Podcast appearances and mentions of eric well

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.

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  

For the first episode of the Newcomer podcast, I sat down with Reid Hoffman — the PayPal mafia member, LinkedIn co-founder, Greylock partner, and Microsoft board member. Hoffman had just stepped off OpenAI's board of directors. Hoffman traced his interest in artificial intelligence back to a conversation with Elon Musk.“This kicked off, actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago,” Hoffman said. Musk told Hoffman that he needed to dive into artificial intelligence during conversations about a decade ago. “This is part of how I operate,” Hoffman remembers. “Smart people from my network tell me things, and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I'm like, ‘Oh, yes, we have another wave coming.'”This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by VantaSecurity is no longer a cost center — it's a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it's more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity. But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta.Vanta's enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to:* Centralize and scale your security program* Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR* Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alikeWith Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank.For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started.Why I Wanted to Talk to Reid Hoffman & What I Took AwayHoffman is a social network personified. Even his journey to something as wonky as artificial intelligence is told through his connections with people. In a world of algorithms and code, Hoffman is upfront about the extent to which human connections decide Silicon Valley's trajectory. (Of course they are paired with profound technological developments that are far larger than any one person or network.)When it comes to the rapidly developing future powered by large language models, a big question in my mind is who exactly decides how these language models work? Sydney appeared in Microsoft Bing and then disappeared. Microsoft executives can dispatch our favorite hallucinations without public input. Meanwhile, masses of images can be gobbled up without asking their creators and then the resulting image generation tools can be open-sourced to the world. It feels like AI super powers come and go with little notice. It's a world full of contradictions. There's constant talk of utopias and dystopias and yet startups are raising conventional venture capital financing.The most prominent player in artificial intelligence — OpenAI — is a non-profit that raised from Tiger Global. It celebrates its openness in its name and yet competes with companies whose technology is actually open-sourced. OpenAI's governance structure and priorities largely remain a mystery. Finally, unlike tech's conservative billionaires who throw their money into politics, in the case of Hoffman, here is a tech overlord that I seem to mostly agree with politically. I wanted to know what that would be like. Is it just good marketing? And where exactly is his heart and political head at right now?I thought he delivered. I didn't feel like he was dodging my questions, even in a world where maintaining such a wide network requires diplomacy. Hoffman seemed eager and open — even if he started to bristle at what he called my “edgy words.”Some Favorite QuotesWe covered a lot of ground in our conversation. We talked about AI sentience and humans' failures to identify consciousness within non-human beings. We talked about the coming rise in AI cloud compute spending and how Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are positioned in the AI race.Hoffman said he had one major condition for getting involved in OpenAI back in the early days when Musk was still on board.“My price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word “robocalypse,” Hoffman told me. “Because I thought that the problem was it's very catchy and it evokes fear.”I asked Hoffman why he thought Musk got involved in artificial intelligence in the first place when Musk seems so worried about how it might develop. Why get the ball rolling down the hill at all, I wondered?Hoffman replied that many people in the field of artificial intelligence had “messiah complexes.”“It's the I am the one who must bring this — Prometheus, the fire to humanity,” Hoffman said. “And you're like, ‘Okay, I kind of think it should be us versus an individual.'” He went on, “Now, us can't be 8 billion people — us is a small group. But I think, more or less, you see the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there? And then let's make sure that we're having the conversations with the right communities.”I raised the possibility that this merely suggested oligarchic control of artificial intelligence rather than dictatorial control. We also discussed Hoffman's politics, including his thoughts on Joe Biden and “woke” politics. I asked him about the state of his friendship with fellow PayPal mafia member Peter Thiel. “I basically am sympathetic to people as long as they are legitimately and earnestly committed to the dialogue and discussion of truth between them and not committed otherwise,” Hoffman said. “There are folks from the PayPal years that I don't really spend much time talking to. There are others that I do continue because that conversation about discovering who we are and who we should be is really important. And you can't allow your own position to be the definer.”I suggested that Thiel's public views sometimes seemed insincere.“Oh, that's totally corrosive,” Hoffman said. “And as much as that's happening, it's terrible. And that's one of the things that in conversations I have, I push people, including Peter, on a lot.”Give it a listen.Find the PodcastRead the TranscriptEric: Reid, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm very excited for this conversation. You know, I'm getting ready for my own AI conference at the end of this month, so hopefully this is sort of a prep by the end of this conversation, we'll all be super smart and ready for that. I feel like there've been so many rounds of sort of AI as sort of the buzzword of the day.This clearly seems the hottest. When did you get into this moment of it? I mean, obviously you just stepped off the Open AI board. You were on that board. Like how, when did you start to see this movement that we're experiencing right now coming.Reid: Well, it's funny because my undergraduate major was artificial intelligence and cognitive science. So I've, I've been around the hoop for multiple waves for a long time and I think this kicked off actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago. You know, 10-ish years ago, Elon and I would have dinner about once a quarter and he's like, well, are you paying attention to this AI stuff?And I'm like, well, I majored in it and you know, I know about this stuff. He's like, no, you need to get back involved. And I was like, all right. This is part of how I operate is smart people from my network tell me things and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I went, oh yes, we have another wave coming.And this was probably about seven or eight years ago, when I, when I saw the beginning of the wave or the seismic event. Maybe it was a seismic event out at sea and I was like, okay, there's gonna be a tsunami here and we should start getting ready cause the tsunami is actually gonna be amazingly great and interesting.Eric: And that—is that the beginning of Open AI?Reid: Open AI is later. What I did is I went and made connections with the kind of the heads of every AI lab and major company because I concluded that I thought that the AI revolution will be primarily driven by large companies initially because of the scale compute requirements.And so, you know, talked to Demis Hassabis, met Mustafa Suleyman, talked to Yann LeCun, talked to Jeff Dean, you know, all these kind of folks and kind of, you know, built all that. And then it was later in conversations with Sam and Elon that I said, look, we need to do something that's a for pro humanity. Not just commercial effort. And my price for participation, cause I thought it was a great idea, but my price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word robocalypse. Because I thought that the problem was that it's very catchy and it evokes fear. And actually, in fact, one of the things I think about this whole area is that it's so much more interesting and has so much amazing opportunity for humanity.A little bit like, I don't know if you saw the Atlantic article I wrote that we evolve ourselves through technology and I'm, you know, going to be doing some writings around describing AI as augmented intelligence versus artificial intelligence. And I wanted to kind of build that positive, optimistic case that I think is the higher probability that I think we can shape towards and so forth.So it's like, okay, I'm in, but no more Robocalypse.Eric: I appreciate the ultimate sort of network person that you tell the story through people. I always appreciate when the origin stories of technology actually come through the human beings. With Elon in particular, I'm sort of confused by his position because it seems like he's very afraid of AI.And if that's the case, why would you want to, like, do anything to sort of get the ball rolling down the hill? Like, isn't there a sort of just like, stay away from it, man, if you think it's so bad. How do you see his thinking? And I'm sure it's evolved.Reid: Well, I think his instinct for the good and the challenging of this is he tends to think AI will only be good if I'm the one who's in control.Eric: Sort of, yeah.Reid: Yeah. And this is actually somewhat replete within the modern AI field. Not everybody but this. And Elon is a public enough figure that I think, you know, making this comment of him is not talking at a school.Other people would, there's a surprising number of Messiah complexes in the field of AI, and, and it's the, I am the one who must bring this, you know, Prometheus, you know, the Fire to humanity. And you're like, okay, I kind of think it should be us, right? Versus an individual. Now us can't be 8 billion people, us as a small group, but I think more or less you see the, the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there and then let, let's make sure that we're having the conversations with the right communities.Like if you say, well, is this going to, you know, institutionalize, ongoing, um, you know, power structures or racial bias, something else? Well, we're talking to the people to make sure that we're going to minimize that, especially over time and navigate it as a real issue. And so those are the, like, that's the kind of anti Messiah complex, which, which is more or less the efforts that I tend to get involved in.Eric: Right. At least sort of oligarchy, of AI control instead of just dictatorship of it.Reid: Well, yeah, and it depends a little bit, even on oligarchy, look, things are built by small numbers of people. It's just a fact, right? Like, there aren't more than, you know, a couple of founders, maybe maximum five in any, any particular thing. There is, you know, there's reasons why. When you have a construction project, you have a head of construction, right?Et cetera. The important thing is to make sure that's why you have, why you have a CEO, you have a board of directors. That's why you have, you know, you say, well, do we have the right thing where a person is accountable to a broader group? And that broader group feels their governance responsibility seriously.So oligarchy is a—Eric: a chargedReid: is a charged word. And I,Eric: There's a logic to it. I'm not, I'm not using it to say it doesn't make sense that you want the people to really understand it around, around it. Um, I mean, specifically with Open AI, I mean, you, you just stepped off the board. You're also on the board of Microsoft, which is obviously a very significant player.In this future, I mean, it's hard to be open. I get a little frustrated with the “open” in “Open AI” because I feel like there's a lot that I don't understand. I'm like, maybe they should change the name a little bit, but is it still a charity in your mind? I mean, it's obviously raised from Tiger Global, the ultimate prophet maker.Like, how should we think about the sort of core ambitions of Open AI?Reid: Well, um, one, the board I was on was a fine one and they've been very diligent about making sure that all of the controls, including for the subsidiary company are from the 501(C)(3) and diligent to its mission, which is staffed by people on the 501(C)(3) board with the responsibilities of being on a 5 0 1 board, which is being in service of the mission, not doing, you know, private inurement and other kinds of things.And so I actually think it is fundamentally still a 501(C)(3). The challenge is if you kind of say, you look at this and say, well, in order to be a successful player in the modern scale AI, you need to have billions of dollars of compute. Where do you get those billions of dollars? Because, you know, the foundations and the philanthropy industry is generally speaking bad at tech and bad at anything other than little tiny checks in tech.And so you said, well, it's really important to do this. So part of what I think, you know, Sam and that group of folks came up with this kind of clever thing to say, well, look, we're about beneficial AI, we're about AI for humanity. We're about making an, I'll make a comment on “open” in a second, but we are gonna generate some commercially valuable things.What if we struck a commercial deal? So you can have the commercial things or you can share the commercial things. You invest in us in order to do this, and then we make sure that the AI has the right characteristics. And then the “open”, you know, all short names have, you know, some simplicities to them.The idea is open to the world in terms of being able to use it and benefit from it. It doesn't mean the same thing as open source because AI is actually one of those things where opening, um, where you could do open source, you could actually be creating something dangerous. As a modern example, last year, Open AI deliberately… DALL·E 2 was ready four months before it went out. I know cause I was playing with it. They did the four months to do safety training and the kind of safety training is, well, let's make sure that individuals can't be libeled. Let's make sure you can't create as best we can, child sexual material. Let's make sure you can't do revenge porn and we'll serve it through the API and we'll make it unchangeable on that.And then the open source people come out and they go do whatever you want and then wow, you get all this crazy, terrible stuff. So “open” is openness of availability, but still with safety and still with, kind of call it the pro-human controls. And that's part of what OpenAI means in this.Eric: I wrote in sort of a mini essay in the newsletter about, like tech fatalism and it fits into your sort of messiah complex that you're talking about, if I'm a young or new startup entrepreneur, it's like this is my moment if I hold back, you know, there's a sense that somebody else is gonna