there a certain set of metrics that you pay the most attention to? Eric: Yeah. I'm like your typical A.D.D. entrepreneur. Being in the details on a daily basis is really hard for me. Everything I do is kind of on an ad hoc basis. When it comes to YouTube, the things that we really look at are our watch time and our click through rate. They're going to be the big indications if a video is going to be successful or not. Then, on our website, really, I'm the top level kind of guy, so I'm looking at revenue. I'm looking at orders. Then, on the ad hoc level, I look at how our blog is converting, then, how our traffic outside of our blog, two of our stores is converting. Then, our page speed has been something that's been a pretty big metric for me, lately. Then, there's so many other more metrics that I should be looking into that I'm fortunate that we have team members who are looking for [crosstalk 00:38:09]- Stephanie: Do that for you. Eric: ... email performance and how those are doing. Stephanie: Is there any themes around either video content that you put out or blog content that you've seen, certain types of videos? Maybe, funny ones convert better or more how-to blog content converts better. Any best practices around releasing content in a strategic way that will actually create a future buyer? Eric: Our strategy is to leverage YouTube's organic growth. To do that, you need to have the viewers want to watch more of your content and stay on YouTube. The strategy isn't really so much of, "Hey, buy this," or, "Be aware of this." It's more of get awareness of the brand. We try to integrate a lot of branding on our videos. We put our taglines on every video, to keep on growing and change the way society views beardsmen. All those call outs in the lower thirds. Then, we try to integrate product placements in our videos as well. It's just bringing awareness to it and not driving people off the YouTube. Eric: Subsequently, when you do that, you're less concerned with any kind of direct sales that you're getting from videos. One great plugin tool that we've used on our Shopify store is called Grapevine. Grapevine allows you to have a simple one-question survey that you put at the end of after they've purchased. We use that to say, "Hey, how did you first hear about us?" We have about 20 different options, from Shark Tank to our YouTube channel to various YouTube personalities. We found that 40% of our customers have first found out about us from YouTube. Eric: Being able to attribute that any particular video, we can kind of segment it a little bit. 18% of it is from our barbershop videos, which was a fair amount. Beyond that, you just kind of have to trust the process. Stephanie: Got it? Do you find influencers in the space? When you're talking about having these barbers do these videos, do you find someone who already has a following? Do you kind of create that following organically through under your brand? Maybe, it's someone that no one would have ever known about, but you just know that they're a great personality to do the video? Eric: A little of both, I would say. One of our most or one of our longest tenured relations, well, we've got a couple of long tenured relationships with influencers, Carlos Costa. We reached out to him back in 2013. He's been with us kind of since then as an influencer for the brand. Then, he's grown to make videos for us. Then, he reached out to Greg Berzinsky, who at that time, I think he had, maybe, 20,000 or 30,000 followers on Instagram. He's a big believer in the brand. Eric: We try to find people who really love your brand, who love the products, who love what we're doing. It's just easier for them to be excited about it. We also try to work with smaller influencers, those who are, maybe, still getting established, or who have a following because they're not influencers. Tobias van Schneider is another one. He's another business owner. He's got other businesses. He's not making money from promoting products. He's more likely to talk about our products and not ask for compensation, which is something that you need as a bootstrap company, to be able to make your dollars go far. Eric: It's been a little bit of that. Then, we have had employees at Beardbrand who are like, "Hey, man. Get on camera. Talk about this. You've got a great beard." They've done that. We've done a little both and have had success and challenges and both processes as well. Stephanie: That's very cool to experiment with all those different types of models. I like the idea of having the employees be the influencer. I know that a lot of companies in Asia are doing this. I haven't seen a lot of companies in the US fully utilizing that model of creating micro-influencers within the company, and then developing their own followings. That's just a nice organic way to do it. Having someone who is an actual expert on the product without being too salesy, because they're not a salesperson. Eric: We try it, too. If you look at our Instagram account, the Beardbrand account is replying to comments, you'll always see Sylvester. He's replying to him. He'll sign his name, or whoever's replying to a comment. On YouTube, they'll sign their name. We're totally in favor of get to know our people, get to know our copywriter, Mike, and get to know our growth marketer, James. Eric: Again, we talked about how you compete with Amazon. Amazon doesn't have a James. They don't have a Mike. They don't have a Lindsey. They don't have a Jordan. They don't have Chandler. But, we have those people. The more we can help them get to know the team. Then, the risk is if you just work with one person within your company, then, that person could hold you hostage or quit or leave or getting a DUI or do something like that. If you have 10 or 20 different people on the regular who you integrate into your content, then, in the natural course of business, as people move on and things change, then, you'll still be able to move forward. Stephanie: In a world where everything is becoming automated and you always know you're talking to bots, I think it's actually nice how certain business models are kind of flipping that. You're mentioning about developing a relationship with the person at the company where you are used to seeing the same name and you kind of are developing an Internet relationship with someone at the company that you trust and grow to love. I like how that model is kind of reversing a bit over the past year. Eric: Sylvester, who I mentioned, that's his full time job, is he runs a community. His responsibility is to build those relationships. He's heading up our private forums. He's putting on these events. He's interacting with people on Twitter and Instagram. As they chat on Twitter, and as they chat on YouTube, and they see the same name over and over again. They start to learn about him. Eric: In our emails, we'll have a photograph of him. We'll talk about him. We'll talk about the style. People will start to trust his input because, obviously, me as the founder, a lot of videos or a lot of views to those videos, a lot of people want to come and talk to me, but I can't interact with 40 people a day and still run the company and have sanity, really. Well, to scale up what I bring, and not only that, Sylvester's got way more incredible style than me. He's a lot more empathetic than me. He's able to really provide these people great advice in a way that I cannot. It brings a lot of joy to me to be able to offer that to our audience, and also, that Sylvester is able to do what he loves. Stephanie: That's really fun. To zoom out a bit, go a little bit higher level, what kind of digital commerce trends are you most excited about that are coming down the pike right now? Eric: Probably, the thing I don't follow too much is the trends. I feel like we just kind of fall into them. SMS is something that a lot of people are talking about, and something that we've actually been doing for a good half a year now. We do it in a way that, I think, most people aren't doing it. Most people see SMS as just another channel to market and throw sales and discounts. That drives consumers crazy. If I see someone marketing to me on SMS, I'm just like, "You're dead to me." How we're using it is as style consulting. You text us, send us a photo. Stephanie: That's good. Eric: SMS is perfect for that because you got your phone there, take a selfie, send it to us, we can tell you where you're trimming your beard, how your neckline is coming in, what your hairline looks like, and what kind of hairstyle will work for you. I think that's an excellent way to use SMS. It's funny. Once we started using SMS that way, the company we work with, Emotive, they actually changed their whole marketing position to be more about style consultants and beauty consultants, and things like that. Stephanie: That's funny. Eric: I want to take full credit for that, but I would like to say we had a little bit of influence in the way that they're selling us on this. I think that's better for the consumer as well to be able to connect with them on a one-to-one kind of consultant basis, rather. Stephanie: How do you make sure they stick with your brand? I can see them, maybe, not having the expertise, like you're talking about, how you're trimming your beard wrong, or what kind of product you need, because of whatever they see in the photo, how do you make sure that they stick with your brand guidelines and make sure they're speaking in the way that you want and they're recommending things correctly and not giving bad advice? Eric: This goes back to our core values, which are freedom, honor, and trust. Part of the hiring process is making sure that we hire people who align with these core values. Then, it's not blind faith with trust, but through experience and interactions. I know Sylvester. I know his style. I see him show up every day in the office and what he's wearing and how he's behaving and how he communicates. It's like, "Dude, man. Go at it. Be yourself." Our brand standard is communicate to our customers in a way that you communicate to your friends. Those no corporate speak, nothing. Eric: If you're a goofy guy, talk goofy. If you're a serious guy, talk serious. Be yourself. You are going to have different experiences. Interacting with Sylvester is going to be different than interacting with Matt. They're two different people. That's totally okay. Stephanie: That's great. Are there any other channels that you're utilizing or looking to utilize over the next couple of years? Eric: For us, our goal has been, again, going back to me being an A.D.D. entrepreneur, you try a little bit of everything. The past two years has been fixing all of my A.D.D. new channels that we've been in. We killed Amazon. We killed selling in the Europe. We've cut marketing channels. It's really how do we get better at the channels we're in? How do we get better at Facebook marketing? How do we get better at Instagram marketing? How do we get better YouTube content? Eric: Like I said, we have a newer, smaller YouTube channel that we're trying to grow and build that awareness. In terms of just completely introducing anything that we've never done before, like TV advertising or radio advertising or podcast advertising, we're going to be staying away from that until we feel like we've completely capitalized on the opportunities of the channels we're currently in. Stephanie: That makes sense. I think killing projects and platforms is a good first step to making sure that you can focus on what's actually working to, then, move into a new channel around the tryout. It sounds like a good strategy to me. Eric: I'll tell you, it sucks, though, when you kill something and then you don't get better at the thing you're supposed to get better at. Stephanie: Yeah, that's a big bummer. Eric: We've done that. Stephanie: That happened a few times? Eric: Yeah. When we pulled out of Europe, Europe was about 20% of our business. We did this March 31st of last year. It was about 20% of our business. The intent was with the new focus of not having to deal with multiple fulfillment centers and different time zones and multiple stores and things like that, that we could get really good at serving our customers. Subsequently, 2019 was a terrible year for us. We weren't able to capture the lost sales that I thought we'd be able to by having more focus. We've had to really analyze. It wasn't so much selling into Europe. That was the thing. I think it was more of the internal structure of our team and kind of red tape that got put in place after seven years of business and systems and processes that kind of built up on itself. We should have taken an axe to all of that, rather than, maybe, potentially taking an axe to the UK channel. Stephanie: Got it. Is there any big initiatives that you undertook that you were like, you talked about internal processes and structures, is there any one thing that led to kind of riding the business back to where you wanted to go after the whole shutting down Europe? Eric: Yeah. Transparently, we had the worst fourth quarter we've ever had. It was a bloodbath. We were just losing a significant amount of cash and just burning through cash. We just had to make hard decisions about the business. When you're hemorrhaging money, you're not profitable, we had to scale back to 15. A leaner team means, "Hey, we're no longer going to have people proofing your work anymore. You're going to have to be responsible for your own work-end. You're no longer going to have someone who's kind of being the quarterback of the marketing team. You have to kind of interact directly with your audience, or your coworkers." By scaling back the team, you were almost, by necessity, forced to cut a lot of that red tape and focus on getting stuff done. Stephanie: Super important. All right. At the end of the interview, we'd like to do a lightning round, which is where I ask you a question and you have under a minute to quickly answer whatever comes to mind. Are you ready, Eric? Eric: I am electrified. Stephanie: Woo-hoo. All right. What's up next on new product launches coming to Beardbrand, if any? Eric: Our big thing is killing scent confusion or ending scent confusion. We want to provide head to toe fragrance and matching products. We don't have anything in your midsection. That's a little hint of a product that will be coming. Stephanie: Fun. I'll have to stay tuned for that. What's up next content or video-wise that you're excited about producing or creating next? Eric: We want to systematize our barbershop and winding in five different barbers and record over the course of a week, which would be a new way for us to perform. I can't wait to do that, but, this whole quarantine has got to end first. Stephanie: That sounds really fun. What's up next on your reading list? Eric: I hate reading. Stephanie: Podcasts, audible, anything? Eric: I hate reading. I'll tell you I just finished the book called Rocket Fuel which talks about integrators and visionaries. It was the one book that I've read over the past year. I'm just going to piggyback off of that one. Stephanie: I don't like it. What's up next on your Netflix queue? Eric: Again, man, I just had a baby five weeks ago. Stephanie: Congrats. Me, too. Eric: Oh, no way. Stephanie: Yeah. I had twins eight weeks ago. Eric: Oh, poor you. Stephanie: Poor us. Eric: It's got to be crazy, right? We're in the quarantine. Stephanie: Yeah. No Netflix for us then, huh? I don't know. I watch Tiger Kings in my off time when they're sleeping. Eric: My answer is a lot of primitive survival type of videos on YouTube. That's my go-to content that I consume. Stephanie: That's great. All right. A little harder one, what's up next for e-commerce pros? Eric: I think there's going to be a move away from Amazon from both a consumer perspective and a seller perspective. I think Amazon is really kind of twisting the screw in a lot of people. There's going to be a little bit of blowback from that. Stephanie: Completely agree, especially with everything going on right now where Amazon's picking what products are essential. I think they just said that they are going to be optimizing for its margins. Instead of showing people, maybe, what they want to find, they're going to be showing people products that have higher margins. I can see that also happening. Eric: They're also neutering a lot of people in the affiliate space where they just literally cut their commissions in half. Stephanie: That's not good. Eric: [crosstalk 00:54:51]. Stephanie: Well, it sounds a good prediction, then. Eric: Yeah. Less people will be pointing links to Amazon, I think. Stephanie: All right. Any final words of advice or wisdom, Eric, that you want to share before we hop off? Eric: The big thing I always like to tell people is, in life you always have doubts and questions about what you need to do. The reality is you need to just go out there, execute, and do it. Action, a lot of times, is better than no action. Just go out there. You know what you need to do. Go and get it done. Stephanie: Yes, do it. All right. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Eric. It was a blast. See you soon. Eric: My pleasure.  