do it too. This isn't necessarily research. Some of the tools are findable, so I need to do it. If somebody's going to, it's easy if you're using your own personhood to say, I'm better than that guy! Even if I have questions about it, I should do it. So that, I think we see that over and over again. Obviously the stakes with AI, I think we both agree are much larger.On the other hand, with AI, there's actually, in my view, been a little bit more restraint. I mean, Google has been a little slower. Facebook seems a little worried, like, I don't know. How do you agree with that sort of view of tech fatalism? Is there anything to be done about it or it's just sort of—if it's possible, it's gonna happen, so the best guy, the best team should do it?Or, or how do you think about that sense of inevitability on if it's possible, it'll be built?Reid: Well, one thing is you like edgy words, so what you describe is tech fatalism, I might say as something more like tech inevitability or tech destiny. And part of it is what, I guess what I would say is for example, we are now in a AI moment and era. There's global competition for it. It's scale compute.It's not something that even somebody like a Google or someone else can kind of have any kind of, real ball control on. But the way I look at it is, hey, look, there's, there's utopic outcomes and dystopic outcomes and it's within our control to steer it. Um, and even to steer it at speed, even under competition because.For example, obviously the general discourse within media is, oh my God, what's happening with the data and what's gonna happen with the bias and what's gonna happen with the crazy conversations, with Bing Chat and all the rest of this stuff. And you're like, well, what am I obsessed about? I'm obsessed about the fact that I have line of sight to an AI tutor and an AI doctor on every cell phone.And think about if you delay that, whatever number of years you delay that, what your human cost is of delaying that, right? And it's like, how do we get that? And for example, people say, wow, the real issue is that Bing chat model is gonna go off the rails and have a drunken cocktail party conversation because it's provoked to do so and can't run away from the person who's provoking it.Uh, and you say, well, is that the real issue? Or is it a real issue? Let's make sure that as many people as we can have access to that AI doctor have access to that AI tutor that where, where we can, where not only, you know, cause obviously technology cause it's expensive initially benefits elites and people are rich.And by the way, that's a natural way of how our capitalist system and all the rest works. But let's try to get it to everyone else as quickly as possible, right?Eric: I a hundred percent agree with that. So I don't want any of my sort of, cynical take like, oh my God, this version.I'd also extend it, you know, I think you're sort of referencing maybe the Sydney situation where you have Kevin Rus in New York Times, you know, communicating with Bing's version of ChatGPT and sort of finding this character who's sort of goes by Sydney from the origin story.And Ben Thompson sort of had a similar experience. And I would almost say it's sad for the world to be deprived of that too. You know, there's like a certain paranoia, it's like, it's like, oh, I wanna meet this sort of seemingly intelligent character. I don't know. What do you make of that whole episode? I mean, people really, I mean, Ben Thompson, smart tech writers really latched onto this as something that they found moving.I don't know. Is there anything you take away from that saga and do you think we'll see those sort of, I don't know, intelligent characters again,Reid: Well for sure. I think 2023 will be at least the first year of the so-called chatbot. Not just because of ChatGPT. And I think that we will have a bunch of different chat bots. I think we'll have chatbots that are there to be, you know, entertainment companions, witty dialogue participants.I think we'll have chatbots that are there to be information like Insta, Wikipedia, kind of things. I think we'll have chatbots that are there to just have someone to talk to. So I think there'll be a whole, whole range of things. And I think we will have all that experience.And I think part of the thing is to say, look, what are the parameters by which you should say the bots should absolutely not do X. And it's fine if these people want a bot that's like, you know, smack talking and these people want something that you know, goes, oh heck. Right?You know, like, what's, what's the range of that? And obviously children get in the mix and, and the questions around things that we already encounter a lot with search, which is like could a chat bot enable self-harm in a way that would be really bad?Let's really try to make sure that someone who's depressed doesn't figure out a way to harm themselves either with search or with chat bots.Eric: Is there a psychologically persuasive, so it's not just the information provided, it's the sense that they might be like walking you towards something less serious.Reid: And they are! This is the thing that's amazing. and it's part of the reason why like everyone should have some interaction with these in some emotional, tangible way. We are really passing the Turing test. This is the thing that I had visibility on a few years ago because I was like, okay, we kind of judge, you know, intelligence and sentience like that, Google engineers like it.I asked if it was conscious and it said it was because we use language as a way of doing that. And you're like, well, but look, that tells you that your language use is not quite fully there. And because part of what's really amazing about, “hallucinations”—and I'm probably gonna do a fireside chat with the gray matter thing on hallucinations, maybe later this week—where the hallucination is, on one hand it says this amazingly accurate, wonderful thing, very persuasively, and then it says this other thing really persuasively that's total fiction, right? And you're like, wow, you sound very persuasive in both cases. But that one's true and that one's fiction.And that's part of the reason why I kind of go back to the augmented intelligence and all the things that I see going on with in 2023 is much less replacement and much more augmentation. It's not zero replacement, but it's much more augmentation in terms of how this plays. And that is super exciting.Eric: Yeah. I mean, to some degree it reflects sort of the weakness in human beings' own abilities to read what's happening. Ahead of this interview, I was talking to the publicly available ChatGPT. I don't know if you saw but I was asking it for questions and I felt like it delivered a very reasonable set of questions. You know, you've written about Blitzscaling, so [ChatGPT] is like, let's ask about that. It's, you know, ask in the context of Microsoft. But when I was like, have you [ChatGPT] ever watched Joe Rogan? Have you ever been on a podcast? Sometimes maybe you should have a long sort of, you should have a statement like I'm doing right now where I sort of have some things I'm saying.Then I ask a question. Other times it should be short and sweet. Sometimes it, you know, annoys you and says oligarchy, like explaining to the chat bot. [In an interview, a journalist] can't just ask a list of like, straightforward questions and it felt like it didn't really even get that. And I get that there's some sort of, we're, we're starting to have a conversation now with companies like Jasper, where it's almost like the language prompting itself.I think Sam Altman was maybe saying it's like almost a form of plain language like coding because you have to figure out how to get what you want out of them. And maybe it was just my failure to explain it, but as a journalist replacing questions, I didn't find the current model of ChatGPT really capable of that.Reid: No, that's actually one of the things on the ChatGPT I find is, like, for example, you ask what questions to ask Reid Hoffman in a podcast interview, and you'll get some generic ones. It'll say like, well, what's going on with new technologies like AI and, and what's going on in Silicon Valley? And you know, and you're like, okay, sure.But those aren't the really interesting questions. That's not what makes me a great journalist, which is kind of a lens to something that people can learn from and that will evolve and change that'll get better. But that's again, one of the reasons why I think it's a people plus machine. Because for example, if I were to say, hey, what should I ask Eric about? Or what should I talk to Eric about and go to? Yeah, gimme some generic stuff. Now if I said, oh, give me a briefing on, um, call it, um, UN governance systems as they apply to AI, because I want to be able to talk about this. I didn't do this, but it would give me a kind of a quick Wikipedia briefing and that would make my conversation more interesting and I might be able to ask a question about the governance system or something, you know, as a way of doing it.And that's what AI is, I think why the combo is so great. Um, and anyway, so that's what we should be aiming towards. It isn't to say, by the way, sometimes like replacement is a good thing. For example, you go to autonomous vehicles and say, hey, look, if we could wave a wand and every car on the road today would be an autonomous vehicle, we'd probably save, we'd probably go from 40,000 deaths in the US per, you know, year to, you know, maybe a thousand or 2000. And you're like, you're shaving 38,000 lives a year, in doing this. It's a good thing. And, you know, it will have a positive vector on gridlocks and for climate change and all the rest of the stuff.And you go, okay, that replacement, yes, we have to navigate truck jobs and all the rest, but that replacement's good. But I think a lot of it is going to end up being, you know, kind of, various forms of amplification. Like if you get to journalists, you go, oh, it'll help me ask, figure out which interesting questions to add.Not because it'll just go here, here's your script to ask questions. But you can get better information to prep your thinking on it.Eric: Yeah. I'm glad you brought up like the self-driving car case and, you know, you're, are you still on the board of Aurora?Reid: I am.Eric: I've, you know, I covered Uber, so I was in their self-driving cars very early, and they made a lot of promises. Lyft made a lot of promises.I mean, I feel like part of my excitement about this sort of generative AI movement is that it feels like it doesn't require completeness in the same way that self-driving cars do. You know? And that, that, that's been a barrier to self-driving cars. On the flip side, you know, sometimes we sort of wave away the inaccuracy and then we say, you know, we sort of manage it.I think that's what we were sort of talking about earlier. You imagine it in some of the completeness that could come. So I guess the question here is just do you think, what I'm calling the completeness problem. I guess just the idea that it needs to be sort of fully capable will be an issue with the large language models or do you think you have this sort of augmented model where it could sort of stop now and still be extremely useful to much of society?Reid: I think it could stop now and be extremely useful. I've got line of sight on current technology for a tutor, for a doctor, for a bunch of other stuff. One of the things my partner and I wrote last year was that within five years, there's gonna be a co-pilot for every profession.The way to think about that is what professionals do. They process information, they take some kind of action. Sometimes that's generating other information, just like you see with Microsoft's co-pilot product for engineers. And what you can see happening with DallE and other image generation for graphic designers, you'll see this for every professional, that there will be a co-pilot on today's technology that can be built.That's really amazing. I do think that as you continue to make progress, you can potentially make them even more amazing, because part of what happened when you move from, you know, GPT3 to 3.5, which is all of a sudden it can write sonnets. Right? You didn't really know that it was gonna be able to write sonnets.That's giving people superpowers. Most people, including myself—I mean, look, I could write a sonnet if you gave me a couple of days and a lot of coffee and a lot of attempts to really try.Eric: But you wouldn't.Reid: You wouldn't. Yeah. But now I can go, oh, you know, I'd like to, to, um, write a sonnet about my friend Sam Altman.And I can go down and I can sit there and I can kind of type, you know, duh da, and I can generate, well, I don't like that one. Oh, but then I like this one, you know, and da da da. And, and that, that gives you superpowers. I mean, think about what you can do for writing, a whole variety of things with that. And that I think the more and more completeness is the word you are using is I think also a powerful thing. Even though what we have right now is amazing.Eric: Is GPT4 a big improvement over what we have? I assume you've seen a fair bit of unreleased, stuff. Like how hyped should we be about the improvement level?Reid: I have. I'm not really allowed to say very much about it cause, you know, part of the responsibilities of former board members and confidentiality. But I do think that it will be a nice—I think people will look at it and go, Ooh, that's cool. And it will be another iteration, another thing as amazing as ChatGPT has, and obviously that's kind of in the last few months. It's kind of taken the world by storm, opening up this vista of imagination and so forth.I think GPT4 will be another step forward where people will go, Ooh, that's, that, that's another cool thing. I think that's—can't be more specific than that, but watch this space cause it'll be cool.Eric: Throughout this conversation we've danced around this sort of artificial general intelligence question. starting with the discussion of Elon and the creation of eventually Open AI. I'm curious how close you think we are with AGI and this idea of a sort of, I mean, people define it so many different ways, you know, it's more sophisticated than humans in some tasks, you know, mini tasks, whatever.How, how do you think we're far from that? Or how, how, how do you see that playing out?Reid: Personally amongst a lot of the people who are in the field, I'm probably on the, we're-much-further-than-we-think stage. Now, some of that's because I've lived through this before with my undergraduate degree and the, you know, the pattern generally is, oh my God, we've gotten this computer to do this amazing thing that we thought was formally the provence of only these cognitive human beings.And it could do that. So then by the way, in 10 years it'll be solving new science problems like fusion and all the rest. And if you go back to the seventies, you saw that same dialogue. I mean, it, it's, it's an ongoing thing. Now we do have a more amazing set of cognitive capabilities than we did before, and there are some reasons to argue that it could be in a decade or two. Because you say, well, these large language models can enable coding and that coding can all, can then be self, reflective and generative, and that can