Panel: David Kimura Eric Berry In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk amongst themselves about their favorite software, equipment, and apps. Both Eric and David thoroughly share their preferred picks within these categories, and they explain how and why they use the specified item. Check out today’s episode to hear more! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:03 – David: Welcome! Today, Chuck is not feeling well. I am David and today we have Eric Berry on our panel today. It is just the two of us today. I want to talk about our development environment. What is your setup like? Do you have an office space and your hardware? 1:58 – Eric: I Have a room in my basement that has everything that I need. I do work from home. There is my guitar, my geek toys and more. For my hardware I am using 2017 MacBook Pro (16 GB of ram). The 13-inch is convenient, but I upgraded b/c I do a lot of traveling. I do pull the iPad out and use DUET. You no longer have to use a cord. I have a monitor that is 30-inches and it’s gorgeous. That is my hardware setup. I am not a mechanical keyboard guy, and I stick with the Apple super flat keyboard. I do use Bestand – it’s a holster for the keyboard and the track pad. What do you have? 4:35 – David: I have a Frankenstein setup. My needs change, over time, and when that changes my hardware changes. Back in the day I did not have a Mac and I used a Windows machine. I used to be a gamer, but then met my wife and then stopped b/c she didn’t like for me to waste time. My setup is more proper. I have a baseline iMac Pro b/c there was a great deal of $1,000 off. The other option was an iMac. I like the desktop b/c that’s where I do work – at home. It was a $4,000 investment. I am on my computer ALL the time it was worth it to me. I got the wall-mount for me, and I have more monitors wall-mounted, too. 8:00 – David: That is my monitor and computer setup. I have an eco-rhythmic keyboard b/c of childhood injuries. I have a really old Microsoft keyboard from 2005 something. It was cheap but I like the style of it. For my mouse I have a Logitech mouse. I love the feel of this thing. It has a side scroll left and right, and up and down. Especially when I am looking at code. It helps with my video editing, too. My mouse is my favorite to-date. I don’t have too much plugged into the Mac. I have a GoDrive, which has everything on it – my whole life’s work is on there. If there is ever an emergency I know to grab that. Back things up in case of an emergency would be my tips to you all. 11:40 – Eric: I have struggled with backing things up actually. The problem that I have is that I am constantly moving my laptop. I have this guilt and fear of doing it wrong. 12:33 – David: I have this work laptop – I don’t back that up every day.  David gives Eric his suggestions in regards to backing files up. David mentions Back Blaze. 14:05 – Eric: That makes sense. I live in the Apple eco-system. I have my phone, watch, 40 iPads, laptop – everything backs up to the Cloud. The date we are recording this is 10/30/18. Apple just announced a new upgrade. I feel like this could compete with an actual laptop computer. Eric asks David a question. 15:35 – David: ...My main problem with that is that you might already have a developmental machine. It’s a stationary computer then it’s not feasible to take on the go. I do have an iPad Pro and I will take that on the go. I can login to my home network. BLINK – I used on my iPad Pro. David continues to talk about his setup. 19:00 – Eric: I kind of agree with you. I have seen it used quite a bit. My brother does everything online for his job. The pros are that if you are training, and his company is configured that way. The pros is that you can code from anywhere on anyone’s computer. I am glad that it DOES exist. It’s not Cloud9 but someone does offer... 20:20 – David: I think going to a solo screen does hurt my productivity – working on the iPad vs. working on the computer. I could get faster and faster but only to a certain degree. If you have the resources – then I don’t think it’s sustainable. However, if you don’t have the resources it’s better than nothing. At least you are coding and that’s important. 22:15 – Eric: I think of the audience we cater to with Ruby Rogues. I wonder if our listeners are strapped for cash or if they do have the resources to get the job done? 22:48 – David: If you don’t have a lot of money, you don’t have to buy a Mac. If Cloud hosting isn’t your thing there are different options. You have DOCKER, and use Windows as your main editor, and the WSL. I wanted to do a test – I bout a laptop for $500-$700 and you can get away with doing what you need to do. Learning how to program and code with what you have is great! 25:00 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 26:05 – Eric: Let’s talk about the software developer environment. Nate Hopkins isn’t on today, but you can’t change his mind – I am VEM all the way. I think Cuck is EMAX. 26:43 – Eric: What do you do? 26:45 – David: I use VS code. David talks about the benefits of using VS code. 27:37 – Eric: Yes, 100%. I met the lead engineer behind VS code. They just made a new announcement. I have been using VS code for quite a while now. The integrated terminal and other features are awesome. Pulling me out of Sublime Text was a really, really hard thing for me. 29:28 – David: Sublime text, yes, but I got tired of the 40-year long beta, and the lack of expanding it, too. VS code has won my heart over. 30:53 – Eric: My guess is that they are going to leave it alone. I am sure they will connect the 2 teams. Think of how much work has gone into ATOM. That would be a hard pill to swallow. 31:20 – David: At the end of the day, though, it is a company. You don’t need 2 different editors when they do the same thing. 31:40 – Eric: I would have to disagree with you. Maybe they won’t merge the 2 but they just become different between ATOM (React and React Native) and... 32:22 – David: Why would a company cancel something only have 1 season? (Clears throat...Fox!) 32:58 – Eric: I open very large files with Sublime. Sublime handles this very easily. This goes back to: why am I opening up very large files? 33:31 – David: It’s a log file don’t lie. 33:40 – David: What browser do you use? Safari? 34:03 – Eric: Safari is nice for non-developers. Safari is lightweight and very fast. I have been a browser whore. I go from bedroom to bedroom from Opera to Firefox to Chrome. I fall into the Chrome field though. I have a problem with Chrome, though, and that it knows me too well. Google can sell my data and they do. 37:14 – David: With BRAVE, weren’t they doing something with the block chain and bit coin to reward you for browsing? 37:38 – Eric: Yeah I think that’s being run by... 38:03 – David: I still use CHROME b/c I like the extensions. It’s important to know why you are picking a certain browser. When you are talking about development you need to know who your target audience is. What kind of apps do you use? 39:54 – Eric: It’s interesting to see how much traffic the Android Browser gets. You want to switch over to other parts? For my tech software...I use Polymail.io for email. I use THINGS to keep me on-track, I use SLACK, BRAVE BROSWER, iTerm3 and MERT. I use FANTASTICO (calendar), and I use BEAR (for my note taking). What about you? 41:21 – David: I use iTerm3, too. I’m on 3 different Slack channels. I have been using DISCORD. Other tools that I use are SPECTACLE (extension) among others. I try to keep it slim and simple, though. Another one is EasyRez (free download) and you can adjust the screen resolution on your desktop monitors. It’s important to target my audience better. I do like PARALLELS, too. 44:24 – David continues: Screenflow, Apple Motion, and Adobe After Effects CC. 45:04 – Eric: I use 1 PASSWORD and BETA BASE. 46:04 – David: Have you heard of Last Pass? 46:15 – Eric: Oh sure! I have been using though 1 Password and I guess there some loyalty there. 46:54 – David asks Eric a question about 1 Password about pricing. 47:12 – Eric: I want to pay with money than with something else. 47:23 – David: It’s owned by LogMeIn, and they have tons of experience with security. 48:00 – Eric: I am going to put an article here that compares all these different apps so you can see the similarities and differences side-by-side. 48:40 – David: Anything else? Banking passwords? 48:54 – Eric: Nah, I am excited to see where we are. I like Mojave for the desktop but I don’t like it for the constant number of resets that I’ve had to do. I love what I do. 49:34 – David: Yeah, I agree. I haven’t experienced any major setbacks, yet. 49:55 – Picks! 50:03 – Eric: I think this whole episode has been PICKS! 50:15 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course Ruby Rust Ruby Motion Ruby on Rails Angular React React Native Komodo Bestand Duet Atom.io EasyRez Polymail.io Docker Adobe After Effects CC LogMeIn Brave 1 Password iTerm3 VS CODE iPad Pro Last Pass GoDrive Mojave EMAX Back Blaze Discord Sublime Text AWS Cloud9 StatCounter GitHub: Mert Bear App Process.st Pi-Hole Sponsors: Sentry Cache Fly Fresh Books Picks: Dave ProxMox Pi-Hole Eric Open Source Funders

Panel: David Kimura Eric Berry In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk amongst themselves about their favorite software, equipment, and apps. Both Eric and David thoroughly share their preferred picks within these categories, and they explain how and why they use the specified item. Check out today’s episode to hear more! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:03 – David: Welcome! Today, Chuck is not feeling well. I am David and today we have Eric Berry on our panel today. It is just the two of us today. I want to talk about our development environment. What is your setup like? Do you have an office space and your hardware? 1:58 – Eric: I Have a room in my basement that has everything that I need. I do work from home. There is my guitar, my geek toys and more. For my hardware I am using 2017 MacBook Pro (16 GB of ram). The 13-inch is convenient, but I upgraded b/c I do a lot of traveling. I do pull the iPad out and use DUET. You no longer have to use a cord. I have a monitor that is 30-inches and it’s gorgeous. That is my hardware setup. I am not a mechanical keyboard guy, and I stick with the Apple super flat keyboard. I do use Bestand – it’s a holster for the keyboard and the track pad. What do you have? 4:35 – David: I have a Frankenstein setup. My needs change, over time, and when that changes my hardware changes. Back in the day I did not have a Mac and I used a Windows machine. I used to be a gamer, but then met my wife and then stopped b/c she didn’t like for me to waste time. My setup is more proper. I have a baseline iMac Pro b/c there was a great deal of $1,000 off. The other option was an iMac. I like the desktop b/c that’s where I do work – at home. It was a $4,000 investment. I am on my computer ALL the time it was worth it to me. I got the wall-mount for me, and I have more monitors wall-mounted, too. 8:00 – David: That is my monitor and computer setup. I have an eco-rhythmic keyboard b/c of childhood injuries. I have a really old Microsoft keyboard from 2005 something. It was cheap but I like the style of it. For my mouse I have a Logitech mouse. I love the feel of this thing. It has a side scroll left and right, and up and down. Especially when I am looking at code. It helps with my video editing, too. My mouse is my favorite to-date. I don’t have too much plugged into the Mac. I have a GoDrive, which has everything on it – my whole life’s work is on there. If there is ever an emergency I know to grab that. Back things up in case of an emergency would be my tips to you all. 11:40 – Eric: I have struggled with backing things up actually. The problem that I have is that I am constantly moving my laptop. I have this guilt and fear of doing it wrong. 12:33 – David: I have this work laptop – I don’t back that up every day.  David gives Eric his suggestions in regards to backing files up. David mentions Back Blaze. 14:05 – Eric: That makes sense. I live in the Apple eco-system. I have my phone, watch, 40 iPads, laptop – everything backs up to the Cloud. The date we are recording this is 10/30/18. Apple just announced a new upgrade. I feel like this could compete with an actual laptop computer. Eric asks David a question. 15:35 – David: ...My main problem with that is that you might already have a developmental machine. It’s a stationary computer then it’s not feasible to take on the go. I do have an iPad Pro and I will take that on the go. I can login to my home network. BLINK – I used on my iPad Pro. David continues to talk about his setup. 19:00 – Eric: I kind of agree with you. I have seen it used quite a bit. My brother does everything online for his job. The pros are that if you are training, and his company is configured that way. The pros is that you can code from anywhere on anyone’s computer. I am glad that it DOES exist. It’s not Cloud9 but someone does offer... 20:20 – David: I think going to a solo screen does hurt my productivity – working on the iPad vs. working on the computer. I could get faster and faster but only to a certain degree. If you have the resources – then I don’t think it’s sustainable. However, if you don’t have the resources it’s better than nothing. At least you are coding and that’s important. 22:15 – Eric: I think of the audience we cater to with Ruby Rogues. I wonder if our listeners are strapped for cash or if they do have the resources to get the job done? 22:48 – David: If you don’t have a lot of money, you don’t have to buy a Mac. If Cloud hosting isn’t your thing there are different options. You have DOCKER, and use Windows as your main editor, and the WSL. I wanted to do a test – I bout a laptop for $500-$700 and you can get away with doing what you need to do. Learning how to program and code with what you have is great! 25:00 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 26:05 – Eric: Let’s talk about the software developer environment. Nate Hopkins isn’t on today, but you can’t change his mind – I am VEM all the way. I think Cuck is EMAX. 26:43 – Eric: What do you do? 26:45 – David: I use VS code. David talks about the benefits of using VS code. 27:37 – Eric: Yes, 100%. I met the lead engineer behind VS code. They just made a new announcement. I have been using VS code for quite a while now. The integrated terminal and other features are awesome. Pulling me out of Sublime Text was a really, really hard thing for me. 29:28 – David: Sublime text, yes, but I got tired of the 40-year long beta, and the lack of expanding it, too. VS code has won my heart over. 30:53 – Eric: My guess is that they are going to leave it alone. I am sure they will connect the 2 teams. Think of how much work has gone into ATOM. That would be a hard pill to swallow. 31:20 – David: At the end of the day, though, it is a company. You don’t need 2 different editors when they do the same thing. 