then make something go. But when I look at the coding and how that works right now, it doesn't generate the kind of code that's like, oh, that's amazing new code.It helps with the, oh, I want to do a parser for quick sort, right? You know, like that kind of stuff. And it's like, okay, that's great. Or a systems integration use of an API or calling in an API for a spellchecker or whatever. Like it's really helpful stuff on engineers, but it's not like, oh my God, it's now inventing the new kind of training of large scale models techniques.And so I think even some of the great optimists will tell you of the great, like believers that it'll be soon and say there's one major invention. And the thing is, once you get to one major invention, is that one major invention? Is that three major inventions? Is it 10 major inventions?Like I think we are some number of major inventions away. I don't, I certainly don't think it's impossible to get there.Eric: Sorry. The major inventions are us human beings build, building things into the system or…?Reid: Yeah. Like for example, you know, can it do, like, for example, a classic, critique of a lot of large language models is can it do common sense reasoning.Eric: Gary Marcus is very…Reid: Exactly. Right. Exactly. And you know, the short answer right now is the large language models are approximating common sense reasoning.Now they're doing it in a powerful and interesting enough way that you're like, well, that's pretty useful. It's pretty helpful about what it's doing, but I agree that it's not yet doing all of that. And also you get problems like, you know, what are called one shot learning. Can you learn from one instance of it?Cause currently the training requires lots and lots of compute processing over days or in self play, can you have an accurate memory store that you update? Like for example, you say now fact X has happened, your entire world based on fact X. Look, there's a bunch of this stuff to all go.And the question is, is that one major invention is that, you know, five major inventions, and by the way, major inventions or major inventions even all the amazing stuff we've done over the last five to 10 years. Major inventions on major inventions. So I myself tend to be two things on the AGI one.I tend to think it's further than most people think. And I don't know if that further is it's 10 years versus five or 20 years versus 10 or 50 years versus 20. I don't, I don't really know.Eric: In your lifetime, do you think?Reid: It's possible, although I don't know. But let me give two other lenses I think on the AGI question cause the other thing that people tend to do is they tend to go, there's like this AI, which is technique machine learning, and there's totally just great, it's augmented intelligence and then there's AGI and who knows what happens with AGI.And you say, well first is AGI is a whole range of possible things. Like what if you said, Hey, I can build something that's the equivalent of a decent engineer or decent doctor, but to run it costs me $200 an hour and I have AGI? But it's $200 an hour. And you're like, okay, well that's cool and that means we can, we can get as many of them as we need. But it's expensive. And so it isn't like all of a sudden, you know, Terminator or you know, or inventing fusion or something like that is AGI and or a potential version of AGI. So what is AGI is the squishy thing that people then go, magic. The second thing is, the way that I've looked at the progress in the last five to eight years is we're building a set of iteratively better savants, right?It just like the chess player was a savant. Um, and, and the savants are interestingly different now. When does savant become a general intelligence and when might savant become a general super intelligence? I don't know. It's obviously a super intelligence already in some ways. Like for example, I wouldn't want to try to play, go against it and win, try to win.It's a super intelligence when it comes, right? But like okay, that's great cause in our perspective, having some savants like this that are super intelligence is really helpful to us. So, so the whole AGI discussion I think tends to go a little bit Hollywood-esque. You know, it's not terminator.Eric: I mean, there there is, there's a sort of argument that could be made. I mean, you know, humans are very human-centric about our beliefs and our intelligence, right? We don't have a theory of mind for other animals. It's very hard for us to prove that other species, you know, have some experience of consciousness like qualia or whatever.Reid: Very philosophically good use of a term by the way.Eric: Thank you. Um, I studied philosophy though. I've forgotten more than I remember. But, um, you know, I mean…Reid: Someday we'll figure out what it's like to be a bat. Probably not this time.Eric: Right, right, exactly. Is that, that's Nagel. If the machine's better than me at chess and go there, there's a level of I, you know, here I am saying it doesn't have an experience, but it, it's so much smarter than me in certain domains.I don't, I, the question is just like, it seems like humans are not capable of seeing what it's like to be a bat. So will we ever really be able to sort of convince ourselves that there's something that it's like to be, um, an AGI system?Reid: Well, I think the answer is um, yes, but it will require a bunch of sophistication. Like one of the things I think is really interesting about, um, as we anthropomorphize the world a little bit and I think some of this machine. Intelligence stuff will, will enable us to do that is, well what does it mean to understand X or, or, or, or no X or experience X or have qualia or whatever else.And right now what we do is we say, well it's some king of shadowy image from being human. So we tend to undercount like animals intelligence. And people tend to be surprised like, look, you know, some animals mate for life and everything else, they clearly have a theory of the world and it's clearly stuff we're doing.We go, ah, they don't have the same kind of consciousness we do. And you're like, well they certainly don't have the same kind of consciousness, but we're not doing a very good job of studying like what the, where it's similar in order it's different. And I think we're gonna need to broaden that out outcome to start saying, well, when you compare us and an eagle or a dolphin or a whale or a chimpanzee or a lion, you know, what are the similarities and and differences?And how this works. And um, and I think that will also then be, well, what happens when it's a silicon substrate? You know? Do we, do we think that consciousness requires a biological substrate? If so, why? Um, and, you know, part of how, of course we get to understand, um, each other's consciousness as we, we get this depth of experience.Where I realize is it isn't, you're just a puppet.Eric:  [laughs] I am, I am just a puppet.Reid: Well, we're, we're talking to each other through Riverside, so, you know, who knows, right. You know, deep fakes and all that.Eric: The AI's already ahead of you. You know, I'm just, it's already, no.Reid: Yeah. I think we're gonna have to get more sophisticated on that question now.I think it's, it's too trivial to say because it can mimic language in particularly interesting ways. And it says, yes, I'm conscious that that makes it conscious. Like that's not, that's not what we use as an instance. And, and part of it is like, do you understand the like part of how we've come to understand each other's consciousness is we realize that we experience things in similar ways.We feel joy in similar, we feel pain in similar ways and that kinda stuff. And that's part of how we begin to understand. And I think it'll be really good that this may kick off kind of us being slightly less kind of call it narcissistically, anthropocentric in this and a broader concept as we look at this.Eric: You know, I was talking to my therapist the other day and I was saying, you know, oh, I did this like kind gesture, but I didn't feel like some profound, like, I don't, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I did it. It felt like I did the right thing should, you know, shouldn't I feel like more around it?And you know, her perspective was much more like, oh, what matters is like doing the thing, not sort of your internal states about it. Which to me would, would go to the, if the machine can, can do all the things we expect from sort of a caring type type machine. Like why do we need to spend all this time when we don't even expect that of humans to always feel the right feelings.Reid: I totally agree with you. Look, I think the real question is what you do. Now that being said, part of how we predict what you do is that, you know, um, you may not have like at that moment gone, haha, I think of myself as really good cause I've done this kind thing. Which by the way, might be a better human thing as opposed to like, I'm doing this cause I'm better than most people.Eric: Right.Reid: Yeah, but it's the pattern in which you engage in these things and part of the feelings and so forth is cause that creates a kind of a reliability of pattern of do you see other people? Do you have the aspiration to have, not just yourself, but the people around you leading better and improving lives.And obviously if that's the behavior that we're seeing from these things, then that's a lot of it. And the only question is, what's that forward looking momentum on it? And I think amongst humans that comes to an intention, a model of the world and so forth. You know, amongst, amongst machines that mean just maybe the no, no, we're aligned.Well, like, we've done a really good alignment with human progress.Eric: Do you think there will be a point in time where it's like an ethical problem to unplug it? Like I think of like a bear, right? Like a bear is dangerous. You know, there are circumstances where pretty comfortable. Killing the bear,But if the bear like hasn't actually done anything, we've taken it under our care. Like we don't just like shoot bears at zoos, you know? Do you think there's a point where like, and it costs us money to sustain the bear at a zoo, do you think there are cases where we might say, oh man, now there's an ethical question around unpluggingReid: I think it's a when, not an if.Eric: Yeah.Reid: Right? I mean, it may be a when, once again, just like AGI, that's a fair way's out. But it's a when, not an if. And by the way, I think that's again, part of the progress that we make because we think about like, how should we be treating it? Because, you know, like for example, if you go back a hundred, 150 years, the whole concept of animal rights doesn't exist in humans.You know, it's like, hey, you wanna, you want to torture animal X to death, you know, like you're queer, but you're, you're, you're allowed to do that. That's an odd thing for you to do. And maybe it's kind of like, like distasteful, like grungy bad in some way, but , you know, it's like, okay. Where's now you're like, oh, that person is, is like going out to try to go torture animals! We should like get them in an institution, right? Like, that's not okay. You know, what is that further progress for the rights and lives? And I think it will ultimately come to things that we think are, when it gets to kind of like things that have their own agency and have their own consciousness and sets of existence.We should be including all of that in some, in some grand or elevated, you know, kind of rights conceptions.Eric: All right, so back back to my listeners who, you know, wanna know where to invest and make money off this and, you know.Reid: [laughs] It isn't from qualia and consciousness. Oh, wait.Eric: Who do you think are the key players? The key players in the models. Then obviously there are more sort of, I don't know if we're calling them vertical solutions or product oriented or whatever, however you think about them.But starting with the models, like who do you see as sort of the real players right now? Are you counting out a Google or do you think they'll still, you know, sort of show?Reid: Oh no. I think Google will show up. And obviously, you know, Open AI, Microsoft has done a ton of stuff. I co-founded Inflection last year with Mustafa Suleyman. We have a just amazing team and I do see a lot of teams, so I'm.Eric: And that's to build sort of the foundational…Reid: Yeah, they're gonna, well, they're building their own models and they're gonna build some things off those models.We haven't really said what they are yet. But that's obviously going to be kind of new models. Adept, another Greylock investment building its own models, Character is building its own models, Anthropic is building its own models. And Anthropic is, you know, Dario and the crew is smart folks from Open AI, they're, they're doing stuff within a kind of a similar research program that Open AI is doing.And so I think those are the ones that I probably most track.Eric: Character's an interesting case and you know, we're still learning more about that company. You know, I was first to report they're looking to raise 250 million. My understanding is that what's interesting is they're building the models, but then for a particular use case, right?Or like, it's really a question of leverage or like, do people need to build the models to be competitive or do you think there will be... can you build a great business on top of Stability or Open AI or do you need to do it yourself?Reid: I think you can, but the way you do it is you can't say it's cause I have unique access to the model. It has to be, you know, I have a business that has network effects or I'm well integrated in enterprise, or I have another deep stack of technology that I'm bringing into it. It can't just be, I'm a lightweight front end to it because then other people can be the lightweight front end.So you can build great businesses. I think with it, I do think that people will both build businesses off, you know, things like the Open AI APIs and I think people will also train models. Because I think one of the things that will definitely happen is a lot of… not just will large models be built in ways that are interesting and compelling, but I think a bunch of smaller models will be built that are specifically tuned and so forth.And there's all kinds of reasons. Everything from you can build them to do something very specific, but also like inference cost, does it, does it run on a low compute or low power footprint? You know, et cetera, et cetera. You know, AI doctor, AI tutor, um, you know, duh and on a cell phone. And, um, and so, you know, I think like all of that, I think the short answer to this is allEric: Right. Do you think we are in a compute arms race still, or do you, do you think this is gonna continue where it's just if you can raise a billion dollars to, to buy sort of com GPU access basically from Microsoft or Amazon or Google, you're, you're gonna be sort of pretty far ahead? Or how do you think about that sort of the money, the money and computing rates shaping up?Reid: So I kind of think about two. There's kind of two lines of trends. There's one line, which is the larger and larger models, which by the way, you say, well, okay, so does the scale compute and one x flop goes to two x flops, and does your performance function go up by