31:40 – Eric: I would have to disagree with you. Maybe they won’t merge the 2 but they just become different between ATOM (React and React Native) and... 32:22 – David: Why would a company cancel something only have 1 season? (Clears throat...Fox!) 32:58 – Eric: I open very large files with Sublime. Sublime handles this very easily. This goes back to: why am I opening up very large files? 33:31 – David: It’s a log file don’t lie. 33:40 – David: What browser do you use? Safari? 34:03 – Eric: Safari is nice for non-developers. Safari is lightweight and very fast. I have been a browser whore. I go from bedroom to bedroom from Opera to Firefox to Chrome. I fall into the Chrome field though. I have a problem with Chrome, though, and that it knows me too well. Google can sell my data and they do. 37:14 – David: With BRAVE, weren’t they doing something with the block chain and bit coin to reward you for browsing? 37:38 – Eric: Yeah I think that’s being run by... 38:03 – David: I still use CHROME b/c I like the extensions. It’s important to know why you are picking a certain browser. When you are talking about development you need to know who your target audience is. What kind of apps do you use? 39:54 – Eric: It’s interesting to see how much traffic the Android Browser gets. You want to switch over to other parts? For my tech software...I use Polymail.io for email. I use THINGS to keep me on-track, I use SLACK, BRAVE BROSWER, iTerm3 and MERT. I use FANTASTICO (calendar), and I use BEAR (for my note taking). What about you? 41:21 – David: I use iTerm3, too. I’m on 3 different Slack channels. I have been using DISCORD. Other tools that I use are SPECTACLE (extension) among others. I try to keep it slim and simple, though. Another one is EasyRez (free download) and you can adjust the screen resolution on your desktop monitors. It’s important to target my audience better. I do like PARALLELS, too. 44:24 – David continues: Screenflow, Apple Motion, and Adobe After Effects CC. 45:04 – Eric: I use 1 PASSWORD and BETA BASE. 46:04 – David: Have you heard of Last Pass? 46:15 – Eric: Oh sure! I have been using though 1 Password and I guess there some loyalty there. 46:54 – David asks Eric a question about 1 Password about pricing. 47:12 – Eric: I want to pay with money than with something else. 47:23 – David: It’s owned by LogMeIn, and they have tons of experience with security. 48:00 – Eric: I am going to put an article here that compares all these different apps so you can see the similarities and differences side-by-side. 48:40 – David: Anything else? Banking passwords? 48:54 – Eric: Nah, I am excited to see where we are. I like Mojave for the desktop but I don’t like it for the constant number of resets that I’ve had to do. I love what I do. 49:34 – David: Yeah, I agree. I haven’t experienced any major setbacks, yet. 49:55 – Picks! 50:03 – Eric: I think this whole episode has been PICKS! 50:15 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course Ruby Rust Ruby Motion Ruby on Rails Angular React React Native Komodo Bestand Duet Atom.io EasyRez Polymail.io Docker Adobe After Effects CC LogMeIn Brave 1 Password iTerm3 VS CODE iPad Pro Last Pass GoDrive Mojave EMAX Back Blaze Discord Sublime Text AWS Cloud9 StatCounter GitHub: Mert Bear App Process.st Pi-Hole Sponsors: Sentry Cache Fly Fresh Books Picks: Dave ProxMox Pi-Hole Eric Open Source Funders

Panel: David Kimura Eric Berry In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk amongst themselves about their favorite software, equipment, and apps. Both Eric and David thoroughly share their preferred picks within these categories, and they explain how and why they use the specified item. Check out today’s episode to hear more! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:03 – David: Welcome! Today, Chuck is not feeling well. I am David and today we have Eric Berry on our panel today. It is just the two of us today. I want to talk about our development environment. What is your setup like? Do you have an office space and your hardware? 1:58 – Eric: I Have a room in my basement that has everything that I need. I do work from home. There is my guitar, my geek toys and more. For my hardware I am using 2017 MacBook Pro (16 GB of ram). The 13-inch is convenient, but I upgraded b/c I do a lot of traveling. I do pull the iPad out and use DUET. You no longer have to use a cord. I have a monitor that is 30-inches and it’s gorgeous. That is my hardware setup. I am not a mechanical keyboard guy, and I stick with the Apple super flat keyboard. I do use Bestand – it’s a holster for the keyboard and the track pad. What do you have? 4:35 – David: I have a Frankenstein setup. My needs change, over time, and when that changes my hardware changes. Back in the day I did not have a Mac and I used a Windows machine. I used to be a gamer, but then met my wife and then stopped b/c she didn’t like for me to waste time. My setup is more proper. I have a baseline iMac Pro b/c there was a great deal of $1,000 off. The other option was an iMac. I like the desktop b/c that’s where I do work – at home. It was a $4,000 investment. I am on my computer ALL the time it was worth it to me. I got the wall-mount for me, and I have more monitors wall-mounted, too. 8:00 – David: That is my monitor and computer setup. I have an eco-rhythmic keyboard b/c of childhood injuries. I have a really old Microsoft keyboard from 2005 something. It was cheap but I like the style of it. For my mouse I have a Logitech mouse. I love the feel of this thing. It has a side scroll left and right, and up and down. Especially when I am looking at code. It helps with my video editing, too. My mouse is my favorite to-date. I don’t have too much plugged into the Mac. I have a GoDrive, which has everything on it – my whole life’s work is on there. If there is ever an emergency I know to grab that. Back things up in case of an emergency would be my tips to you all. 11:40 – Eric: I have struggled with backing things up actually. The problem that I have is that I am constantly moving my laptop. I have this guilt and fear of doing it wrong. 12:33 – David: I have this work laptop – I don’t back that up every day.  David gives Eric his suggestions in regards to backing files up. David mentions Back Blaze. 14:05 – Eric: That makes sense. I live in the Apple eco-system. I have my phone, watch, 40 iPads, laptop – everything backs up to the Cloud. The date we are recording this is 10/30/18. Apple just announced a new upgrade. I feel like this could compete with an actual laptop computer. Eric asks David a question. 15:35 – David: ...My main problem with that is that you might already have a developmental machine. It’s a stationary computer then it’s not feasible to take on the go. I do have an iPad Pro and I will take that on the go. I can login to my home network. BLINK – I used on my iPad Pro. David continues to talk about his setup. 19:00 – Eric: I kind of agree with you. I have seen it used quite a bit. My brother does everything online for his job. The pros are that if you are training, and his company is configured that way. The pros is that you can code from anywhere on anyone’s computer. I am glad that it DOES exist. It’s not Cloud9 but someone does offer... 20:20 – David: I think going to a solo screen does hurt my productivity – working on the iPad vs. working on the computer. I could get faster and faster but only to a certain degree. If you have the resources – then I don’t think it’s sustainable. However, if you don’t have the resources it’s better than nothing. At least you are coding and that’s important. 22:15 – Eric: I think of the audience we cater to with Ruby Rogues. I wonder if our listeners are strapped for cash or if they do have the resources to get the job done? 22:48 – David: If you don’t have a lot of money, you don’t have to buy a Mac. If Cloud hosting isn’t your thing there are different options. You have DOCKER, and use Windows as your main editor, and the WSL. I wanted to do a test – I bout a laptop for $500-$700 and you can get away with doing what you need to do. Learning how to program and code with what you have is great! 25:00 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 26:05 – Eric: Let’s talk about the software developer environment. Nate Hopkins isn’t on today, but you can’t change his mind – I am VEM all the way. I think Cuck is EMAX. 26:43 – Eric: What do you do? 26:45 – David: I use VS code. David talks about the benefits of using VS code. 27:37 – Eric: Yes, 100%. I met the lead engineer behind VS code. They just made a new announcement. I have been using VS code for quite a while now. The integrated terminal and other features are awesome. Pulling me out of Sublime Text was a really, really hard thing for me. 29:28 – David: Sublime text, yes, but I got tired of the 40-year long beta, and the lack of expanding it, too. VS code has won my heart over. 30:53 – Eric: My guess is that they are going to leave it alone. I am sure they will connect the 2 teams. Think of how much work has gone into ATOM. That would be a hard pill to swallow. 31:20 – David: At the end of the day, though, it is a company. You don’t need 2 different editors when they do the same thing. 31:40 – Eric: I would have to disagree with you. Maybe they won’t merge the 2 but they just become different between ATOM (React and React Native) and... 32:22 – David: Why would a company cancel something only have 1 season? (Clears throat...Fox!) 32:58 – Eric: I open very large files with Sublime. Sublime handles this very easily. This goes back to: why am I opening up very large files? 33:31 – David: It’s a log file don’t lie. 33:40 – David: What browser do you use? Safari? 34:03 – Eric: Safari is nice for non-developers. Safari is lightweight and very fast. I have been a browser whore. I go from bedroom to bedroom from Opera to Firefox to Chrome. I fall into the Chrome field though. I have a problem with Chrome, though, and that it knows me too well. Google can sell my data and they do. 37:14 – David: With BRAVE, weren’t they doing something with the block chain and bit coin to reward you for browsing? 37:38 – Eric: Yeah I think that’s being run by... 38:03 – David: I still use CHROME b/c I like the extensions. It’s important to know why you are picking a certain browser. When you are talking about development you need to know who your target audience is. What kind of apps do you use? 39:54 – Eric: It’s interesting to see how much traffic the Android Browser gets. You want to switch over to other parts? For my tech software...I use Polymail.io for email. I use THINGS to keep me on-track, I use SLACK, BRAVE BROSWER, iTerm3 and MERT. I use FANTASTICO (calendar), and I use BEAR (for my note taking). What about you? 41:21 – David: I use iTerm3, too. I’m on 3 different Slack channels. I have been using DISCORD. Other tools that I use are SPECTACLE (extension) among others. I try to keep it slim and simple, though. Another one is EasyRez (free download) and you can adjust the screen resolution on your desktop monitors. It’s important to target my audience better. I do like PARALLELS, too. 44:24 – David continues: Screenflow, Apple Motion, and Adobe After Effects CC. 45:04 – Eric: I use 1 PASSWORD and BETA BASE. 46:04 – David: Have you heard of Last Pass? 46:15 – Eric: Oh sure! I have been using though 1 Password and I guess there some loyalty there. 46:54 – David asks Eric a question about 1 Password about pricing. 47:12 – Eric: I want to pay with money than with something else. 47:23 – David: It’s owned by LogMeIn, and they have tons of experience with security. 48:00 – Eric: I am going to put an article here that compares all these different apps so you can see the similarities and differences side-by-side. 48:40 – David: Anything else? Banking passwords? 48:54 – Eric: Nah, I am excited to see where we are. I like Mojave for the desktop but I don’t like it for the constant number of resets that I’ve had to do. I love what I do. 49:34 – David: Yeah, I agree. I haven’t experienced any major setbacks, yet. 49:55 – Picks! 50:03 – Eric: I think this whole episode has been PICKS! 50:15 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course Ruby Rust Ruby Motion Ruby on Rails Angular React React Native Komodo Bestand Duet Atom.io EasyRez Polymail.io Docker Adobe After Effects CC LogMeIn Brave 1 Password iTerm3 VS CODE iPad Pro Last Pass GoDrive Mojave EMAX Back Blaze Discord Sublime Text AWS Cloud9 StatCounter GitHub: Mert Bear App Process.st Pi-Hole Sponsors: Sentry Cache Fly Fresh Books Picks: Dave ProxMox Pi-Hole Eric Open Source Funders

Eric: Oh, come on, I know exactly where we are! Presto: Yeah, a hundred miles from nowhere and fifty miles from anyplace. A small village is perched on top of a den of horror and the promise of treasure. To learn more about how Kingdom is played check out our primer episode. The characters for this game: Gonzo Lameleg (Ken Breese) - Former adventure, now damaged and living in the swamp. Patriarch Pugnacious Zachariah (D Gailey) - The spiritual leader of the Hamlet. Zinnia Faltine (John Holt) - An apprentice to the town's sage, the Alchemist. The Kingdom for this game: The Hamlet, a quiet town far from civilization in the middle of a forest. Threats: Outsiders (AKA Adventurers) could overwhelm the Hamlet. Our economy relies on having a steady stream of adventurers The things below the Hamlet threaten to come pouring to the surface. Locations: Forager's Camp in the Swamp Ruined Tower with stairs that lead Down The Church Vault The"Luck 'o the Draw" Tavern The Cartographer's Printing Press The Master Alchemist's Shop The Conflict: Conflict: Will The Hamlet allow the Children of the White Sword to go below? Find D Gailey on twitter @mxnurd Find John on twitter @LordJoho Find Ken on twitter @Berlingsbeard Follow us on twitter @boredghostworld Our Bored Ghost theme song is by the amazing Pat Cupples, see his band website Hotels and Highways. Bored Ghosts we hope you found some distraction from your eternity in the void this week!

The bros talk shop and review Parlour Von Kopp's trio of All Natural Wunder Bart Beard Oils (Original, Cedarwood and Minted blends) and his White Buffalo Beard Balm. Eric, Evan and Dan all share some interesting albums from 2016 including Rare Future's This Is Your Brain on Love, Diarrhea Planet's Turn to Gold and Holy Grail's Times of Pride and Peril. And Eric and Dan drink Brewery Ommegang's Abbey Ale, while Evan indulges in some Rosetta cherry ale. The Beats, Beards & Brews crew also debate how to properly determine the "butt feel" of a beer and go on to talk about a variety of butt-related things. They also struggle to pronounce "Ommegang," "dubbel" and "anise." Exchange of the Show: Evan: "You learn so many things on this podcast, Diarrhea Planet, anise flower... Dan: "I think most of things you learn on this podcast are butt related." Eric: "Oh yeah, for sure." *This exchange is brought to you by the Official Beats, Beards & Brews Butt Feel Tarp and Funnel.

It's the 2014 Half Ear Extravaganza! In this 2 hour podcast, we review almost everything that has happened and been announced in the first six months of 2014 in the World of Universal, Disney, and Theme Parks! We spend a lot of time covering Diagon Alley as well as other Disney topics. The hosts of this show are Dallas Thompson from Relive the Magic and Relive the Adventure as well as Eric Oh from USH Today!