that?And it doesn't have to go up by a hundred percent or, or two x or plus one x. It could go up by 25%, but sometimes that really matters. Coding doctors, you know, legal, other things. Well, it's like actually, in fact, it, even though it's twice as expensive, a 25% increase in, you know, twice as expensive of compute, the 25% increase in performance is worth it. And I think you then have a large scale model, like a set of things that are kind of going along need to be using the large scale models.Then I think there's a set of things that don't have that need. And for example, that's one of the reasons I wasn't really surprised at all by the profusion of image generation, cuz those are, you know, generally speaking, trainable for a million to $10 million. I think there's gonna be a range of those.I think, you know, maybe someone will figure out how to do, you know, a hundred-million version and once they figured out how to do a hundred-million dollar version, someone also figured out how to do the 30-million version of that hundred-million dollar version. And there's a second line going on where all of these other smaller models will fit into interesting businesses. And then I think a lot of people will either deploy an open source model that they're using themselves, train their own model, get a special deal with, like a model provider or something else as a way of doing it.And so I think the short answer is there will be both, and you have to be looking at this from what's the specific that this business is doing. You know, the classic issues of, you know, how do you go to market, how do you create a competitive mode? What are the things that give you real, enduring value that people will pay for in some way in a business?All of the, those questions still apply, but the, but, but there's gonna be a panoply of answers, depending on the different models of how it playsEric: Do you think spend on this space in terms of computing will be larger in ‘24 and then larger in 25?Reid: Yes. Unquestionably,Eric: We're on the, we're still on the rise.Reid: Oh, yes. Unquestionably.Eric: That's great for a certain company that you're on the board of.Reid: Well look, and it's not just great for Microsoft. There are these other ones, you know, AWS, Google, but…Eric: Right. It does feel like Amazon's somewhat sleepy here. Do you have any view there?Reid: Well, I think they have begun to realize, what I've heard from the market is that they've begun to realize that they should have some stuff here. I don't think they've yet gotten fully underway. I think they are trying to train some large language models themselves. I don't know if they've even realized that there is a skill to training those large language models, cause like, you know, sometimes people say, well, you just turn on and you run the, run the large language model, the, the training regime that you read in the papers and then you make stuff.We've seen a lot of failures, of people trying to build these things and failing to do so, so, you know, there's, there's an expertise that you learn in doing it as well. And so I think—Eric: Sorry to interrupt—if Microsoft is around Open AI and Google is around Anthropic, is Amazon gonna be around stability? That's sort of the question that I'll put out to the world. I don't know if you have.Reid: I certainly don't know anything. And in the case of, you know, very, very, very, um, a politely said, um, Anthropic and OpenAI have scale with huge models. Stability is all small models, so, hmm.Eric: Yeah. Interesting. I, I don't think I've asked you sort of directly about sort of stepping off the Open AI board. I mean, I would assume you would prefer to be on the board or…?Reid: Yeah. Well, so look, it was a funny thing because, um, you know, I was getting more and more requests from various Greylock portfolio companies cause we've been investing in AI stuff for over five years. Like real AI, not just the, we call it “software AI”, but actual AI companies.For a while and I was getting more and more requests to do it and I was like oh, you know, what I did before was, well here's the channel. Like here is the guy who, the person who handles the API request goes, go talk to them. Like, why can't you help me? I was like, well, I'm on the board.I have a responsibility to not be doing that. And then I realized that, oh s**t, it's gonna look more and more. Um, I might have a real conflict of interest here, even as we're really carefully navigating it and, and it was really important cause you know various forces are gonna kind of try to question the frankly, super deep integrity of Open AI.It's like, look, I, Sam, I think it might be best even though I remain a fan, an ally, um, to helping, I think it may be best for Open AI. And generally to step off a board to avoid a conflict of interest. And we talked about a bunch and said, okay, fine, we'll do it. And you know, I had dinner with Sam last night and most of what we were talking about was kind of the range of what's going on and what are the important things that open eyes need to solve? And how should we be interfacing with governments so that governments understand? What are the key things that, that, that should be in the mix? And what great future things for humanity are really important not to fumble in the, in the generally, like everyone going, oh, I'm worrying. And then I said, oh, I got a question for you. And he's like, yeah, okay. I'm like, now that I'm no longer on the board, could I ask you to personally look at unblocking, my portfolio company's thing to the API? Because I couldn't ever ask you that question before. Cause I would be unethical. But now I'm not on the board, so can I ask the question?He's like, sure, I'll look into it. I'm like, great, right? And that's the substance of it, which I never would've done before. But that wasn't why, I mean, obviously love Sam and the Open AI team.Eric: The fact that you're sort of a Democratic super donor was that in the calculus? Or, because I mean, we are seeing Republican… well, I didn't think that at all coming into this conversation, but just hearing what you're saying. Looking at it now, it feels like Republicans are like trying to find something to be angry about.Reid: WellEric: These AI things, I don't quite…Reid: The unfortunate thing about the, the most vociferous of the republican media ecosystem is they just invent fiction, like their hallucination full out.Eric: Right.Reid: I mean, it just like, I mean, the amount of just like, you know, 2020 election denial and all the rest, which you can tell from having their text released from Fox News that like, here are these people who are on camera going on where you have a question about, you know, what happened in the election.And they're texting each other going, oh my God, this is insane. This is a coup, you know, da da da. And you're like, okay. Anyway, so, so all like, they don't require truth to generate. Heat and friction. So that was, wasn't that no, no. It's just really, it's kind of the question of, when you're serving on a board, you have to understand what your mission is very deeply and, and to navigate it.And part of the 501(C)(3) boards is to say, look, obviously I contribute by being a board member and helping and navigate various circumstances and all the rest. And, you know, I can continue to be a counselor and an aid to the company not being on the board. And one of the things I think is gonna be very important for the next X years, for the entire world to know is that open AI takes its ethics super seriously,Eric: Right.Reid: As do I.Eric: Does that fit with having to invest? I mean, there are lots of companies that do great things. They have investors. I believe in companies probably more than personally I believe in charities to accomplish things. But the duality of OpenAI is extremely confusing. Like, was Greylock, did Greylock itself invest a lot or you invested early as an angel?Reid: I was the founding investor as an angel, as a, as a program related investment from my foundation. Because like I started, I was among the first people to make a philanthropic donation to Open AI. Just straight out, you know, here's a grant by Wednesday, then Sam and Crew came up with this idea for doing this commercial lp, and I said, look, I, I'll help and I have no idea if this will be an interesting economic investment.They didn't have a business plan, they didn't have a revenue plan, they didn't have a product plan. I brought it to Greylock. We talked about it and they said, look, we think this will be possibly a really interesting technology, but you know, part of our responsibility to our LPs, which you know, includes a whole bunch of universities and else we invest in businesses and there is no business plan.Eric: So is that the Khosla did? Khosla's like we invested wild things. Anyway, we don't care. That's sort of what Vinod wants to project anyway, so yeah.Reid: You know, yes, that's exactly the same. So I put them 50 and then he put in a, I think he was the only venture fund investing in that round. But like, there was no business plan, there was no revenue model, there was no go to market…Eric: Well, Sam basically says, someday we're gonna have AGI and we're gonna ask you how to make a bunch of money? Like, is he, that's a joke, right? Or like, how much is he joking?Reid: It's definitely, it's not a 100% joke and it's not a 0% joke. It's a question around, the mission is really about how do we get to AGI or as close to AGI as useful and to make it useful for humanity. And by the way, the closer you get to AGI, the more interesting technologies fall out, including the ability to have the technology itself solve various problems.So if you said, we have a business model problem, it's like, well ask the thing. Now, if you currently sit down and ask, you know, ChatGPT what the business model is, you'll get something pretty vague and generic that wouldn't get you a meeting with a venture capitalist because it's like “we will have ad supported”... you're like, okay. Right.Eric: Don't you have a company that's trying to do pitch decks now or something?Reid: Oh yeah, Tome. No, and it's awesome, but by the way, that's the right kind of thing. Because, because what it does is you say, hey, give me a set of tiles, together with images and graphics and things arguing X and then you start working with the AI to improve it. Say, oh, I need a slide that does this and I need a catchier headline here, and, and you know, da da da.And then you, and you know, obviously you can edit it yourself and so on. So that's the kind of amplification. Now you don't say, give me my business model, right?Eric: You're like, I have this business model, like articulate it.Reid: Exactly.Eric: Um, I, politics, I mean, I feel like we, we live through such like a… you know what I mean, I feel like Silicon Valley, you know, has like, worked on PE everybody be able to, you know, everybody can get along. There's sort of competition, but then you sort of still stay close to any, everybody like, you, you especially like are good, you know, you you are in the PayPal mafia with a lot of people who are fairly very conservative now.The Trump years broke that in some ways and particular, and that, yeah. So how did you maintain those relationships?I see headlines that say you're friends with Peter Thiel. What is, what's the state of your friendship with Peter Thiel and how, how did it survive?I guess the Trump years is the question.Reid: Well, I think the thing that Peter and I learned when we were undergraduate at Stanford together is it's very important to… cause we, you know, I was a lefty. He was a righty. We'd argue a lot to maintain conversation and to argue things. It's difficult to argue on things that feel existential and it's ethically challenged is things around Trump. You know, the, you know, Trump feels to be a corrosive asset upon our democracy that is disfiguring us and staining us to the world. And so to have a dispassionate argument about it is, it's challenging. And it ends up with some uneven ground and statements like, I can't believe you're f*****g saying that, as part of dialogue.But on the other hand, you know, maintaining dialogue is I think part of how we make progress as society. And I basically sympathetic to people as long as they are legitimately and earnestly and committed to the dialogue and discussion of truth between them and committed otherwise.And so, you know, there are folks from the PayPal years that I don't really spend much time talking to, right?. There are others that I do because that conversation about discovering who we are and who we should be is really important. And you can't allow your own position to be the definer.It almost goes back to what we were talking about, the AI side, which is make sure you're talking to other smart people who challenge you to make sure you're doing the right thing. And that's, I think, a good general life principle.Eric: Well, you know, I feel like part of what my dream of like the Silicon Valley world is that we have these, you know, we have, Twitter is like the open forum. We're having sincere sort of on the level debates, but then you see something like, you know, the…Reid: You don't think it's the modern Seinfeld show I got? Well, not Seinfeld, um, Springer, Jerry Springer.Eric: Yeah, that's, yeah. Right. But I just feel like the sort of like, if the arguments are on the level issue is my problem with some of the sort of, I don't know, Peter Theil arguments, that he's not actually publicly advancing his beliefs in a sincere way, and that that's almost more corrosive.Reid: Oh, that's totally corrosive. And as much as that's happening, it's terrible. And that's one of the things that I, um, you know, in conversations I have, I push people including Peter on a lot.Eric: Yeah. Are you still, are you still gonna donate a lot, or what was, what's your, are you as animated about the Democratic party and working through sort of donor channels at the moment?Reid: Well, what I would say is I think that we have a responsibility to try to make, like with, it's kind of the Spider-Man ethics. With power comes responsibility, with wealth comes responsibility, and you have to try to help contribute to… what is the better society that we should be living and navigating in?And so I stay committed on that basis. And I do think there are some really amazing people in the administration. I think Biden is kind of a good everyday guy.Eric: Yeah.Reid: In fact, good for trying to build bridges in the country. I think there are people like Secretary Raimondo and Secretary Buttigieg who are thinking intensely about technology and what should be done in the future.And I think there's other folks now, I think there's a bunch of folks on the democratic side that I think are more concerned with their demagoguery than they are with the right thing in society. And so I tend to be, you know, unsympathetic to, um, you know…Eric: I know, Michael Moritz, it's Sequoia, that oped sort of criticizing San Francisco government, you know, and there's, there's certainly this sort of woke critique of the Democratic Party. I'm curious if there's a piece of it sort of outside of he governance that you're…Reid: Well, the interesting thing about woke is like, well, we're anti woke. And you're like, well, don't you think being awake is a good thing? I mean, it's kind of a funny thing. Eric: And sort of the ill-defined nature of woke is like key to the allegation because it's like, what's the substantive thing you're saying there? And you know, I mean we we're seeing Elon tweet about race right now, which is sort of terrifying anyway.Reid: Yeah. I think the question on this stuff is to try to say, look, people have a lot of different views and a lot of different things and some of those views are, are bad, especially in kind of minority and need to be advocated against in various… part of why we like democracy is to have discourse.I'm very concerned about the status of public discourse. And obviously most people tend to focus that around social media, which obviously has some legitimate things that we need to talk about. But on the other hand, they don't track like these, like opinion shows on, like, Fox News that represent themselves implicitly as news shows and saying, man, this is the following thing.Like there's election fraud in 2020, and then when they're sued for the various forms of deformation, they say, we're just an entertainment show. We don't do anything like news. So we have that within that we are already struggling on a variety of these issues within society. and we, I think we need to sort them all out.Eric: Is there anything on the AI front that we missed or that you wanted to make sure to talk about? I think we covered so much great ground. Reid: And, and we can do it again, right. You know, it's all, it's great.Eric: I love it. This was all the things you're interested in and I'm interested in, so great. I really enjoyed having you on the podcast and thanks.Reid: Likewise. And, you know, I follow the stuff you do and it's, it's, it's cool and keep doing it. 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For the first episode of the Newcomer podcast, I sat down with Reid Hoffman — the PayPal mafia member, LinkedIn co-founder, Greylock partner, and Microsoft board member. Hoffman had just stepped off OpenAI's board of directors. Hoffman traced his interest in artificial intelligence back to a conversation with Elon Musk.“This kicked off, actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago,” Hoffman said. Musk told Hoffman that he needed to dive into artificial intelligence during conversations about a decade ago. “This is part of how I operate,” Hoffman remembers. “Smart people from my network tell me things, and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I'm like, ‘Oh, yes, we have another wave coming.'”This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by VantaSecurity is no longer a cost center — it's a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it's more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity. But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta.Vanta's enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to:* Centralize and scale your security program* Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR* Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alikeWith Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank.For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started.Why I Wanted to Talk to Reid Hoffman & What I Took AwayHoffman is a social network personified. Even his journey to something as wonky as artificial intelligence is told through his connections with people. In a world of algorithms and code, Hoffman is upfront about the extent to which human connections decide Silicon Valley's trajectory. (Of course they are paired with profound technological developments that are far larger than any one person or network.)When it comes to the rapidly developing future powered by large language models, a big question in my mind is who exactly decides how these language models work? Sydney appeared in Microsoft Bing and then disappeared. Microsoft executives can dispatch our favorite hallucinations without public input. Meanwhile, masses of images can be gobbled up without asking their creators and then the resulting image generation tools can be open-sourced to the world. It feels like AI super powers come and go with little notice. It's a world full of contradictions. There's constant talk of utopias and dystopias and yet startups are raising conventional venture capital financing.The most prominent player in artificial intelligence — OpenAI — is a non-profit that raised from Tiger Global. It celebrates its openness in its name and yet competes with companies whose technology is actually open-sourced. OpenAI's governance structure and priorities largely remain a mystery. Finally, unlike tech's conservative billionaires who throw their money into politics, in the case of Hoffman, here is a tech overlord that I seem to mostly agree with politically. I wanted to know what that would be like. Is it just good marketing? And where exactly is his heart and political head at right now?I thought he delivered. I didn't feel like he was dodging my questions, even in a world where maintaining such a wide network requires diplomacy. Hoffman seemed eager and open — even if he started to bristle at what he called my “edgy words.”Some Favorite QuotesWe covered a lot of ground in our conversation. We talked about AI sentience and humans' failures to identify consciousness within non-human beings. We talked about the coming rise in AI cloud compute spending and how Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are positioned in the AI race.Hoffman said he had one major condition for getting involved in OpenAI back in the early days when Musk was still on board.“My price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word “robocalypse,” Hoffman told me. “Because I thought that the problem was it's very catchy and it evokes fear.”I asked Hoffman why he thought Musk got involved in artificial intelligence in the first place when Musk seems so worried about how it might develop. Why get the ball rolling down the hill at all, I wondered?Hoffman replied that many people in the field of artificial intelligence had “messiah complexes.”“It's the I am the one who must bring this — Prometheus, the fire to humanity,” Hoffman said. “And you're like, ‘Okay, I kind of think it should be us versus an individual.'” He went on, “Now, us can't be 8 billion people — us is a small group. But I think, more or less, you see the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there? And then let's make sure that we're having the conversations with the right communities.”I raised the possibility that this merely suggested oligarchic control of artificial intelligence rather than dictatorial control. We also discussed Hoffman's politics, including his thoughts on Joe Biden and “woke” politics. I asked him about the state of his friendship with fellow PayPal mafia member Peter Thiel. “I basically am sympathetic to people as long as they are legitimately and earnestly committed to the dialogue and discussion of truth between them and not committed otherwise,” Hoffman said. “There are folks from the PayPal years that I don't really spend much time talking to. There are others that I do continue because that conversation about discovering who we are and who we should be is really important. And you can't allow your own position to be the definer.”I suggested that Thiel's public views sometimes seemed insincere.“Oh, that's totally corrosive,” Hoffman said. “And as much as that's happening, it's terrible. And that's one of the things that in conversations I have, I push people, including Peter, on a lot.”Give it a listen.Find the PodcastRead the TranscriptEric: Reid, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm very excited for this conversation. You know, I'm getting ready for my own AI conference at the end of this month, so hopefully this is sort of a prep by the end of this conversation, we'll all be super smart and ready for that. I feel like there've been so many rounds of sort of AI as sort of the buzzword of the day.This clearly seems the hottest. When did you get into this moment of it? I mean, obviously you just stepped off the Open AI board. You were on that board. Like how, when did you start to see this movement that we're experiencing right now coming.Reid: Well, it's funny because my undergraduate major was artificial intelligence and cognitive science. So I've, I've been around the hoop for multiple waves for a long time and I think this kicked off actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago. You know, 10-ish years ago, Elon and I would have dinner about once a quarter and he's like, well, are you paying attention to this AI stuff?And I'm like, well, I majored in it and you know, I know about this stuff. He's like, no, you need to get back involved. And I was like, all right. This is part of how I operate is smart people from my network tell me things and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I went, oh yes, we have another wave coming.And this was probably about seven or eight years ago, when I, when I saw the beginning of the wave or the seismic event. Maybe it was a seismic event out at sea and I was like, okay, there's gonna be a tsunami here and we should start getting ready cause the tsunami is actually gonna be amazingly great and interesting.Eric: And that—is that the beginning of Open AI?Reid: Open AI is later. What I did is I went and made connections with the kind of the heads of every AI lab and major company because I concluded that I thought that the AI revolution will be primarily driven by large companies initially because of the scale compute requirements.And so, you know, talked to Demis Hassabis, met Mustafa Suleyman, talked to Yann LeCun, talked to Jeff Dean, you know, all these kind of folks and kind of, you know, built all that. And then it was later in conversations with Sam and Elon that I said, look, we need to do something that's a for pro humanity. Not just commercial effort. And my price for participation, cause I thought it was a great idea, but my price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word robocalypse. Because I thought that the problem was that it's very catchy and it evokes fear. And actually, in fact, one of the things I think about this whole area is that it's so much more interesting and has so much amazing opportunity for humanity.A little bit like, I don't know if you saw the Atlantic article I wrote that we evolve ourselves through technology and I'm, you know, going to be doing some writings around describing AI as augmented intelligence versus artificial intelligence. And I wanted to kind of build that positive, optimistic case that I think is the higher probability that I think we can shape towards and so forth.So it's like, okay, I'm in, but no more Robocalypse.Eric: I appreciate the ultimate sort of network person that you tell the story through people. I always appreciate when the origin stories of technology actually come through the human beings. With Elon in particular, I'm sort of confused by his position because it seems like he's very afraid of AI.And if that's the case, why would you want to, like, do anything to sort of get the ball rolling down the hill? Like, isn't there a sort of just like, stay away from it, man, if you think it's so bad. How do you see his thinking? And I'm sure it's evolved.Reid: Well, I think his instinct for the good and the challenging of this is he tends to think AI will only be good if I'm the one who's in control.Eric: Sort of, yeah.Reid: Yeah. And this is actually somewhat replete within the modern AI field. Not everybody but this. And Elon is a public enough figure that I think, you know, making this comment of him is not talking at a school.Other people would, there's a surprising number of Messiah complexes in the field of AI, and, and it's the, I am the one who must bring this, you know, Prometheus, you know, the Fire to humanity. And you're like, okay, I kind of think it should be us, right? Versus an individual. Now us can't be 8 billion people, us as a small group, but I think more or less you see the, the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there and then let, let's make sure that we're having the conversations with the right communities.Like if you say, well, is this going to, you know, institutionalize, ongoing, um, you know, power structures or racial bias, something else? Well, we're talking to the people to make sure that we're going to minimize that, especially over time and navigate it as a real issue. And so those are the, like, that's the kind of anti Messiah complex, which, which is more or less the efforts that I tend to get involved in.Eric: Right. At least sort of oligarchy, of AI control instead of just dictatorship of it.Reid: Well, yeah, and it depends a little bit, even on oligarchy, look, things are built by small numbers of people. It's just a fact, right? Like, there aren't more than, you know, a couple of founders, maybe maximum five in any, any particular thing. There is, you know, there's reasons why. When you have a construction project, you have a head of construction, right?Et cetera. The important thing is to make sure that's why you have, why you have a CEO, you have a board of directors. That's why you have, you know, you say, well, do we have the right thing where a person is accountable to a broader group? And that broader group feels their governance responsibility seriously.So oligarchy is a—Eric: a chargedReid: is a charged word. And I,Eric: There's a logic to it. I'm not, I'm not using it to say it doesn't make sense that you want the people to really understand it around, around it. Um, I mean, specifically with Open AI, I mean, you, you just stepped off the board. You're also on the board of Microsoft, which is obviously a very significant player.In this future, I mean, it's hard to be open. I get a little frustrated with the “open” in “Open AI” because I feel like there's a lot that I don't understand. I'm like, maybe they should change the name a little bit, but is it still a charity in your mind? I mean, it's obviously raised from Tiger Global, the ultimate prophet maker.Like, how should we think about the sort of core ambitions of Open AI?Reid: Well, um, one, the board I was on was a fine one and they've been very diligent about making sure that all of the controls, including for the subsidiary company are from the 501(C)(3) and diligent to its mission, which is staffed by people on the 501(C)(3) board with the responsibilities of being on a 5 0 1 board, which is being in service of the mission, not doing, you know, private inurement and other kinds of things.And so I actually think it is fundamentally still a 501(C)(3). The challenge is if you kind of say, you look at this and say, well, in order to be a successful player in the modern scale AI, you need to have billions of dollars of compute. Where do you get those billions of dollars? Because, you know, the foundations and the philanthropy industry is generally speaking bad at tech and bad at anything other than little tiny checks in tech.And so you said, well, it's really important to do this. So part of what I think, you know, Sam and that group of folks came up with this kind of clever thing to say, well, look, we're about beneficial AI, we're about AI for humanity. We're about making an, I'll make a comment on “open” in a second, but we are gonna generate