In this brand-new episode of the Sales Funnel Mastery podcast, I am interviewed by Eric Barton. I guarantee this is one of the most value-packed interviews you've ever listened to. Here are a few things we discussed...1) Why most people talking about conversion rates aren't telling you the WHOLE truth...2) 3 quick and easy ways to increase retention rates...3) How to increase price and skyrocket net profits without dropping conversions...4) A current split-test I'm running which you've NEVER heard of (but must try!)...5) And tons more!After listening, head on over to http://www.JeremyReeves.com   Transcript: Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Sales Funnel Mastery podcast. I hope you’re loving what you’re getting so far. I have a ton more content coming up for you. I wrote out the other day about sixty different ideas. That’s not even including interviews, which I’m going to try to do about once every two weeks or so. For this podcast, I have something a little bit different for you. In fact, this is the actually the first interview, except the difference is I’m not going to be interviewing somebody else. I’m going to be giving you an interview that somebody did for me. I’m going be getting interviewed. It was an interview from Eric Barton, from Fast Easy Success. When we talked, we went over a lot of really, really good marketing stuff; including a conversion split test that I’m currently running. It’s still running right now, but I guarantee you it’s something you’ve never heard before. It’s definitely something you want to try because as of right now, it’s winning by about 50 percent over my control. You’ll see in this interview that the percent doesn’t really matter, but it’s winning right now. I think the comp was about 92 percent. Here is that episode. I hope you really enjoy it. Let me know what you think. Eric: Welcome to episode ten of the Fast Easy Success Marketing Insider podcast. I want to thank everyone for tuning into the Fast Easy Success Marketing Insider. A lot of exciting things coming today and in the future for you. Make sure you hit that subscription button right now, so you don’t miss out on the value-packed podcast coming your way as well. Before we dive into our show and our very special guest today, I just want to welcome everyone to head over to fasteasysuccess.com. Go ahead and grab your business building tips sent directly to your email daily. When you head over to fasteasysuccess.com, I’m also giving you your free business cheat sheets. This is going to help you with your websites, emails and writing. Let’s dive in because I’m excited to have this special guest coming on the show today. If you haven’t discovered this man yet, you’re definitely in for a treat today. He’s a direct response copywriter who actually specializes in building very profitable sales funnels for clients. You may even have heard this man referred to as the sales funnel specialist, and really the world’s number one most trust sales funnel authority. Ladies and gentlemen, joining us today, I want to welcome to the show, Jeremy Reeves. Jeremy, thanks so much for taking the time to jam with us today. Jeremy: Thanks for having me. I’m really, really excited. I used to get a little nervous getting interviewed, but I’m actually very pumped to be talking to you. Eric: Beautiful. That’s what I like to hear. I’m sure the audience is definitely, they got their ticket to this profitable thrill ride and ready to jump in. Let’s just ask real quick, for the people who are not familiar with you, can you originally tell people how you started out in the sales marketing or copywriting world or how you really go involved? Jeremy: One thing I want to say, just as everybody is listening at the beginning of the interview, I’ve listened to a lot of interviews. I listen to a whole bunch of podcasts and all that kind of stuff. Personally, I have never been a huge fan of interviews because a lot of people take too long to tell their stories and don’t really give a lot of good advice, just in general. I did want to throw out there that I am really going to give out a lot of really, really good content. It’s not going to be all about me. I’ll give you my quick little story here for about 30 seconds, but then I’d like to just jump in. I like to demonstrate my authority by demonstrating that I actually know what I’m talking about, instead of telling my story. I just wanted to throw that out there in the beginning. I like to do unique interviews. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: For my short little blurb here, I got started as a direct response copywriter, writing sales copy for clients. Right at the beginning of my career with that, which was about, roughly seven years ago, I realized that writing, understanding the dynamics of writing copy and being able to sell on paper and all that good stuff really doesn’t do much if the strategy behind the copy isn’t right. I really started focusing a lot on the marketing strategy and how to write the copy to fit that strategy. If you have bad strategy with a great copy, it’ll do okay; but if you have incredible strategy and okay copy, it can still do fantastic. The strategy really compels it. When you add the really good, hard-hitting copy on top of it, that’s when things really take off. I really started focusing on the marketing strategy behind the copy and that led me down, through working with all kinds of different clients, a lot of the industry leaders that you’re probably familiar with. It really made me specialize and focus on building sales funnels, because I realized a lot of the challenges that people deal with have to do with not having systems in place and not having—basically, not being able to buy paid traffic; which is one thing I really, really focus on. When you have an automated sales funnel in place, you can pretty much look at your sales funnel as a whole and see, I got 1,000 people that hit the first part of the sales funnel. By the time they got to the end, I made X dollars. You know what each person is worth or your earnings per visitor. That way you know what you can pay for traffic. If your average earnings per visitor, for each person that you send to a landing page, for example, the first part of the funnel, if that’s $5, then you know you can pay $2, $3 or $4, whatever you want to keep your margin at, to get new people into the funnel. It really makes your business really, really stable. Then you keep tweaking and testing and making everybody worth more money. That’s where all the fun comes in. That’s pretty much my history. Basically, started as a copywriter, went into strategy. I worked with all kinds of different business owners from internet marketers to a couple celebrities and really high name, high profile clients; to even all the way on the other side of the coin, to people like, dry cleaners and hair dressers and people like that. A pretty big gamut of people that I’ve worked with. Eric: Right. That’s what I was saying, it works with a lot of online and as well as offline. It works with the large and the small businesses. One thing I wanted to ask, it’s been the theme the show, I’m going to ask it in the beginning, because I think if they set up in the beginning, it’s going to help. This goes into what you were talking about, the paid traffic. Really what I’m referring to is the un-sexy sales secret, which is what I call it, is lead generation. I think, unfortunately, this is a point that a lot of business owners get wrong. A lot of people mix up with lead generation with customer generation. A lot of times they want customers instead of leads. Leads are something that you nurture. You can grab the low hanging fruit, obviously, but it’s something you have to build. Can you share your thoughts or what’s your view on the lead generation part of whether they’re starting a funnel or just bringing them to a sales page or website et cetera? Jeremy: Yeah. There’s a lot to go into on that. I’ll just take when I’m working with clients, I’ll go off of that. One of the things that I try to do, a lot of people talk about cost per lead and things like that. That’s good … Eric: Bad? Jeremy: No, it’s definitely good to know and I track that metric and all that, but there’s a big difference in the quality of leads. Let’s just say you have Facebook ads, Google ads and SEO, you’re doing those three things. You might have leads that are worth, let’s say your average lead on Google AdWords is worth $3. It might be worth only $1 on Facebook and $6 for SEO. You really have to look at, I’m getting this amount of leads from this source, but what are they worth to the business? Because everything, the leads coming in, they all have different values. Eric: That’s a great point. I think that’s what a lot of people mix up too. They’re getting in a lot of leads, and they’re like, yeah, I’m doing good. But how much is that lead actually worth, like you just said. That’s a great point. Jeremy: Exactly. You could even dive in more. For example, I have Facebook campaign that I’m running right now. We tag them as Facebook leads and I can track it overall and look at it every month and say, we’ve got 1,000 leads this month and we made $3,000 from that. We spent $1,500, whatever the numbers are. If you want to even take it to another level, you can tag them by the audience that you’re targeting. For example, let’s just say you’re in health and you’re targeting men, 50 plus, and then another group is women, 30 plus, whatever. It could be anything that you’re targeting. You can actually tag them as that, and then track those specific things; so you know, not only do you know how much your average Facebook lead is worth, but you could also say, I have these two segments that we’re targeting. This one is worth this much; this one is worth this much. You can get pretty crazy with the metrics. I usually recommend that for people that are really advanced and trying to take it to a completely new level and gains a huge competitive advantage. That particular one is more for people that are a lot more advanced. Eric: It’s a little more work. It’s more profitable, but it is more work. If it’s something that competition isn’t really willing to do, that’s a good thing for people in our world. This can go into the testing, too, because that’s something that you’re definitely known for is heavy testing. Do you do the simple split, like A, B, split test or really how do you start your test? What’s the best way you start testing where people can do that? Jeremy: That’s a good question. I get extremely mad at a lot of people in the conversion rate optimization field. That was one thing that probably last year, it might have even been 2012. In the last two years, I was really heavily involved in that. I got offered a really healthy, six figure offer by one of the biggest conversion rate optimization companies in the world and turned that down. I’m still really friends with them. I just don’t want a job. There’s so much I can go into here. There’s a lot of things that you need to look out for when you test. One of the things you’ll hear—and I’m not going to give out any names here, because I don’t like to make enemies. A lot of people when they say, “We got an 80 percent increase doing this.” “We got a 60 percent increase doing that.” If you look at the actual stats and sometimes they’ll show you in a video, they’ll show you a screen shot of their stats and all that. A lot of times you’ll notice that the numbers are really small. Maybe they hit 95 percent confidence. If you’re familiar with testing, you’ll know what I mean, but it’s essentially 95 percent chance of that test being a winner. It doesn’t mean that you have a 95 percent chance of that test winning by that percentage. For example, let me pull up a test I have running right now for a Facebook campaign. It’s running to a landing page. The one call to action on there is “give me my free report.” It’s the control, call to action. The one I’m testing it against is “show me your sales funnel secrets.” That’s the A, B test. They get split up. Eric: Sure. Jeremy: Let me go to my results. It just became a winner this morning. The control, which was—I forget it already. The control, which was “get instant access,” I think it was, is converting at 24 percent and the “show me your sales funnel secrets” is converting at 39.68 percent. This is a fairly new test. It’s only been up a day or two. The percentage improvement is 65.34 percent. A lot of times you’ll see a lot of experts showing that, “Hey, I got a 65 percent improvement,” and they pretend they’re big, they know everything about split testing and all that. This one, by the way, has a 98 percent chance to beat the original. Eric: 98 percent, nice. Jeremy: What’s that? Eric: I said, 98 percent? Jeremy: Yeah, 98 percent. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: This one is a winner, right? What a lot of people won’t tell you—and this is something that’s really, really important to understand—is that, right now it has a 65 percentage improvement, but it’s everything always comes back to the norm. Even though it’s a winner, as more conversion data comes in—this is only based off, I have 43 conversions total. As I get up to 100, 200, 300 conversions and there’s more data, that percentage of improvement is going to come down and get closer to the median or closer to normal, where it would be even. Eric: Right. Jeremy: Basically, the thing to take away is that when people tell you, “We did X and we doubled our results.” Don’t listen to the percentage that they tell you, just get the idea. The idea, for my example, so you guys can test this, is test something normal that you would normally use; “get instant access,” “get free report now,” whatever is, versus something that’s a little bit more like a more novel, more “show me your sales funnel secrets.” It’s not something they see every day. Test that, but don’t look at the—when conversion rates experts tell you the numbers, don’t really pay attention to any of that. Just pay attention to what the strategy behind it was, and then do your own testing. Mine is 65 percent now. I’m going to let it run a week and after that, it might only be 30 percent or it might be 20 percent. It should still be a winner. It’s just that the percentage of an improvement is the one thing that—basically, don’t get too excited about it. Eric: Do you have any advice on how long they should let a test run? Is there a certain amount of views or clicks you should let a test, on average, run? Jeremy: That’s a good question. It really depends on a couple factors. What I usually do is look for at least 30 conversions for each of the variations. If you have two variations, wait until you get at least 30 to 50 conversions on each of them. You also always want to make sure that you do it for at least a week, so it can go through. You’ll find that out that some days convert a lot higher than other days. If you really dig into the data, weekends might do really bad or really good or whatever, so that’s the second thing. I use Visual Website Optimizer. Any split testing software you use is going to give you a chance to beat the original. You always want that to be above 95 percent. A little bit of a caveat to that is that if you have a business and you don’t have a lot of conversions, it takes you awhile. It’s really just a percentage game. It’s just a chance that you have. It’s a very high probable chance. This one, for example, has a 98 percent chance to beat the original. That doesn’t mean that it’s absolutely going to beat the original. It means that I have a 2 percent of that actually losing. Don’t think of testing as a definite thing. Think of it is as, this is the most likely scenario. If you’re testing and you don’t have a lot of data, if it takes you three months to get one test done, just go with whatever you’re comfortable with. If you get up to 90 percent chance to beat the original, then go with that. Just go with whatever. I usually recommend 95, but you also have to look at the time factor and the time cost too. Eric: That’s true. Jeremy: That’s just a couple things to think about. Eric: Let’s say you had that definite winner, and that Facebook button was the winner for you, the submit button; would you challenge that to another test then? Do you say, lesson learned for now, that’s the winner. I’ll let that go and move onto the next thing I want to test, whether it be a website or something else. Jeremy: That’s another good question. What I’ll do is this is a winner, has a couple days left. Whenever a week is over, if it’s still a winner, on the page, I’ll change it to the winner. At that point, I’m trying to think. I will probably, on this landing page, I will, I actually might do a little bit more of a big test. The landing page right now is all text based, so I actually might go to an all text, to just a video and an opt-in form, something big like that. Pretty much, when it comes to figuring out what to test next, I look for the things on the page that are going to make the biggest improvements; so going from an all text to all video. The call to action button, believe it or not, it’s a big factor. Eric: No, it is. I think a lot of people miss that. When I changed my opt-in on my site, I tested it all that time. Just simple changing of words can make a huge, dramatic—a perfect example, my Facebook fan page, a client had something like “send my email here.” We changed it to a simple, “give me the info.” It dramatically increased the opt-in that same day. We let it run and that’s what we’ve been using, but just simple, like you said could be huge. A lot of people drop the ball on the simple stuff. Jeremy: Yeah. It really can, especially, the shorter the page, the more that’s going to have an effect. If you have a 15 page long sales letter, doing “add to cart” versus “buy now” probably won’t make a huge difference, but if you have just a quick little landing page, then it can make a huge difference. Eric: Right. Jeremy: Even with that, another cool little thing to try just to get people’s minds, get it creative and going a little crazy, is one of the things—and I might do this for my next test, I’m not sure. I’m excited about the idea because I don’t remember seeing it before. You’re going to get an exclusive idea here. What I’m going to test now is “show me your sales funnel secrets” versus a big, huge call to action button that essentially has 30 or 40 words in it. It’s like, “Give me your secret that you’ve invested or that you’ve got over a million dollars worth of testing research under your belt. This is what you came up with;” something really, really long. Eric: Oh, nice, like a direct response order form button or kind of like “Yes, Eric, I’m ready to invest.” Jeremy: Yeah. Something like that, but in a button form on a regular landing page. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: To be honest, I have no idea if it’s going to work or not. It might bomb horribly. I have no idea. I’ve never seen that done before, so I’m going to do it. I, personally, think that it’s going to work, just because you have to read every word of that. Nobody’s ever seen that before, so the novelty of it, the newness and uniqueness of it. As soon as people hit that page, how do you not read that? Eric: Right. That’s going to be a button form, kind of thing, where they push it? Jeremy: Yeah. Eric: Yeah. I haven’t seen that done. Definitely let me know how that works out for you. That’s going to be interesting. Jeremy: I’m excited. Eric: That’s nice. I know what we’re talking about is once you’re doing the testing, they’ve come to your page or they’ve opted in. This is the thing, like you said, too, that you really work with clients with this, is building their sales funnels. If we could maybe dive into a little bit about how business owners can go out and find the holes currently in their funnels or if they’re starting out, how they can get that process at least started, to make it profitable from the jump. Jeremy: I’ll take that in two different ways. If you’re just starting up, what you want to do is—I’m going to try to make it as generally applicable to everybody listening. When you’re just starting up, let’s say that your order process is, somebody comes into your website, they buy and they get the thank you email saying, “Your order was successful,” and that’s it. It’s not really even a sales funnel, but it’s a way to get them in, I guess. What you want to do and most basic thing that I always try to get people to do is, number one, give away some type of value added thing. It could be a free report, a video, anything that gives value to the people that you’re trying to serve, to get them to essentially raise their hand and say, “Hey, I’m interested in what you’re selling.” You put them onto a prospect auto responder list. The point of that is to sell them your main product, whatever that is. After they buy your main product, you should have—I’m trying to think of a minimum here. I would say probably at least two other, either products or services. One thing is I always try to tell people, if you’re a service business, make sure you have product. If you’re a product business, make sure you have services. It’s really the only way to maximize your funnel and really find those hyper buyers in your list that are going to pay you for anything that you come out with. Eric: That’s a great point. Can I ask on a sidetrack, but related. Do you find that a lot of clients come to you from your products that you release or vice versa, they become your clients and then go after your products? Jeremy: Both actually. A pretty huge percentage of clients will buy a product, and then I hear from them three days later. It’s usually along those lines, for me personally. I mean, it’s different for everybody. My services are really expensive, in the four and five figures, so people want to make sure that I know what I’m talking about. I’ll get a lot of emails that say, “Hey, Jeremy, I just bought X product. Didn’t even go through it. I just wanted to make sure you were the real deal and you actually did what you said you did. That’s why I’m writing to you now and I want to talk about hiring you.” I get those emails all the time because I’m the sales funnel guy and people want to go through my process, and say, “Let’s see if the sales funnel guy has his own sales funnel.” Eric: Yeah. See if he’s just preaching there, exactly. Jeremy: I get a lot of those emails. I also get a lot of people that come in and they become clients or coaching students or whatever, and they want to learn more. These are mostly the business owners that they really love to learn. They just can’t get enough information, so they’ll be working with me as they’re going through my products. Eric: Right. Those are the best kind of clients, absolutely. Jeremy: Yeah. It’s kind of both. Eric: Nice. Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to get you sidetracked. I thought it was important to throw that out to the audiences that are trying to get some products. That’s a good way to bring in business as well. Jeremy: For everybody that has a service business. I’m doing this Facebook campaign. It’s giving away a free report, getting them into my funnel. I just had somebody, I think it was yesterday, where I looked at their—I like to look at the—I have office autopilot, I can see, somebody opted in for this and went to this page, and they filled out this form, so I can see the whole process of everything they did. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. It essentially tracks all the pages, and you can see the whole process that they went through. This happens all the time. This one is just one example. They opted in. They’re from Facebook, so they never heard of me before. They opted into the same landing page that I’ve been talking about. Three minutes after that, they went to my services page and read my service about building sales funnels and opted into that. They became a coaching prospect, I guess you could say, or a client prospect. It’s pretty cool. You get ancillary benefits of doing a lot of traffic. You should factor that in, by the way, to when you’re buying paid traffic. There’s always that little side shoe. If you’re selling products, there’s always a certain number of people that are going invest in your services and other products and things like that. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: I forget where I was going with that. Eric: I’m sorry. I threw you off. We were talking about, basically, with everything, that’s part of the funnel process obviously. Let’s say someone has an auto responder set up, someone has a product or services; is there common holes that you’ve found with clients that are maybe just leaking profits for them or something they could do to plug those holes up real quick? Jeremy: Yeah. That’s an interesting one. Holes in their funnels? It usually has to do with the frequency of communication. What that means is, essentially, a lot of people—and I mean, by a lot of people, I mean probably 90 plus percent of entrepreneurs—they’re kind of afraid of communicate with their prospects. Personally, I have a hard time understanding this. It might just be for me. I kind of got my chops reading J. Abraham and strategy preeminence where everything is just, you just start the relationship by adding value. That might be the reason for that. Everything I do, it starts with value. I don’t ever, ever expect anybody to do business with me before me providing them value first. The thing with communication is people are afraid they’re going to annoy their lists. It’s kind of bogus because they wouldn’t be doing business with you, they won’t be on your list unless they wanted to hear from you. If you have a weight loss website or if you’re a dentist and somebody signs up for your newsletter or whatever. They did that. It’s not like somebody is holding a gun to their head and they made them sign up for the newsletter. They did that because they want to hear from you. They want to hear about you, about what you do about how you can help them. About how you helped other people. To see you demonstrate your expertise so they can make a decision whether they should go with you or somebody else. The biggest hole when you’re building your funnel is, make sure that you’re communicating with your prospects as much as you possibly can. That includes auto responder sequences. It includes retargeting campaign, people who saw certain pages and didn’t buy what you have. You follow up with them with banners or Facebook ads, doing retargeting. You can do direct mail, emails, postcard, text messages, voice mails. There’s all kinds of stuff, but make sure that you are communicating with them frequently. Along with that, getting them in as risk free as possible. Usually start with whatever your lowest price product or service is and offer them that, get them into the buying cycle. It gets them used to spending money with you and then just constantly working on taking them up the ladder. Let’s just say right now you have a $37 product and a service that’s $97 a month, just for an example. Once you start getting people that are going to that $97 a month product or service, you should be thinking, what else? How can I add more value to these people and charge a higher price? Usually, that’s a “done for you” thing, or more of a step-by-step process. Coaching, you can do coaching in almost any business. Any business that you have. You want to make things faster or easier for people, and then get creative. Think of new products, new services, that you can charge more money for because there’s just a lot of people. There’s a certain percentage in every audience that will spend several times more money with you than you’re currently offering them. That’s a huge hole that I find in almost everybody’s funnel. They don’t have enough high priced, high ticket items. It really makes a huge, huge difference. If you’re selling $37 products and you have a $5,000 product, you only have to sell—or let’s just say for easy math, a $30 product and a $6,000 really high ticket thing. You have to sell 200 of the $30 products, for one of the $6,000 sales. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: If you’re selling 200 a month, you’re making $6,000 a month. You add in a $6,000 product and you sell one of those to one out of every 200 people, you’ve just doubled your business. It’s really, really important to have those high priced, high ticket offers in there. It really can do some pretty amazing things to your bottom line. A lot of times, if they are services or something like that, they’re higher profit too. Your profit margin is, typically at least, if it’s one-on-one coaching or something like that. Your profit margin is pretty huge. Eric: Right. Are you a big fan of the marketing ladder? Say, moving people up from the $39 e-book or product all the way up to the “done for you” services, et cetera? Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. I actually have tomorrow and Friday, we’re recording this on a Wednesday, tomorrow, Thursday and Friday, I have back-to-back in-person, full day consultations with a client. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: It’s $3,000 a day, so it’s $6,000 in two days. That’s essentially, for me, an upsell from my typical monthly coaching program. It’s essentially doing several months in advance, doing it in one or two days. It’s a way to do everything faster for people. It’s very, very profitable doing that. Definitely, because people want to spend more money with you, it’s just a matter of showing them the value. It really all comes back down to value. I could go out there and have $100,000 coaching program, but if I can’t show people that they’re going to make $500,000 or $1 million, then nobody is going to buy it. You have to find out how much value you can provide to people and then charge accordingly. Eric: That makes sense. I guess what you said before, and I wanted to ask you about this, I know you’ve said before the truth about price; what the main reason people really buy your product or services is? Jeremy: Yeah. A lot of people think that people buy based off price. In some cases, it’s true. Sometimes people literally just don’t have the money to pay you. I was talking to someone who desperately wanted to join my coaching program, but she couldn’t afford it because she was going month to month and she could barely even put food on the table. I was like, “Listen, don’t even.” She wanted to join, she’s like, “No, no, I’ll sell something,” or whatever. I said, “Listen, I’m not comfortable enough. If this doesn’t work, you literally can’t feed yourself. I just can’t live with that.” I guess that’s a good demonstration of my sales funnel selling her on my coaching program. It’s the same way with your sales funnel. You want to make sure that people understand the value that you’re providing them. That’s what it really comes down to. In most cases, like in 90 percent of cases, it’s not that something is too expensive. It’s that they don’t see that the value you’re providing is more than the prices they’re paying. If you’re offering, we’ll go to health, just because it’s easy and it’s relatable. Say it’s $97. If you don’t show the value is worth more than $97, then people aren’t going to buy. Whereas, if you show them that its worth $197, $297, $997, whatever it is, then people are more likely to buy on the higher you show that value, then the bigger gap between your price and the value. Obviously, with the value being higher, the higher your sales are going to be. That’s what copywriters do is, essentially, bring out that value and show the benefits and overcome the objections. That’s why operating it is so important, because when you really boil it down, that’s what we’re doing, is bringing out and showing people why they’re paying X dollars, but the value is X dollars times five, ten or twenty or whatever. Eric: Yeah. Like you’re saying, it doesn’t really have to be what you’re adding to it, you just have to raise the perceived value and that will raise the prices. Maybe a tip you give someone to raise the perceived value without adding more to their product or service or their widget? Jeremy: Yeah. That’s a good question. First of all, before I even get into that, raising your prices is probably the best and fastest way to grow your business. Eric: Right. Jeremy: I wish I could just get paid for saying, “Raise your price.” Because you can go into a million dollar business and say, “Raise your price ten percent,” and they can increase their profit by $100,000. If your margins are low, the lower your profit margin, the more you raise your price, the higher that multiple is. I can’t really do any examples off the top of my head because there’s a lot of math involved. Just basically, before I get into how to raise your perceived value so you can raise prices, make it a point to do a split test and raise your prices. If you’re nervous about it, I know a lot of people are, that’s totally fine. If you’ve never done it before, don’t be worried about being nervous about. Do it at 5 percent or 10 percent or something like that. If you think about it, if you’re selling something for $897 and you go to $997, that’s ten percent higher. People really aren’t going to notice that difference. If you go from $9 to $9.90, that would be 10 percent. People aren’t going to notice that. If you want to do that, number one, is if you can just price test and see if people will pay a higher price. A lot of times you’ll see that you can go up to 20 percent without changing anything about the offer and your conversions stay the same. Sometimes, not too often, but sometimes you’ll actually increase your conversions because sometimes people, if you have too much value and your price is too low, it’s actually one of those scenarios, where people are like, “That can’t be real. There must be something about this. That’s just wrong.” Eric: That’s a great point. That happens all the time because speaking in the marketing ladder a lot of times with a client I’ll do an SEO. From there, go onto the marketing and the copywriting because they need that afterwards, before or during. A lot of clients, a lot of packages, the price, they just couldn’t believe that’s what I was offering. I had a lot of skeptical people because they were coming from other companies that had ripped them off or had bad experiences with them. That’s a great point, sometimes people just don’t believe it if it sounds too good to be true. Jeremy: Yeah, people are skeptical. You kind of have to think as a consumer. Take your mind out of being a business owner. As a consumer, you have this natural sense of what a price should be. You can probably look at things and just line ten items up. You could probably get within 20 or 30 percent of that actually price, just by guessing at what the price would be. We kind of just have that internal filter of what a price should be. If you’re out of that range, people’s flags go up and they’re like, “Wait, something is not right here.” They get that gut feeling that just something is just not adding up. The conclusion they come to is, “Well, they must be lying.” Eric: Right. Jeremy: Going back to the raising perceived value. There’s a lot of different ways to do it. Number one is improve your copy. If you’re trying to do the copy yourself, hire a good copywriter, not somebody from elance or not somebody for $500 for a sales letter; unless you’re just starting and you really just don’t have money. It’s better than nothing. If you have a relatively successful business, number one, is hiring a copywriter or learning copy yourself. Then get some courses and learn how to write really good copy because, like I said, you learn to overcome objections. You learn to gain attention from people. You learn to develop interests and get them engaged in the copy to really showcase the benefits of your product or service. Number one is write better copy. Number two, is show your personality. That’s actually one thing that most people don’t really think of, but I’ve made a big, big shift in the last year, because I see a huge trend in going towards personality and transparency. If you follow my emails, you’ll see how personal I am. I’m always telling stories about my wife and my kids and stupid things that I’m doing, like last weekend I jumped into an ice pond for a polar plunge. It was for charity. I like to talk about that. One guy actually wrote back and told me I had a death wish. It was fun, talking about that stuff. It’s just me being me. You can’t be fake anymore. You have to just be whoever you are. If you’re a big flamboyant really off the wall character, and you’re really loud and obnoxious, then just be that. If you’re kind of quiet, shy and reserved, be that person. You can’t really fake it anymore with social media and all that kind of stuff. Number two is be yourself. Usually that’s done either through emails or videos. In case you’re wondering in your head, “Wait how does that increase perceived value of your product or service?” That really doesn’t increase the value of the product or service. It increases the value of you and the relationship that they have with you. It all starts with a relationship. They have to trust you if you’re selling something. If they don’t trust you, you could be giving away bars of gold for $1 and nobody is going to buy it, because they think you’re lying. That’s number two is build trust by being yourself, being personal, telling stories, and that kind of thing. Another thing you could do is add bonuses. Add whatever your product is, whatever your service, add little extras, little bonuses. If you’re selling an information product, you can have bonuses on little extra videos or how to get faster results; how to get better results with this certain technique or whatever. That’s one that probably most people know. Another thing, make it better risk reversal. Have better guarantees. You could have longer guarantees. You could have conditional