some commercially valuable things.What if we struck a commercial deal? So you can have the commercial things or you can share the commercial things. You invest in us in order to do this, and then we make sure that the AI has the right characteristics. And then the “open”, you know, all short names have, you know, some simplicities to them.The idea is open to the world in terms of being able to use it and benefit from it. It doesn't mean the same thing as open source because AI is actually one of those things where opening, um, where you could do open source, you could actually be creating something dangerous. As a modern example, last year, Open AI deliberately… DALL·E 2 was ready four months before it went out. I know cause I was playing with it. They did the four months to do safety training and the kind of safety training is, well, let's make sure that individuals can't be libeled. Let's make sure you can't create as best we can, child sexual material. Let's make sure you can't do revenge porn and we'll serve it through the API and we'll make it unchangeable on that.And then the open source people come out and they go do whatever you want and then wow, you get all this crazy, terrible stuff. So “open” is openness of availability, but still with safety and still with, kind of call it the pro-human controls. And that's part of what OpenAI means in this.Eric: I wrote in sort of a mini essay in the newsletter about, like tech fatalism and it fits into your sort of messiah complex that you're talking about, if I'm a young or new startup entrepreneur, it's like this is my moment if I hold back, you know, there's a sense that somebody else is gonna do it too. This isn't necessarily research. Some of the tools are findable, so I need to do it. If somebody's going to, it's easy if you're using your own personhood to say, I'm better than that guy! Even if I have questions about it, I should do it. So that, I think we see that over and over again. Obviously the stakes with AI, I think we both agree are much larger.On the other hand, with AI, there's actually, in my view, been a little bit more restraint. I mean, Google has been a little slower. Facebook seems a little worried, like, I don't know. How do you agree with that sort of view of tech fatalism? Is there anything to be done about it or it's just sort of—if it's possible, it's gonna happen, so the best guy, the best team should do it?Or, or how do you think about that sense of inevitability on if it's possible, it'll be built?Reid: Well, one thing is you like edgy words, so what you describe is tech fatalism, I might say as something more like tech inevitability or tech destiny. And part of it is what, I guess what I would say is for example, we are now in a AI moment and era. There's global competition for it. It's scale compute.It's not something that even somebody like a Google or someone else can kind of have any kind of, real ball control on. But the way I look at it is, hey, look, there's, there's utopic outcomes and dystopic outcomes and it's within our control to steer it. Um, and even to steer it at speed, even under competition because.For example, obviously the general discourse within media is, oh my God, what's happening with the data and what's gonna happen with the bias and what's gonna happen with the crazy conversations, with Bing Chat and all the rest of this stuff. And you're like, well, what am I obsessed about? I'm obsessed about the fact that I have line of sight to an AI tutor and an AI doctor on every cell phone.And think about if you delay that, whatever number of years you delay that, what your human cost is of delaying that, right? And it's like, how do we get that? And for example, people say, wow, the real issue is that Bing chat model is gonna go off the rails and have a drunken cocktail party conversation because it's provoked to do so and can't run away from the person who's provoking it.Uh, and you say, well, is that the real issue? Or is it a real issue? Let's make sure that as many people as we can have access to that AI doctor have access to that AI tutor that where, where we can, where not only, you know, cause obviously technology cause it's expensive initially benefits elites and people are rich.And by the way, that's a natural way of how our capitalist system and all the rest works. But let's try to get it to everyone else as quickly as possible, right?Eric: I a hundred percent agree with that. So I don't want any of my sort of, cynical take like, oh my God, this version.I'd also extend it, you know, I think you're sort of referencing maybe the Sydney situation where you have Kevin Rus in New York Times, you know, communicating with Bing's version of ChatGPT and sort of finding this character who's sort of goes by Sydney from the origin story.And Ben Thompson sort of had a similar experience. And I would almost say it's sad for the world to be deprived of that too. You know, there's like a certain paranoia, it's like, it's like, oh, I wanna meet this sort of seemingly intelligent character. I don't know. What do you make of that whole episode? I mean, people really, I mean, Ben Thompson, smart tech writers really latched onto this as something that they found moving.I don't know. Is there anything you take away from that saga and do you think we'll see those sort of, I don't know, intelligent characters again,Reid: Well for sure. I think 2023 will be at least the first year of the so-called chatbot. Not just because of ChatGPT. And I think that we will have a bunch of different chat bots. I think we'll have chatbots that are there to be, you know, entertainment companions, witty dialogue participants.I think we'll have chatbots that are there to be information like Insta, Wikipedia, kind of things. I think we'll have chatbots that are there to just have someone to talk to. So I think there'll be a whole, whole range of things. And I think we will have all that experience.And I think part of the thing is to say, look, what are the parameters by which you should say the bots should absolutely not do X. And it's fine if these people want a bot that's like, you know, smack talking and these people want something that you know, goes, oh heck. Right?You know, like, what's, what's the range of that? And obviously children get in the mix and, and the questions around things that we already encounter a lot with search, which is like could a chat bot enable self-harm in a way that would be really bad?Let's really try to make sure that someone who's depressed doesn't figure out a way to harm themselves either with search or with chat bots.Eric: Is there a psychologically persuasive, so it's not just the information provided, it's the sense that they might be like walking you towards something less serious.Reid: And they are! This is the thing that's amazing. and it's part of the reason why like everyone should have some interaction with these in some emotional, tangible way. We are really passing the Turing test. This is the thing that I had visibility on a few years ago because I was like, okay, we kind of judge, you know, intelligence and sentience like that, Google engineers like it.I asked if it was conscious and it said it was because we use language as a way of doing that. And you're like, well, but look, that tells you that your language use is not quite fully there. And because part of what's really amazing about, “hallucinations”—and I'm probably gonna do a fireside chat with the gray matter thing on hallucinations, maybe later this week—where the hallucination is, on one hand it says this amazingly accurate, wonderful thing, very persuasively, and then it says this other thing really persuasively that's total fiction, right? And you're like, wow, you sound very persuasive in both cases. But that one's true and that one's fiction.And that's part of the reason why I kind of go back to the augmented intelligence and all the things that I see going on with in 2023 is much less replacement and much more augmentation. It's not zero replacement, but it's much more augmentation in terms of how this plays. And that is super exciting.Eric: Yeah. I mean, to some degree it reflects sort of the weakness in human beings' own abilities to read what's happening. Ahead of this interview, I was talking to the publicly available ChatGPT. I don't know if you saw but I was asking it for questions and I felt like it delivered a very reasonable set of questions. You know, you've written about Blitzscaling, so [ChatGPT] is like, let's ask about that. It's, you know, ask in the context of Microsoft. But when I was like, have you [ChatGPT] ever watched Joe Rogan? Have you ever been on a podcast? Sometimes maybe you should have a long sort of, you should have a statement like I'm doing right now where I sort of have some things I'm saying.Then I ask a question. Other times it should be short and sweet. Sometimes it, you know, annoys you and says oligarchy, like explaining to the chat bot. [In an interview, a journalist] can't just ask a list of like, straightforward questions and it felt like it didn't really even get that. And I get that there's some sort of, we're, we're starting to have a conversation now with companies like Jasper, where it's almost like the language prompting itself.I think Sam Altman was maybe saying it's like almost a form of plain language like coding because you have to figure out how to get what you want out of them. And maybe it was just my failure to explain it, but as a journalist replacing questions, I didn't find the current model of ChatGPT really capable of that.Reid: No, that's actually one of the things on the ChatGPT I find is, like, for example, you ask what questions to ask Reid Hoffman in a podcast interview, and you'll get some generic ones. It'll say like, well, what's going on with new technologies like AI and, and what's going on in Silicon Valley? And you know, and you're like, okay, sure.But those aren't the really interesting questions. That's not what makes me a great journalist, which is kind of a lens to something that people can learn from and that will evolve and change that'll get better. But that's again, one of the reasons why I think it's a people plus machine. Because for example, if I were to say, hey, what should I ask Eric about? Or what should I talk to Eric about and go to? Yeah, gimme some generic stuff. Now if I said, oh, give me a briefing on, um, call it, um, UN governance systems as they apply to AI, because I want to be able to talk about this. I didn't do this, but it would give me a kind of a quick Wikipedia briefing and that would make my conversation more interesting and I might be able to ask a question about the governance system or something, you know, as a way of doing it.And that's what AI is, I think why the combo is so great. Um, and anyway, so that's what we should be aiming towards. It isn't to say, by the way, sometimes like replacement is a good thing. For example, you go to autonomous vehicles and say, hey, look, if we could wave a wand and every car on the road today would be an autonomous vehicle, we'd probably save, we'd probably go from 40,000 deaths in the US per, you know, year to, you know, maybe a thousand or 2000. And you're like, you're shaving 38,000 lives a year, in doing this. It's a good thing. And, you know, it will have a positive vector on gridlocks and for climate change and all the rest of the stuff.And you go, okay, that replacement, yes, we have to navigate truck jobs and all the rest, but that replacement's good. But I think a lot of it is going to end up being, you know, kind of, various forms of amplification. Like if you get to journalists, you go, oh, it'll help me ask, figure out which interesting questions to add.Not because it'll just go here, here's your script to ask questions. But you can get better information to prep your thinking on it.Eric: Yeah. I'm glad you brought up like the self-driving car case and, you know, you're, are you still on the board of Aurora?Reid: I am.Eric: I've, you know, I covered Uber, so I was in their self-driving cars very early, and they made a lot of promises. Lyft made a lot of promises.I mean, I feel like part of my excitement about this sort of generative AI movement is that it feels like it doesn't require completeness in the same way that self-driving cars do. You know? And that, that, that's been a barrier to self-driving cars. On the flip side, you know, sometimes we sort of wave away the inaccuracy and then we say, you know, we sort of manage it.I think that's what we were sort of talking about earlier. You imagine it in some of the completeness that could come. So I guess the question here is just do you think, what I'm calling the completeness problem. I guess just the idea that it needs to be sort of fully capable will be an issue with the large language models or do you think you have this sort of augmented model where it could sort of stop now and still be extremely useful to much of society?Reid: I think it could stop now and be extremely useful. I've got line of sight on current technology for a tutor, for a doctor, for a bunch of other stuff. One of the things my partner and I wrote last year was that within five years, there's gonna be a co-pilot for every profession.The way to think about that is what professionals do. They process information, they take some kind of action. Sometimes that's generating other information, just like you see with Microsoft's co-pilot product for engineers. And what you can see happening with DallE and other image generation for graphic designers, you'll see this for every professional, that there will be a co-pilot on today's technology that can be built.That's really amazing. I do think that as you continue to make progress, you can potentially make them even more amazing, because part of what happened when you move from, you know, GPT3 to 3.5, which is all of a sudden it can write sonnets. Right? You didn't really know that it was gonna be able to write sonnets.That's giving people superpowers. Most people, including myself—I mean, look, I could write a sonnet if you gave me a couple of days and a lot of coffee and a lot of attempts to really try.Eric: But you wouldn't.Reid: You wouldn't. Yeah. But now I can go, oh, you know, I'd like to, to, um, write a sonnet about my friend Sam Altman.And I can go down and I can sit there and I can kind of type, you know, duh da, and I can generate, well, I don't like that one. Oh, but then I like this one, you know, and da da da. And, and that, that gives you superpowers. I mean, think about what you can do for writing, a whole variety of things with that. And that I think the more and more completeness is the word you are using is I think also a powerful thing. Even though what we have right now is amazing.Eric: Is GPT4 a big improvement over what we have? I assume you've seen a fair bit of unreleased, stuff. Like how hyped should we be about the improvement level?Reid: I have. I'm not really allowed to say very much about it cause, you know, part of the responsibilities of former board members and confidentiality. But I do think that it will be a nice—I think people will look at it and go, Ooh, that's cool. And it will be another iteration, another thing as amazing as ChatGPT has, and obviously that's kind of in the last few months. It's kind of taken the world by