guarantees, like a money back guarantee if they can prove that they went through your program or did your service or whatever and they didn’t get the results, then they can double you money back guarantee; something that takes the risk off that person and puts it on you. Another thing you can do is establish—juxtapose your product or service with somebody with an industry leader that they already trust. You can kind of borrow that credibility. For example, you have a course and you’re selling information. It really doesn’t matter. It could be a service, course, whatever it is. If you somehow involve either something in your industry or a celebrity or somebody like that and you kind of juxtapose, which essentially means you tie it into your product, then that increases the value because you get that borrowed credibility. Those are a couple ways to help increase your perceived value. The easiest way is probably better copy, I would say. Eric: Right. I agree. I always say this, but I think copy marketing and sales are the most important skills. The better the marketing, the easier the sales process and copywriting and salesmanship tie together. Jeremy: Yeah. Absolutely. Eric: Nice. One thing I want to ask you, not only to provide value for the audience, but selfishly, as well, I guess I should say. I’m coming out with a new course here. This is about product launching. Is there steps that you, personally, do when you work with clients or start off your launches on the right track? Is there something that you could do or suggest to people? Jeremy: I’ll let you take most of the credit for the product launch stuff. I don’t want to jump on your toes too much. I’ll give one recommendation that reverberates through the whole product launch sequence, and that is, proof. Proof is just everything. When I was launching the funnel formula, which is my flagship product that teaches you how to build sales funnels. When I did that launch to my own list, I didn’t do affiliates and all that kinds of stuff. That’s just too annoying for me. One of the things, I just focused on proof, proof, proof. Every single email that went out, every piece of communication that went out had some type, at least one piece of proof in it; whether it was a result that I got for a client, whether it was case study from a client, or an example of what happened when a client or me built the sales funnel or added a piece of the sales funnel. Telling them things they didn’t know, like, “Hey, in module three, there’s a really cool tip that let’s you do X.” That’s a style of proof, everywhere from there or telling about my past results. I did something that I was a little bit nervous of, but during my launch, and it really only works for selling to marketing people. I’ll give you an example of how you can use it in another niche. What I did was during my launch, I did it—I can’t even remember the dates. It might have been Monday through Friday, I forget. Throughout the week, I was telling my audience and giving them proof on how sales funnels worked, based on giving them numbers of my own sales funnel and how that launch was going. Eric: Nice, so a play-by-play of your launch. Jeremy: Exactly. I had screenshots. I said, “Hey, look, I would have made X dollars if I didn’t have this sales funnel in place.” I didn’t actually say dollars, I just did percentage. It was something like, “I made an extra,” I forgot what it turned out to be. It was something like, 33 percent of my sales were from selling the main product, and 66 percent of my sales came from the sales funnel, after they bought that first product. I said, “Look, I would have been leaving 66 percent of the money I made on the table if I didn’t have this sales funnel.” That was huge. I actually showed even more proof. I showed a screenshot from inside my office autopilot, which is my CRM, so they could see what I was talking about. One thing that you can do, let’s just go back to weight loss. That one is easy. If you’re selling a weight loss course, you can say, maybe you did a two week launch. You could say, “Somebody bought this on the first day, four days later, they’re already down eight pounds. This other person bought it and within two days, they were down five pounds.” Throughout the launch, you can talk about the results that people are getting since the launch started, results that people have done in the past. You could even do things like with scarcity, with deadlines and scarcity. Saying, “We only have 50 left and there are 20,000 people waiting on the list. They’re waiting for the cart to open. Make sure you get there as soon as I tell you it’s open, because there’s going to be 20,000 people that are going to buy this product.” You can do scarcity like that. Make sure you don’t lie. I hate when people lie in marketing. Eric: That’s a good point. My last course I did that too. It was a higher price course. What I did with the list that was on the list for that course was scarcity and social proof. I would literally list the people. I would say, “Jason from California invested today.” I listed the people’s first name and the state they were from of who invested that day during that launch process as social proof as well. I never really tested that, to be honest with you, against not doing that. When I did that, the results seemed to be more dramatic then when I did this before without doing that added factor. Jeremy: That’s one of those things that it’s a given that it’s going to do better. Hopefully, that helps with product launches. Eric: Nice. That’s beautiful. Just to clarify, I don’t know if you misunderstood. My course, it has nothing to do with product launches, but as this launched a new course or product. I know you actually worked with that, but my audience at the end, we’ll give out Jeremy’s website at the end. If you do have a product launch, you can talk to Jeremy as well. Jeremy: I thought you were having a course about product launches? Eric: No. It’s going to be a full marketing strategy, sales copy, the good stuff. Before we wrap it up today, because you shared a lot of good value and I definitely want to thank you for coming on. I know a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs listening may have a continuity service or maybe a continuity or monthly program, or maybe they’re even thinking about starting one, which could be very profitable. Can you share a tip or two before we leave today on how they can increase their retention rates? Some way to make their customers stick with them longer. Jeremy: Yeah. Let me throw out three different things. Number one is one of the things that I really love to do. Again, everything all goes back to value. As soon as they buy something, this is especially true with a continuity program, but it’s also true with any service, any product. I put people into what I call a “personal coach campaign.” Somebody buys one of my products and for the next, roughly 30 days, it depends, but roughly 30 days; they get emails specifically based on that product. The point of that is to get them to consume the product, not eat the product, you know, consume the product. Eric: Right. Jeremy: I guess it could be to eat the product, if you’re selling some kind of food. Eric: That’s awesome. That’s motivating them at the same time you’re there for them, right, supporting them? Jeremy: Yeah. There’s a couple things that it does. It establishes a relationship with them. You already have a relationship with them because they trust you enough to buy your product. A lot of people have buyer’s remorse. They’re kind of like, “Oh, God, I shouldn’t have bought it. Now I’m going to have to return this.” They think that a lot of business owners don’t care. They’re just in it for the sale. If you have a full 30 days of emails or could be a mix of emails, videos, whatever you want to do with it, the media. It really shows people that you care about them. You should care about them, regardless if it increases retention rates or anything like that. You should do this anyway because you care about your customers. The side benefit is that it increase retention rates, reduces refunds, because it establishes and builds that relationship. It all comes down to value and relationship. That’s one thing that, everything revolves around that. That’s one thing is to have a personal coach campaign. It’s just easy. They could be quick, just to say, “I really appreciate that you bought it. I want you to know that I’m here for you. I actually care about you and hope that you get the results that you’re looking for.” It’s not just like, “Hey, thanks for your money. See ya,” and you never talk to them again; which is what most people do. It’s rare that I get emails, maybe out of all the product I’ve ever bought in my entire life, I could probably count on one hand how many campaigns like that that I’ve ever gotten. You stick out like crazy, if you do that. Eric: Great. Jeremy: Number two … I’m sorry. Eric: I just said that’s great. That’s fantastic. I haven’t seen, like you said, I’ve really never seen it. I can’t think of any product or service that I’ve bought where there’s been an ongoing campaign like that. Jeremy: Yeah. For some people, it’s that they really don’t care. They just want your money. For others, they just haven’t thought about it yet. The second thing is send out some type of email. It could be anything. It could be a salesman calling them, a customer support person. It could be a postcard, letter, text message, whatever media you want to use. Essentially, do a stick letter. In direct mail, they do stick letter. That is kind of close to a personal coach campaign, but it’s just one piece, where you just thank them for the order. If there’s any membership details, you can put that in there. Just reassure them that it was a good purchase. They’re going to get value out of it. maybe add a little tip in there to help them get more value out of whatever they just bought, and then sell them another product. Eric: Absolutely. That’s a fabulous way to get your back end going. Jeremy: Yeah. The product should be, if you’re selling a supplement for, let’s just go back to weight loss again. If you’re selling something for weight loss, you can’t sell them a supplement for getting rid of toe fungus or something like that, because there’s no congruency there. Whatever it is, it has to be really congruent, and really make sense to add more value to take whatever results they’re going to get and take them to a new level. That’s the second one, send a stick letter. The third one, I just had it in my mind. The first one is the personal coach campaign. The second one is a stick letter. Third one, another thing you can do for retention rates is get people—this is kind of a mental type of thing. Get people to give you testimonials. You may not have really heard this before, I’m not sure. If you can get somebody to give you a testimonial and cement that idea in their mind that they love this product, it’s helping them. Who do you know that’s going to give somebody a testimonial and ask for a refund? Know what I mean? You can do this in your personal coaching campaign. If you do a campaign and get them to commit to doing business with you and to admit that you’re helping them and you’re doing a good job for them, they’re probably not going to ask for a refund. They’re going to stay with you longer. A fourth bonus thing that goes in with the stick letter is keep selling them additional products. Keep selling them additional services, because as they go down the rabbit hole with you, they’re going to get more attached to doing business with you. The more they spend with you, the less likely they are to ever leave you because you’re now their knight in shining armor that’s helping them fix whatever problem their trying to solve. Eric: Fantastic. Absolutely. That’s great. This has been awesome, Jeremy. I definitely want to thank you. You shared a lot of fantastic value, great value share here. I want to thank you for coming on the tenth episode here of The Fast Easy Success Marketing Insider. Before everyone goes out and dives in on all the tips and takes action on everything we talked about, can you tell the listeners where they can learn more about you, check you out? Jeremy: Two things, pretty easy. My name is Jeremy Reeves. I’ll tell you why I’m saying this in a second. You spell it J-E-R-E-M-Y R-E-E-V-E-S. The reason that I’m spelling it out is because the number one thing that I would recommend is just going on my website, www.JeremyReeves.com. On there, you can see whatever you want. I have free stuff on there. There should be a popup that comes up and gives you a free report up in the navigation bar, there’s a resources section that says “free” on it. There’s different things that you can opt-in to and get a whole bunch of free stuff, interviews and reports and videos and all kinds of stuff. The other thing is I have my own podcast. It’s called, Sales Funnel Mastery. Go into iTunes or whatever you listen to and do a search for that. You can follow me on my podcast. I do a lot of short sections, where I usually cover a single topic in five, ten, fifteen minutes, something like that. Little tidbits of strategy and stuff like that. Those are the two things, www.JeremyReeves.com for my website. If you want to look at any of the free products I have, free services or whatever is right for you, or check out Sales Funnel Mastery. That’s my podcast. Eric: Nice. I was telling Jeremy before the show, I checked out his podcast yesterday. I definitely recommend everybody check out there, and definitely his site. You get some good value. I recommend it. It’s definitely worth it. Jeremy, wow, it’s been an absolutely pleasure with you. Thank you for taking the time and sharing everything with the listeners. All you listeners out there, I hope you enjoyed the show and most importantly, take action on everything Jeremy and I talked about today. Before we go, if you guys could do me two quick favors, I’d really appreciate it. Simply hit that subscribe button, so you don’t miss out on a future business boosting podcast. If you stuck around this far, you obviously enjoyed the value share. Make sure you do those reviews and comments. I need your help in getting noticed and getting the value out to more people. I’m your host Eric Barton, a result specialist, signing out today. We’ll see you next week for another fast easy success marketing insider. Here’s to your success. It’s Jeremy back here again. I really hope you enjoyed that interview. For more information on this podcast and everything like that. A couple things, make sure that you’re subscribed to this podcast to make sure you’re getting every episode. This is the kind of stuff that I cover, everything that we went over in that interview; just really, really solid, insightful strategies for building your business. Make sure that you’re telling friends about the podcast, we can get the rankings up there and get the word out to everybody. Make sure that you’re leaving reviews and clicking the little stars; especially, in iTunes. That helps me boost the rankings and get more attention so everybody else can benefit from this. That’s pretty much it. I will see you at www.JeremyReeves.com. I really hope you enjoyed this. Thanks.

Panel Reuven Lerner (twitter github blog) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Curtis McHale (twitter github blog) Discussion 01:18 - The Power of “NO” Getting Things Done by David Allen Instapaper Evernote Omnifocus 06:56 - Just-in-Time Learning 09:02 - Saying “NO” in Hindsight Overcommitment 11:54 - Getting Comfortable with Saying “NO” Derek Sivers: No more yes. It's either HELL YEAH! or no. Confidence Risk Level 19:14 - Having a Financial Cushion Accounting The Freelancers Show 072 - LessAccounting with Steven Bristol 23:04 - Red Flags That Mean an Instant “NO” Client Investment Slimy People The Ruby Freelancers Show 054 - Red Flags with Potential or Current Clients with Ashe Dryden Disrespectful Clients 32:31 - Irregular Clients Project Minimums Referring Clients to Other People Picks Das Keyboard (Reuven) Kalzumeus Podcast 5: Quitting Consulting Via Productization (Reuven) About the Facebook platform, from Pando Daily (Reuven) Derek Sivers: No more yes. It's either HELL YEAH! or no. (Eric) Filmic Pro (Eric) Jaybird Bluebuds (Curtis) Next Week Book Club: Getting Things Done with David Allen Transcript CURTIS: So, am I the leader since I'm recording? REUVEN: I guess so! [Laughs] CURTIS: Whoo-hoo! ERIC: Curtis, leader! [Laughter] CURTIS: That's right, you can call me "The Leader" for the whole show. [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net.] [You're fantastic at code, but do you have an action plan to take it to the next level? The upcoming book, Next Level Freelance, will help you optimize your freelance business for happiness. The book is packed with actionable steps to make more money, case studies, tips to find more clients, and exercises for you to establish your desired lifestyle. Extras include: 9 interviews with freelancers who make great money while enjoying great work-life balance, videos on strategies to find quality subcontractors, and videos on making more free time by outsourcing your daily tasks. Check it out today at nextlevelfreelance.com!] CURTIS: Welcome to the Freelancers' Show Episode 72! Today, we're going to talk about the "Power of No". We have, Eric Davis joining us. ERIC: Hi! CURTIS: And Reuven Lerner. I'm Curtis McHale, filling in for Chuck today because he is, I don't know, he's off, probably sitting on the beach somewhere, not doing much. Like I said, today's topic is the "Power of No". As we've been coming up to the bookclub, I've been reading the "Getting Things Done" book and I think the thing that's continually been impressed on me more and more and more is that so many of the issues are all these tasks and 9000 things that are flying at us are just the power of 'No'. I actually been used it yesterday in my Instapaper queue at 97 articles and decided, "I'm never going to read half of these, why they even put them in?" and just said 'No' to them all and dropped down to like 25 actual real articles that I will make time to read. What about you guys? Eric, have you used no or have you, I guess, not over-committed yourself? ERIC: No. CURTIS: [Laughs] Thanks! ERIC: Oh! Yeah! [Laughter] ERIC: I have to say that a lot. While you're talking, I open up my Instapaper, and god! Maybe a month ago, I actually went in there and there's a button, I've been afraid to hit it. It basically says, "Delete everything that's aloo in 30 days." I've had Instapaper stuff in there that came from tags that I had in Delicious, which were from 2005-2006 that I've -- CURTIS: I don't know there is that button. That's just on the web view? ERIC: Yeah. CURTIS: I manually deleted all mine! ERIC: Oh, yeah! Look for an "Archive All", it's on the right side. But yeah, I overcommit stuff. I've had times where I've had over a thousand items on my to-do list, and the Getting Things Done stuff, that's not really...

Panel Reuven Lerner (twitter github blog) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Curtis McHale (twitter github blog) Discussion 01:18 - The Power of “NO” Getting Things Done by David Allen Instapaper Evernote Omnifocus 06:56 - Just-in-Time Learning 09:02 - Saying “NO” in Hindsight Overcommitment 11:54 - Getting Comfortable with Saying “NO” Derek Sivers: No more yes. It's either HELL YEAH! or no. Confidence Risk Level 19:14 - Having a Financial Cushion Accounting The Freelancers Show 072 - LessAccounting with Steven Bristol 23:04 - Red Flags That Mean an Instant “NO” Client Investment Slimy People The Ruby Freelancers Show 054 - Red Flags with Potential or Current Clients with Ashe Dryden Disrespectful Clients 32:31 - Irregular Clients Project Minimums Referring Clients to Other People Picks Das Keyboard (Reuven) Kalzumeus Podcast 5: Quitting Consulting Via Productization (Reuven) About the Facebook platform, from Pando Daily (Reuven) Derek Sivers: No more yes. It's either HELL YEAH! or no. (Eric) Filmic Pro (Eric) Jaybird Bluebuds (Curtis) Next Week Book Club: Getting Things Done with David Allen Transcript CURTIS: So, am I the leader since I'm recording? REUVEN: I guess so! [Laughs] CURTIS: Whoo-hoo! ERIC: Curtis, leader! [Laughter] CURTIS: That's right, you can call me "The Leader" for the whole show. [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net.] [You're fantastic at code, but do you have an action plan to take it to the next level? The upcoming book, Next Level Freelance, will help you optimize your freelance business for happiness. The book is packed with actionable steps to make more money, case studies, tips to find more clients, and exercises for you to establish your desired lifestyle. Extras include: 9 interviews with freelancers who make great money while enjoying great work-life balance, videos on strategies to find quality subcontractors, and videos on making more free time by outsourcing your daily tasks. Check it out today at nextlevelfreelance.com!] CURTIS: Welcome to the Freelancers' Show Episode 72! Today, we're going to talk about the "Power of No". We have, Eric Davis joining us. ERIC: Hi! CURTIS: And Reuven Lerner. I'm Curtis McHale, filling in for Chuck today because he is, I don't know, he's off, probably sitting on the beach somewhere, not doing much. Like I said, today's topic is the "Power of No". As we've been coming up to the bookclub, I've been reading the "Getting Things Done" book and I think the thing that's continually been impressed on me more and more and more is that so many of the issues are all these tasks and 9000 things that are flying at us are just the power of 'No'. I actually been used it yesterday in my Instapaper queue at 97 articles and decided, "I'm never going to read half of these, why they even put them in?" and just said 'No' to them all and dropped down to like 25 actual real articles that I will make time to read. What about you guys? Eric, have you used no or have you, I guess, not over-committed yourself? ERIC: No. CURTIS: [Laughs] Thanks! ERIC: Oh! Yeah! [Laughter] ERIC: I have to say that a lot. While you're talking, I open up my Instapaper, and god! Maybe a month ago, I actually went in there and there's a button, I've been afraid to hit it. It basically says, "Delete everything that's aloo in 30 days." I've had Instapaper stuff in there that came from tags that I had in Delicious, which were from 2005-2006 that I've -- CURTIS: I don't know there is that button. That's just on the web view? ERIC: Yeah. CURTIS: I manually deleted all mine! ERIC: Oh, yeah! Look for an "Archive All", it's on the right side. But yeah, I overcommit stuff. I've had times where I've had over a thousand items on my to-do list, and the Getting Things Done stuff, that's not really...

asset title: Episode 11: Pronouns - Adult supervision required filename: ra_11.mp3 track number: 11/22 time: 19:20 size: 15.86 MB bitrate: 112 kbps In Episode 11, Adult supervision required, we will blast off with the Dottore into the world of pronouns! We will focus on subject pronouns and object pronouns, both direct and indirect. Generally speaking, there are two major issues involved with Italian pronouns: one is which pronoun to use, and the other is where to put the pronoun in relation to the verb. We'll try to help straighten both of these issues out in our next three episodes. Let's listen and start the pronoun countdown now! Dialog: Italian Fuochi d'artificio Gatto Nero Dottore: Eccoli, eccoli, eccoli ... Venite a vederli ... Signori e signore, bambini di tutte le età, venite ... sentitemi ... Partecipate alle feste di San Giovanni, di Capodanno, di Natale, a tutte le feste dell'anno ... Qui ci sono i rumori più sbalorditivi, le luci più brillanti, i colori più stravaganti, il fumo più misterioso, qui ci sono ... i fuochi d'artificio Gatto Nero! Colombina: Dottore! Lei qui a Firenze! Che sorpresa VederLa qui! Ma che cos'è tutto questo? Dottore: Sono i fuochi d'artificio Gatto Nero! Sono i migliori, i più belli ... eccoci a Firenze, la festa del santo patrono, dovrei venderne tanti, ma mi pare che ci siano solo stranieri nei paraggi ... Cosa dicono, mia cara? Colombina: Lui vuole sapere chi è, Dottore, e lei vuole sapere cosa vende ... Dottore: Oh, devono essere molto giovani se non mi riconoscono ... Benvenuti a Firenze! Buona festa di San Giovanni! Ecco le candele magiche più'scintillanti del mondo! Colombina: Lei ne vuole una dozzina di candele magiche, e lui vuole sapere se ha dei petardi ... Dottore: Se ho dei petardi! Pulcinella, portami una scatola di petardi per il giovanotto ... E per la signorina, queste meravigliose candele magiche 'Gatto Nero', un balocco divertente per tutta la famiglia ... Oh, Pulcinella sì lo conoscono ... Eccoli eccoli eccoli! Signori e signore, bambini di tutte le età, venite ... Sì, sì ... i razzi 'Gatto Nero' sono giustamente famosi in tutto il mondo! Osservate ... Accendo ora la miccia ... Colombina, per favore ... Colombina: Ecco, Dottore Dottore: Grazie, mia cara ... Et nunc ... State per vedere qualcosa di veramente inverosimile .... Colombina: Oh! Lei senz'altro lo vedrà, Dottore! Dottore: Tre ... due ... uno ... Fuoco! Meravigliatevi ora davanti all'incomparabile pirotecnica 'Gatto Nero'! Dialog: English Gatto Nero Fireworks Dottore: Here they are, here they are, here they are ... Come see them ... Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages ... come, hear me ... Take part in the feasts of St John, of the New Year, of Christmas, all the holidays of the year ... Here are the most astonishing sounds, the most brilliant lights, the most extravagant colors, the most mysterious smoke, here are ... Gatto Nero Fireworks! Colombina: Dottore! You here in Florence! What a surprise to see you here? But what is all this? Dottore: It's Gatto Nero Fireworks! They're the best, the most beautiful ... Here we are in Florence, the feast of the patron saint, I should be selling lots of them, but it seems to me there are only foreigners in the vicinity ... What are they saying, my dear? Colombina: He wants to know who you are, Dottore, and she wants to know what you're selling ... Dottore: Oh, they must be very young if they don't recognize me ... Welcome to Florence! Happy St John's Day! Behold the most sparkling sparklers in the world! Colombina: She wants a dozen of the sparklers and he wants to know if you have any firecrackers. Dottore: If I have any firecrackers! Pulcinella, bring me a box of firecrackers for the young man ... And for the young lady, these wonderful Gatto Nero sparklers, an amusing diversion for the whole family ... Oh, Pulcinella, him they know ... Here they are, here they are, here they are! Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages ... Yes, yes, the Gatto Nero rockets are justly famous throughout the world! Observe ... Now I light the fuse ... Colombina, if you please ... Colombina: There you are, Dottore. Dottore: Thank you, my dear ... Et nunc you are about to see something truly incredible ... Colombina: Oh! You certainly are going to see it, Dottore! Dottore: Three, two, one ... Fire! Now be amazed before the incomparable pyrotechnics of Gatto Nero! ------ Dialog: Italian Una telefonata da Antonella a Firenze Antonella: Ciao, Eric! Eric: Antonella! Ciao, come stai? Antonella: Bene, bene ... Beato te! Ma qui a Firenze, è la festa del santo patrono: San Giovanni Battista! Eric: Oh, molto più bello di una pedicure! E cosa farete? Antonella: Cosa abbiamo fatto ... Ricorda che qui siamo sette ore avanti! Comunque, abbiamo visto il Corteo -- tutti con costumi medievali, sventolamento di bandiere, odore di cera, musica ... Eric: Che pittoresco! Certo Firenze è tutta pittoresca! Immagino che tutti gli studenti siano rimasti strabiliati non solo dalle manifestazioni culturali ma anche dall'arte fiorentina ... Antonella: Ci siamo fatti una abbuffata di arte rinascimentale! È stupenda! Ma la festa non è finita con il corteo ... Eric: Oh no! Non mi dire che Pulcinella ha fatto un'altra frittata con quell'esplosivo peperoncino calabrese! Antonella: Ma no, questi sono i fuochi d'artificio in onore di San Giovanni! Li stiamo ammirando dal magnifico Piazzale Michelangelo che sovrasta la città. Magari fossi qui con noi, Eric ... Eric: Magari ... ma devo scappare ora ... Antonella: Buona pedichiurata! Eric: Felici fuochi! Ciao, a presto ... Antonella: Arisentirci! Dialog: English A Phone Call from Antonella in Florence Antonella: Hi, Eric! Eric: Antonella! Hi, how are you? Antonella: Fine, fine ... Lucky you! But here in Florence, it's the feast of their patron saint, St John the Baptist! Eric: Oh, much nicer than a pedicure! And what will you do? Antonella: What have we done ...! Remember we're seven hours ahead of you here! Anyway, we've seen the procession--everyone in medieval costumes, flagwaving, the scent of wax, music ... Eric: How picturesque! Of course Florence is all picturesque! I imagine all the students were amazed, not just by the cultural events but by the Florentine art ... Antonella: We've stuffed ourselves with renaissance art! It's stupendous! But the celebration didn't end with the procession ... Eric: Oh no! Don't tell me that Pulcinella made another frittata with that explosive Calabrese pepper! Antonella: No, these are the fireworks in honor of St John! We're admiring them from the magnificent Piazzale Michelangelo that overlooks the city. If only you were here with us, Eric ... Eric: I wish ... but I've got to go now ... Antonella: Happy pedicuring! Eric: Happy fireworks! Ciao, talk to you again soon ... Antonella: Until we talk again!