storm, opening up this vista of imagination and so forth.I think GPT4 will be another step forward where people will go, Ooh, that's, that, that's another cool thing. I think that's—can't be more specific than that, but watch this space cause it'll be cool.Eric: Throughout this conversation we've danced around this sort of artificial general intelligence question. starting with the discussion of Elon and the creation of eventually Open AI. I'm curious how close you think we are with AGI and this idea of a sort of, I mean, people define it so many different ways, you know, it's more sophisticated than humans in some tasks, you know, mini tasks, whatever.How, how do you think we're far from that? Or how, how, how do you see that playing out?Reid: Personally amongst a lot of the people who are in the field, I'm probably on the, we're-much-further-than-we-think stage. Now, some of that's because I've lived through this before with my undergraduate degree and the, you know, the pattern generally is, oh my God, we've gotten this computer to do this amazing thing that we thought was formally the provence of only these cognitive human beings.And it could do that. So then by the way, in 10 years it'll be solving new science problems like fusion and all the rest. And if you go back to the seventies, you saw that same dialogue. I mean, it, it's, it's an ongoing thing. Now we do have a more amazing set of cognitive capabilities than we did before, and there are some reasons to argue that it could be in a decade or two. Because you say, well, these large language models can enable coding and that coding can all, can then be self, reflective and generative, and that can then make something go. But when I look at the coding and how that works right now, it doesn't generate the kind of code that's like, oh, that's amazing new code.It helps with the, oh, I want to do a parser for quick sort, right? You know, like that kind of stuff. And it's like, okay, that's great. Or a systems integration use of an API or calling in an API for a spellchecker or whatever. Like it's really helpful stuff on engineers, but it's not like, oh my God, it's now inventing the new kind of training of large scale models techniques.And so I think even some of the great optimists will tell you of the great, like believers that it'll be soon and say there's one major invention. And the thing is, once you get to one major invention, is that one major invention? Is that three major inventions? Is it 10 major inventions?Like I think we are some number of major inventions away. I don't, I certainly don't think it's impossible to get there.Eric: Sorry. The major inventions are us human beings build, building things into the system or…?Reid: Yeah. Like for example, you know, can it do, like, for example, a classic, critique of a lot of large language models is can it do common sense reasoning.Eric: Gary Marcus is very…Reid: Exactly. Right. Exactly. And you know, the short answer right now is the large language models are approximating common sense reasoning.Now they're doing it in a powerful and interesting enough way that you're like, well, that's pretty useful. It's pretty helpful about what it's doing, but I agree that it's not yet doing all of that. And also you get problems like, you know, what are called one shot learning. Can you learn from one instance of it?Cause currently the training requires lots and lots of compute processing over days or in self play, can you have an accurate memory store that you update? Like for example, you say now fact X has happened, your entire world based on fact X. Look, there's a bunch of this stuff to all go.And the question is, is that one major invention is that, you know, five major inventions, and by the way, major inventions or major inventions even all the amazing stuff we've done over the last five to 10 years. Major inventions on major inventions. So I myself tend to be two things on the AGI one.I tend to think it's further than most people think. And I don't know if that further is it's 10 years versus five or 20 years versus 10 or 50 years versus 20. I don't, I don't really know.Eric: In your lifetime, do you think?Reid: It's possible, although I don't know. But let me give two other lenses I think on the AGI question cause the other thing that people tend to do is they tend to go, there's like this AI, which is technique machine learning, and there's totally just great, it's augmented intelligence and then there's AGI and who knows what happens with AGI.And you say, well first is AGI is a whole range of possible things. Like what if you said, Hey, I can build something that's the equivalent of a decent engineer or decent doctor, but to run it costs me $200 an hour and I have AGI? But it's $200 an hour. And you're like, okay, well that's cool and that means we can, we can get as many of them as we need. But it's expensive. And so it isn't like all of a sudden, you know, Terminator or you know, or inventing fusion or something like that is AGI and or a potential version of AGI. So what is AGI is the squishy thing that people then go, magic. The second thing is, the way that I've looked at the progress in the last five to eight years is we're building a set of iteratively better savants, right?It just like the chess player was a savant. Um, and, and the savants are interestingly different now. When does savant become a general intelligence and when might savant become a general super intelligence? I don't know. It's obviously a super intelligence already in some ways. Like for example, I wouldn't want to try to play, go against it and win, try to win.It's a super intelligence when it comes, right? But like okay, that's great cause in our perspective, having some savants like this that are super intelligence is really helpful to us. So, so the whole AGI discussion I think tends to go a little bit Hollywood-esque. You know, it's not terminator.Eric: I mean, there there is, there's a sort of argument that could be made. I mean, you know, humans are very human-centric about our beliefs and our intelligence, right? We don't have a theory of mind for other animals. It's very hard for us to prove that other species, you know, have some experience of consciousness like qualia or whatever.Reid: Very philosophically good use of a term by the way.Eric: Thank you. Um, I studied philosophy though. I've forgotten more than I remember. But, um, you know, I mean…Reid: Someday we'll figure out what it's like to be a bat. Probably not this time.Eric: Right, right, exactly. Is that, that's Nagel. If the machine's better than me at chess and go there, there's a level of I, you know, here I am saying it doesn't have an experience, but it, it's so much smarter than me in certain domains.I don't, I, the question is just like, it seems like humans are not capable of seeing what it's like to be a bat. So will we ever really be able to sort of convince ourselves that there's something that it's like to be, um, an AGI system?Reid: Well, I think the answer is um, yes, but it will require a bunch of sophistication. Like one of the things I think is really interesting about, um, as we anthropomorphize the world a little bit and I think some of this machine. Intelligence stuff will, will enable us to do that is, well what does it mean to understand X or, or, or, or no X or experience X or have qualia or whatever else.And right now what we do is we say, well it's some king of shadowy image from being human. So we tend to undercount like animals intelligence. And people tend to be surprised like, look, you know, some animals mate for life and everything else, they clearly have a theory of the world and it's clearly stuff we're doing.We go, ah, they don't have the same kind of consciousness we do. And you're like, well they certainly don't have the same kind of consciousness, but we're not doing a very good job of studying like what the, where it's similar in order it's different. And I think we're gonna need to broaden that out outcome to start saying, well, when you compare us and an eagle or a dolphin or a whale or a chimpanzee or a lion, you know, what are the similarities and and differences?And how this works. And um, and I think that will also then be, well, what happens when it's a silicon substrate? You know? Do we, do we think that consciousness requires a biological substrate? If so, why? Um, and, you know, part of how, of course we get to understand, um, each other's consciousness as we, we get this depth of experience.Where I realize is it isn't, you're just a puppet.Eric:  [laughs] I am, I am just a puppet.Reid: Well, we're, we're talking to each other through Riverside, so, you know, who knows, right. You know, deep fakes and all that.Eric: The AI's already ahead of you. You know, I'm just, it's already, no.Reid: Yeah. I think we're gonna have to get more sophisticated on that question now.I think it's, it's too trivial to say because it can mimic language in particularly interesting ways. And it says, yes, I'm conscious that that makes it conscious. Like that's not, that's not what we use as an instance. And, and part of it is like, do you understand the like part of how we've come to understand each other's consciousness is we realize that we experience things in similar ways.We feel joy in similar, we feel pain in similar ways and that kinda stuff. And that's part of how we begin to understand. And I think it'll be really good that this may kick off kind of us being slightly less kind of call it narcissistically, anthropocentric in this and a broader concept as we look at this.Eric: You know, I was talking to my therapist the other day and I was saying, you know, oh, I did this like kind gesture, but I didn't feel like some profound, like, I don't, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I did it. It felt like I did the right thing should, you know, shouldn't I feel like more around it?And you know, her perspective was much more like, oh, what matters is like doing the thing, not sort of your internal states about it. Which to me would, would go to the, if the machine can, can do all the things we expect from sort of a caring type type machine. Like why do we need to spend all this time when we don't even expect that of humans to always feel the right feelings.Reid: I totally agree with you. Look, I think the real question is what you do. Now that being said, part of how we predict what you do is that, you know, um, you may not have like at that moment gone, haha, I think of myself as really good cause I've done this kind thing. Which by the way, might be a better human thing as opposed to like, I'm doing this cause I'm better than most people.Eric: Right.Reid: Yeah, but it's the pattern in which you engage in these things and part of the feelings and so forth is cause that creates a kind of a reliability of pattern of do you see other people? Do you have the aspiration to have, not just yourself, but the people around you leading better and improving lives.And obviously if that's the behavior that we're seeing from these things, then that's a lot of it. And the only question is, what's that forward looking momentum on it? And I think amongst humans that comes to an intention, a model of the world and so forth. You know, amongst, amongst machines that mean just maybe the no, no, we're aligned.Well, like, we've done a really good alignment with human progress.Eric: Do you think there will be a point in time where it's like an ethical problem to unplug it? Like I think of like a bear, right? Like a bear is dangerous. You know, there are circumstances where pretty comfortable. Killing the bear,But if the bear like hasn't actually done anything, we've taken it under our care. Like we don't just like shoot bears at zoos, you know? Do you think there's a point where like, and it costs us money to sustain the bear at a zoo, do you think there are cases where we might say, oh man, now there's an ethical question around unpluggingReid: I think it's a when, not an if.Eric: Yeah.Reid: Right? I mean, it may be a when, once again, just like AGI, that's a fair way's out. But it's a when, not an if. And by the way, I think that's again, part of the progress that we make because we think about like, how should we be treating it? Because, you know, like for example, if you go back a hundred, 150 years, the whole concept of animal rights doesn't exist in humans.You know, it's like, hey, you wanna, you want to torture animal X to death, you know, like you're queer, but you're, you're, you're allowed to do that. That's an odd thing for you to do. And maybe it's kind of like, like distasteful, like grungy bad in some way, but , you know, it's like, okay. Where's now you're like, oh, that person is, is like going out to try to go torture animals! We should like get them in an institution, right? Like, that's not okay. You know, what is that further progress for the rights and lives? And I think it will ultimately come to things that we think are, when it gets to kind of like things that have their own agency and have their own consciousness and sets of existence.We should be including all of that in some, in some grand or elevated, you know, kind of rights conceptions.Eric: All right, so back back to my listeners who, you know, wanna know where to invest and make money off this and, you know.Reid: [laughs] It isn't from qualia and consciousness. Oh, wait.Eric: Who do you think are the key players? The key players in the models. Then obviously there are more sort of, I don't know if we're calling them vertical solutions or product oriented or whatever, however you think about them.But starting with the models, like who do you see as sort of the real players right now? Are you counting out a Google or do you think they'll still, you know, sort of show?Reid: Oh no. I think Google will show up. And obviously, you know, Open AI, Microsoft has done a ton of stuff. I co-founded Inflection last year with Mustafa Suleyman. We have a just amazing team and I do see a lot of teams, so I'm.Eric: And that's to build sort of the foundational…Reid: Yeah, they're gonna, well, they're building their own models and they're gonna build some things off those models.We haven't really said what they are yet. But that's obviously going to be kind of new models. Adept, another Greylock investment building its own models, Character is building its own models, Anthropic is building its own models. And Anthropic is, you know, Dario and the crew is smart folks from Open AI, they're, they're doing stuff within a kind of a similar research program that Open AI is doing.And so I think those are the ones that I probably most track.Eric: Character's an interesting case and you know, we're still learning more about that company. You know, I was first to report they're looking to raise 250 million. My understanding is that what's interesting is they're building the models, but then for a particular use case, right?Or like, it's really a question of leverage or like, do people need to build the models to be competitive or do you think there will be... can you build a great business on top of Stability or Open AI or do you need to do it yourself?Reid: I think you can, but the way you do it is you can't say it's cause I have unique access to the model. It has to be, you know, I have a business that has network effects or I'm well integrated