asset title: Episode 10: Imperative - For best results filename: ra_10.mp3 track number: 10/22 time: 10:01 size: 8.23 MB bitrate: 112 kbps In Episode 10, For best results, we learn more about the 'noi' and 'voi' forms of the imperative mood. We also summarize the general rules for the use of pronouns with the imperative. By now, the 'noi' and 'voi' forms of the imperative should hold no mysteries: they're identical to the present indicative, and negative commands are made simply by placing a 'non' in front of the imperative form. Episode 10 comes to us from the center of Rome, where the Dottore will be showing tourists how to beat the heat of the Eternal City with Acqua Minerale Pansellegrino! Let's listen. Dialog Italian Acqua Minerale Pansellegrino Dottore: Eccoci nel centro di Roma, Città Eterna... in estate Città Eternamente Calda. Il sole spietato batte la fronte di tutti coloro che osano passeggiare a mezzogiorno... Turisti! Turisti americani, tedeschi, cinesi, persino italiani! The Tourists: Sì! Dottore: Avete visitato il Vittoriano? Avete ammirato il Foro Romano? The Tourists: Sì! Dottore: Siete andati ai Musei Vaticani? Avete messo la mano nella Bocca della Verità? The Tourists: Sì! Dottore: Avete camminato da Piazza Navona fino alla Fontana di Trevi? The Tourists: Sì! Dottore: Avete salito la scalinata in Piazza di Spagna? The Tourists: Oh, sì! Dottore: Siete stanchi? The Tourists: Sì! Colombina: Riposiamoci! Dottore: Sentite il caldo dell'estate romana? The Tourists: Sì! Colombina: Rinfreschiamoci! Dottore: Avete sete? The Tourists: Sì! Colombina: Beviamo! Dottore: Bravi! Bevete, sì! Venite, venite... Colombina: Andiamo! The Tourists: Sì! Dottore: Assaggiate l'acqua Pansellegrino! L'acqua piu deliziosa, più rinfrescante, più dolce di tutte le acque minerali del Bel Paese! Colombina: Assaggiamola! The Tourists: Sì! Dottore: Pulcinella, aiutami ad aprire le bottiglie e a versare quest'acqua frizzante! Dottore: Vedete! Sentite! Quanto è effervescente! Sorseggiatela! Colombina: Assaporiamola! The Tourists: Sì! Dottore: Senti, Pulcinella, è meglio non -- Pulcinella, mi raccomando, non fare così con la bottiglia! The Tourists: Ah! Colombina: Proteggiamoci! Dottore: Pulcinella! Colombina: Andiamo via! The Tourists: Sì! Dottore: Dobbiamo avvertire che i migliori risultati si ottengono quando non si agitano le bottiglie prima di aprirle... Colombina: Cerchiamo degli asciugamani! The Tourists: Sì! Dottore: Ricordate, amici... è il vostro amico il Dottor Balanzone che vi raccomanda Acqua Pansellgrino... gassata -- e come! English Acqua Minerale Pansellegrino Dottore: Here we are in the center of Rome, Eternal City... in the summer, Eternally Hot City. The merciless sun beats upon the foreheads of everyone who dares to stroll about at noon... Tourists! American, German, Chinese, even Italian tourists! The Tourists: Yes! Dottore: Have you visited the Vittoriano monument? Have you admired the Roman Forum? The Tourists: Yes! Dottore: Have you gone to the Vatican Museums? Have you put your hand in the Mouth of Truth? The Tourists: Yes! Dottore: Have you walked from Piazza Navona to the Trevi Fountain? The Tourists: Yes! Dottore: Have you climbed the Spanish Steps? The Tourists: Oh, yes! Dottore: Are you tired? The Tourists: Yes! Colombina: Let's rest! Dottore: Do you feel the heat of the Roman summer? The Tourists: Yes! Colombina: Let us refresh ourselves! Dottore: Are you thirsty? The Tourists: Yes! Colombina: Let's drink! Dottore: Fine! Drink, yes! Come, Come... Colombina: Let's go! The Tourists: Yes! Dottore: Try Pansellegrino water! The most delicious, most refreshing, sweetest mineral water of the Bel Paese! Colombina: Let's try it! The Tourists: Yes! Dottore: Pulcinella, help me open the bottles and pour this sparkling water! See! Hear! How effervescent it is! Sip it! Colombina: Let's savor it! The Tourists: Yes! Dottore: Listen, Pulcinella, it's better not to -- Pulcinella, I beg you, don't do that with the bottle! The Tourists: Ah! Colombina: Let's protect ourselves! Dottore: Pulcinella! Colombina: Let's get out of here! The Tourists: Yes! Dottore: We must advise that the best results are obtained when the bottles are not shaken before opening them... Colombina: Let's look for some towels! The Tourists: Yes! Dottore: Remember, friends... it's your friend Dottor Balanzone who recommends Acqua Pansellegrino to you... fizzy -- and how! Italian Una telefonata dal Colosseo Antonella: Ciao, Eric! Eric: Antonella! Ciao, come stai? Antonella: Bene, bene... Va ora in onda Radio Arlecchino? Eric: Va in onda, sì! E tu, dove ti trovi oggi? Antonella: Siamo qui all'Anfiteatro Flavio... Lo conosci? Eric: Ma chi non lo conosce, anche se solo dalle foto... Antonella: Ah-hah... e cioè...? Eric: Il Colosseo, certo... Antonella: Bravo! Sì, eccoci tutti, io, gli studenti, la guida... Eric: E hai chiacchierato con qualche Gatto-Imperatore? Antonella: Non ancora, però, proprio adesso mi sta intrattenendo un Gladiatore! Eric: Solo uno? Antonella: A dire il vero ce ne sono tanti nei paraggi... Eric: Mi auguro che gli studenti ti facciano qualche foto... Antonella: Questa è l'idea! Eric: Dopo ne sceglieremo una da mettere insieme a quelle di Nanni e Johnny... Antonella: Perfetto! Senti, ora ti saluto, adesso andiamo al Palatino... Eric: Va bene... salutami Biceps Gloriosus... e buona passeggiata... Antonella: Grazie, a presto, Eric... Eric: A presto e....? Antonella: Arisentirci! English A phone call from the Coliseum Antonella: Ciao, Eric! Eric: Antonella! Ciao, How are you? Antonella: Fine, fine... Is Radio Arlecchino on the air? Eric: Oh yes, it's on the air! And you, where are you today? Antonella: We're here at the Flavian Amphitheatre. Do you know it? Eric: Why who doesn't know it, even if only from photographs... Antonella: Ah-hah... an that is...? Eric: The Coliseum, of course... Antonella: Bravo! Yes, here we are, all of us, me, the students, the guide... Eric: And have you chatted with some Cat-Emperors? Antonella: Not yet; however, right now a gladiator is entertaining me! Eric: Just one? Antonella: To tell the truth there are quite a few of them around here... Eric: I hope the students are taking some pictures of you... Antonella: That's the idea! Eric: Later we'll pick one of them to put with Nanni and Johnny's... Antonella: Perfect! Listen, I'm saying good-bye to you, we're going to the Palatine now... Eric: All right, say hello to Biceps Gloriosus for me... and have a nice stroll... Antonella: Thanks, see you soon, Eric... Eric: See you soon and....? Antonella: Arisentirci!

asset title: Episode 9: Imperative - Build a better mousetrap filename: ra_09.mp3 track number: 9/22 time: 9:42 size: 7.96 MB bitrate: 112 kbps In Build a better mousetrap, we will focus on the tu forms of the imperative -- the most frequently used. While the tu forms of second- and third-conjugation verbs are the same as the present indicative, the forms for first-conjugation verbs are different. The imperative for these is the present indicative stem + -a, as in guarda! (look!). The second anomaly is in the negative command form, where non is placed in front of the infinitive of the verb rather than in front of the imperative verb. Let's listen as the Dottore demonstrates the new anti-mouse technology of the TopoKill 9000, a supertrap capable of catching more than a mouse!Dialog: TopoKill 9000Italian-------Dottore: Gentili ascoltatori, qui il vostro amico il Dottor Balanzone. Questa situazione vi è conosciuta? Non vi vergognate di dirmelo, lo so, lo so ... Colombina: Oh, Dottore, che orrore! che paura! che schifo!Dottore: Come dico ai miei allievi all'Università, 'Pudor non in habere sed in tenere est.'Colombina: E la soluzione, Egregio ...?Dottore: Eccola qua! La nuova TopoKill 9000! La tecnologia anti-topo presenta una supertrappola, senza pesticidi, che rispetta l'ambiente, riutilizzabile, con esca naturale!Colombina: Ma ci vuole molto tempo per--Dottore: È pronta nel giro di secondi!Colombina: Ed è di uso semp--Dottore: Di semplicissimo uso!Colombina: Ma funziona veram---Dottore: Efficientissima!Colombina: E ... non ci sono ... cioè ...Dottore: Igienica!Colombina: Ma per i bambini.--Dottore: Innocua per i bambini e gli animali domestici!Colombina: Oh, Dottore. questa nuova TopoKill 9000 mi sembra una meraviglia! Ma Lei crede che io sia in grado di utilizzarla correttamente?Dottore: Niente sarebbe più facile! Vieni, mia cara. Osserva cosa vuol dire 'semplicissimo uso'!Colombina: Oh, non lo so ... io, a dire il vero ... è che io ...Dottore: Non avere paura! Abbi coraggio! Eccola! Vedi quanto è bella! Dai, prendi.Colombina: Oh! E ora, come si fa ...?Dottore: Spingi la levetta ...Colombina: Così?Dottore: Brava! Spingila verso il basso .... Ecco! Benissimo! Colombina: Oh1 È facile ...English-------Dottore: Kind listeners, your friend Dottor Balanzone here. Is this situation familiar to you? Don't be ashamed to tell me so. I know, I know ...Colombina: Oh, Dottore, how horrible! How frightening! How disgusting!Dottore: As I tell my students at the University: 'The shame is not in the having, but in the keeping.'Colombina: And the solution, Professor?Dottore: Behold! The new TopoKill 9000! Anti-mouse technology presents a supertrap, without pesticides, that respects the environment, re-usable, with all-natural bait!Colombina: But does it take long to--Dottore: It's ready in a matter of seconds!Colombina: And is it simple to u--Dottore: Ever so easy to use!Colombina: But does it really wo---Dottore: Extremely efficient!Colombina: And, there aren't any, I mean ...Dottore: Sanitary!Colombina: But to children.--Dottore: Harmless to children and pets!Colombina: Oh, Dottore, this new TopoKill 9000 seems a marvel! But do you believe that I'm capable of using it properly?Dottore: Nothing could be easier! Come, my dear. Observe what 'Ever so easy to use' really means!Colombina: Oh, I don't know ... I, to tell the truth, it's that I ...Dottore: Do not be afraid! Have courage! Here it is! See how beautiful it is! Come on, take (it).Colombina: Oh! And now, what does one do?Dottore: Push the trigger ...Colombina: Like this?Dottore: Fine! Push it down .... There! Excellent! Colombina: Oh1 It's easy ...Dottore: And what had I told you? Now, remove the bait cover ...Colombina: Ah! Done! Dottore: Perfect! The TopoKill 9000 is now ready to be used! Place the trap in an appropriate place ...Colombina: Mice rarely cross open surfaces ...Dottore: So, set the trap with the opening turned to the wall!Colombina: Here? Like that?Dottore: Right there, fine. Just like that ...Colombina: And now?Dottore: Perform a check at regular intervals!Colombina: Gracious!Dottore: Pulcinella! Zounds!We must point out that the use of spaghetti as bait is inadvisable.Colombina: But, Dottore, what shall I do now to free this wretch's finger?Dottore: Simply press down rapidly on the little door ...And the TopoKill 9000 is already ready to be re-used!Colombina: Poor Pulcinella! Come with me. Don't cry any more ...Dottore: Dear listener: Get the TopoKill 9000 and say as the Dottore says --Mus musculus, Hail -- and Farewell!Dialog: A phone call from Antonella in ItalyItalian-------Eric: Pronto...Antonella: Ciao, Eric! Sono Antonella!Eric: Ciao, bella! Come stai?Antonella: Bene, bene... va ora in onda Radio Arlecchino?Eric: Va in onda, sì! Meno male che ci sei anche tu, ora, telefonicamente...Antonella: Grazie. Senti, fammi un favore, per favore.Eric: Come no! Dimmi.Antonella: Ho lasciato una cosa lì nello studio che volevo portare in Italia. Aiutami ora a trovarlo, poi me lo spedisci...Eric: Va bene... Dov'è?Antonella: Dunque... Guarda, vai alla mia scrivania...Eric: Ci vado... ecco, ci sono.Antonella: Sposta quel grande dizionario Zarganti...Eric: Oh, è proprio pesante! Spero che non sia questo quello che ti serve...Antonella: No no no, sotto il dizionario -- cosa c'è?Eric: Be', ci sono due foto, una di Nanni Moretti... e una di -- Johnny Depp?! firmate pure! 'ad Antonella, con amicizia...'Antonella: No no no no no, quelle non le toccare... . Lascia quel libro....Eric: Allora?Antonella: Sopra la scrivania, su quello scaffale... Prendi quella scatola...Eric: Cosa c'è dentro...?Antonella: Dai, dai, svita il cappuccio...Eric: Ahù... Antonella... ma cos'è questo?Antonella: Oh, scusa, hai preso quella sbagliata, scusa, scusa... Ci dev'essere un'altra, controlla.Eric: La vedo, ma oso aprirla?Antonella: Ma sì! Abbi coraggio, Eric!Eric: Accidenti!Antonella: Oh, Eric! Che mani di pasta frolla che hai! Quelli sono i miei fagioli saltellanti!Eric: Te li mando?Antonella: No, no, quelli non mi servono! Ma mi raccomando, non li lasciare lì per terra!Eric: Adesso pulisco...Antonella: Bene, Eric, non fare più sciocchezze. Prova a vedere nel cassetto...Eric: Va bene...Antonella: Se è lì, è proprio in fondo, in fondo... dietro tutte quelle cartelle... Stendi la mano, allunga...Eric: Ma-- Ah-- Antonella: Eric! Se c'è un topo, buttalo via! Che schifo!Eric: Ormai si sarà spaventato...Antonella: Senti, Eric, ti richiamo dopo. Mi restano pochissimi minuti sulla mia scheda...Eric: D'accordo, tanto, io devo trovare un'aspirina... Arisentirci.Antonella: A presto, mio caro...English-------A phone call from Antonella in ItalyEric: Hello ...Antonella: Ciao, Eric! It's Antonella!Eric: Ciao, bella! How are you?Antonella: Fine, fine ... is Radio Arlecchino on the air?Eric: It's on the air, yes! And it's a good thing you're here now too, telephonically ...Antonella: Thanks. Listen, do me a favor, please.Eric: Of course! Tell me.Antonella: I left something there in thet studio that I wanted to bring to Italy. Help me now to find it ... then you can send it to me.Eric: All right. Where is it?Antonella: Well then .... Look, go to my desk ...Eric: I'm going ... I'm there.Antonella: Move that big Zarganti dictionary ...Eric: Hey, that's pretty heavy! I hope that isn't what you need ...Antonella: No no no, under the dictionary. What's there?Eric: Well, there's two photographs, one of Nanni Moretti, and one of -- Johnny Depp?! Autographed even! 'to Antonella, in friendship ...'Be', ci sono due foto, una di Nanni Moretti ... e una di -- Johnny Depp?! firmate pure! 'ad Antonella, con amicizia ...'Antonella: No no no no no, don't touch those .... Let go of that book ....Eric: Now what?Antonella: Over the desk, on that shelf ... Grab that can.Eric: What's in it ...?Antonella: Go on, go on, unscrew the lid ...Eric: Yow ... Antonella ... what is this?Antonella: Oh, sorry, you grabbed the wrong one, sorry, sorry ... There must be another one, check it out.Eric: I see it, but do I dare to open it?Antonella: Of course! Be brave, Eric! (Have courage!)Eric: Yikes!Antonella: Oh, Eric! What a butterfingers you are! Those are my jumping beans!Eric: Shall I send them to you?Antonella: No, no, I don't need those. But please, don't leave them there on the ground!Eric: I'll clean up now ...Antonella: Good, Eric, no more foolishness (Don't do any more foolish things). Try looking in the drawer ...Eric: All right ...Antonella: If it's there, it's way in the back, behind all those folders .... Reach out your hand ... Stretch ...Eric: Ma-- Ah--Antonella: Eric! If there's a mouse, throw it out! Gross!Eric: By now he'll be frightened ...Antonella: Listen, Eric, I'll call you back later. I have very few minutes left on my card ...Eric: Fine, I've got to find an aspirin anyway .... Talk to you later.Antonella: Soon, my dear ...