in enterprise, or I have another deep stack of technology that I'm bringing into it. It can't just be, I'm a lightweight front end to it because then other people can be the lightweight front end.So you can build great businesses. I think with it, I do think that people will both build businesses off, you know, things like the Open AI APIs and I think people will also train models. Because I think one of the things that will definitely happen is a lot of… not just will large models be built in ways that are interesting and compelling, but I think a bunch of smaller models will be built that are specifically tuned and so forth.And there's all kinds of reasons. Everything from you can build them to do something very specific, but also like inference cost, does it, does it run on a low compute or low power footprint? You know, et cetera, et cetera. You know, AI doctor, AI tutor, um, you know, duh and on a cell phone. And, um, and so, you know, I think like all of that, I think the short answer to this is allEric: Right. Do you think we are in a compute arms race still, or do you, do you think this is gonna continue where it's just if you can raise a billion dollars to, to buy sort of com GPU access basically from Microsoft or Amazon or Google, you're, you're gonna be sort of pretty far ahead? Or how do you think about that sort of the money, the money and computing rates shaping up?Reid: So I kind of think about two. There's kind of two lines of trends. There's one line, which is the larger and larger models, which by the way, you say, well, okay, so does the scale compute and one x flop goes to two x flops, and does your performance function go up by that?And it doesn't have to go up by a hundred percent or, or two x or plus one x. It could go up by 25%, but sometimes that really matters. Coding doctors, you know, legal, other things. Well, it's like actually, in fact, it, even though it's twice as expensive, a 25% increase in, you know, twice as expensive of compute, the 25% increase in performance is worth it. And I think you then have a large scale model, like a set of things that are kind of going along need to be using the large scale models.Then I think there's a set of things that don't have that need. And for example, that's one of the reasons I wasn't really surprised at all by the profusion of image generation, cuz those are, you know, generally speaking, trainable for a million to $10 million. I think there's gonna be a range of those.I think, you know, maybe someone will figure out how to do, you know, a hundred-million version and once they figured out how to do a hundred-million dollar version, someone also figured out how to do the 30-million version of that hundred-million dollar version. And there's a second line going on where all of these other smaller models will fit into interesting businesses. And then I think a lot of people will either deploy an open source model that they're using themselves, train their own model, get a special deal with, like a model provider or something else as a way of doing it.And so I think the short answer is there will be both, and you have to be looking at this from what's the specific that this business is doing. You know, the classic issues of, you know, how do you go to market, how do you create a competitive mode? What are the things that give you real, enduring value that people will pay for in some way in a business?All of the, those questions still apply, but the, but, but there's gonna be a panoply of answers, depending on the different models of how it playsEric: Do you think spend on this space in terms of computing will be larger in ‘24 and then larger in 25?Reid: Yes. Unquestionably,Eric: We're on the, we're still on the rise.Reid: Oh, yes. Unquestionably.Eric: That's great for a certain company that you're on the board of.Reid: Well look, and it's not just great for Microsoft. There are these other ones, you know, AWS, Google, but…Eric: Right. It does feel like Amazon's somewhat sleepy here. Do you have any view there?Reid: Well, I think they have begun to realize, what I've heard from the market is that they've begun to realize that they should have some stuff here. I don't think they've yet gotten fully underway. I think they are trying to train some large language models themselves. I don't know if they've even realized that there is a skill to training those large language models, cause like, you know, sometimes people say, well, you just turn on and you run the, run the large language model, the, the training regime that you read in the papers and then you make stuff.We've seen a lot of failures, of people trying to build these things and failing to do so, so, you know, there's, there's an expertise that you learn in doing it as well. And so I think—Eric: Sorry to interrupt—if Microsoft is around Open AI and Google is around Anthropic, is Amazon gonna be around stability? That's sort of the question that I'll put out to the world. I don't know if you have.Reid: I certainly don't know anything. And in the case of, you know, very, very, very, um, a politely said, um, Anthropic and OpenAI have scale with huge models. Stability is all small models, so, hmm.Eric: Yeah. Interesting. I, I don't think I've asked you sort of directly about sort of stepping off the Open AI board. I mean, I would assume you would prefer to be on the board or…?Reid: Yeah. Well, so look, it was a funny thing because, um, you know, I was getting more and more requests from various Greylock portfolio companies cause we've been investing in AI stuff for over five years. Like real AI, not just the, we call it “software AI”, but actual AI companies.For a while and I was getting more and more requests to do it and I was like oh, you know, what I did before was, well here's the channel. Like here is the guy who, the person who handles the API request goes, go talk to them. Like, why can't you help me? I was like, well, I'm on the board.I have a responsibility to not be doing that. And then I realized that, oh s**t, it's gonna look more and more. Um, I might have a real conflict of interest here, even as we're really carefully navigating it and, and it was really important cause you know various forces are gonna kind of try to question the frankly, super deep integrity of Open AI.It's like, look, I, Sam, I think it might be best even though I remain a fan, an ally, um, to helping, I think it may be best for Open AI. And generally to step off a board to avoid a conflict of interest. And we talked about a bunch and said, okay, fine, we'll do it. And you know, I had dinner with Sam last night and most of what we were talking about was kind of the range of what's going on and what are the important things that open eyes need to solve? And how should we be interfacing with governments so that governments understand? What are the key things that, that, that should be in the mix? And what great future things for humanity are really important not to fumble in the, in the generally, like everyone going, oh, I'm worrying. And then I said, oh, I got a question for you. And he's like, yeah, okay. I'm like, now that I'm no longer on the board, could I ask you to personally look at unblocking, my portfolio company's thing to the API? Because I couldn't ever ask you that question before. Cause I would be unethical. But now I'm not on the board, so can I ask the question?He's like, sure, I'll look into it. I'm like, great, right? And that's the substance of it, which I never would've done before. But that wasn't why, I mean, obviously love Sam and the Open AI team.Eric: The fact that you're sort of a Democratic super donor was that in the calculus? Or, because I mean, we are seeing Republican… well, I didn't think that at all coming into this conversation, but just hearing what you're saying. Looking at it now, it feels like Republicans are like trying to find something to be angry about.Reid: WellEric: These AI things, I don't quite…Reid: The unfortunate thing about the, the most vociferous of the republican media ecosystem is they just invent fiction, like their hallucination full out.Eric: Right.Reid: I mean, it just like, I mean, the amount of just like, you know, 2020 election denial and all the rest, which you can tell from having their text released from Fox News that like, here are these people who are on camera going on where you have a question about, you know, what happened in the election.And they're texting each other going, oh my God, this is insane. This is a coup, you know, da da da. And you're like, okay. Anyway, so, so all like, they don't require truth to generate. Heat and friction. So that was, wasn't that no, no. It's just really, it's kind of the question of, when you're serving on a board, you have to understand what your mission is very deeply and, and to navigate it.And part of the 501(C)(3) boards is to say, look, obviously I contribute by being a board member and helping and navigate various circumstances and all the rest. And, you know, I can continue to be a counselor and an aid to the company not being on the board. And one of the things I think is gonna be very important for the next X years, for the entire world to know is that open AI takes its ethics super seriously,Eric: Right.Reid: As do I.Eric: Does that fit with having to invest? I mean, there are lots of companies that do great things. They have investors. I believe in companies probably more than personally I believe in charities to accomplish things. But the duality of OpenAI is extremely confusing. Like, was Greylock, did Greylock itself invest a lot or you invested early as an angel?Reid: I was the founding investor as an angel, as a, as a program related investment from my foundation. Because like I started, I was among the first people to make a philanthropic donation to Open AI. Just straight out, you know, here's a grant by Wednesday, then Sam and Crew came up with this idea for doing this commercial lp, and I said, look, I, I'll help and I have no idea if this will be an interesting economic investment.They didn't have a business plan, they didn't have a revenue plan, they didn't have a product plan. I brought it to Greylock. We talked about it and they said, look, we think this will be possibly a really interesting technology, but you know, part of our responsibility to our LPs, which you know, includes a whole bunch of universities and else we invest in businesses and there is no business plan.Eric: So is that the Khosla did? Khosla's like we invested wild things. Anyway, we don't care. That's sort of what Vinod wants to project anyway, so yeah.Reid: You know, yes, that's exactly the same. So I put them 50 and then he put in a, I think he was the only venture fund investing in that round. But like, there was no business plan, there was no revenue model, there was no go to market…Eric: Well, Sam basically says, someday we're gonna have AGI and we're gonna ask you how to make a bunch of money? Like, is he, that's a joke, right? Or like, how much is he joking?Reid: It's definitely, it's not a 100% joke and it's not a 0% joke. It's a question around, the mission is really about how do we get to AGI or as close to AGI as useful and to make it useful for humanity. And by the way, the closer you get to AGI, the more interesting technologies fall out, including the ability to have the technology itself solve various problems.So if you said, we have a business model problem, it's like, well ask the thing. Now, if you currently sit down and ask, you know, ChatGPT what the business model is, you'll get something pretty vague and generic that wouldn't get you a meeting with a venture capitalist because it's like “we will have ad supported”... you're like, okay. Right.Eric: Don't you have a company that's trying to do pitch decks now or something?Reid: Oh yeah, Tome. No, and it's awesome, but by the way, that's the right kind of thing. Because, because what it does is you say, hey, give me a set of tiles, together with images and graphics and things arguing X and then you start working with the AI to improve it. Say, oh, I need a slide that does this and I need a catchier headline here, and, and you know, da da da.And then you, and you know, obviously you can edit it yourself and so on. So that's the kind of amplification. Now you don't say, give me my business model, right?Eric: You're like, I have this business model, like articulate it.Reid: Exactly.Eric: Um, I, politics, I mean, I feel like we, we live through such like a… you know what I mean, I feel like Silicon Valley, you know, has like, worked on PE everybody be able to, you know, everybody can get along. There's sort of competition, but then you sort of still stay close to any, everybody like, you, you especially like are good, you know, you you are in the PayPal mafia with a lot of people who are fairly very conservative now.The Trump years broke that in some ways and particular, and that, yeah. So how did you maintain those relationships?I see headlines that say you're friends with Peter Thiel. What is, what's the state of your friendship with Peter Thiel and how, how did it survive?I guess the Trump years is the question.Reid: Well, I think the thing that Peter and I learned when we were undergraduate at Stanford together is it's very important to… cause we, you know, I was a lefty. He was a righty. We'd argue a lot to maintain conversation and to argue things. It's difficult to argue on things that feel existential and it's ethically challenged is things around Trump. You know, the, you know, Trump feels to be a corrosive asset upon our democracy that is disfiguring us and staining us to the world. And so to have a dispassionate argument about it is, it's challenging. And it ends up with some uneven ground and statements like, I can't believe you're f*****g saying that, as part of dialogue.But on the other hand, you know, maintaining dialogue is I think part of how we make progress as society. And I basically sympathetic to people as long as they are legitimately and earnestly and committed to the dialogue and discussion of truth between them and committed otherwise.And so, you know, there are folks from the PayPal years that I don't really spend much time talking to, right?. There are others that I do because that conversation about discovering who we are and who we should be is really important. And you can't allow your own position to be the definer.It almost goes back to what we were talking about, the AI side, which is make sure you're talking to other smart people who challenge you to make sure you're doing the right thing. And that's, I think, a good general life principle.Eric: Well, you know, I feel like part of what my dream of like the Silicon Valley world is that we have these, you know, we have, Twitter is like the open forum. We're having sincere sort of on the level debates, but then you see something like, you know, the…Reid: You don't think it's the modern Seinfeld show I got? Well, not Seinfeld, um, Springer, Jerry Springer.Eric: Yeah, that's, yeah. Right. But I just feel like the sort of like, if the arguments are on the level issue is my problem with some of the sort of, I don't know, Peter Theil arguments, that he's not actually publicly advancing his beliefs in a sincere way, and that that's almost more corrosive.Reid: Oh, that's totally corrosive. And as much as that's happening, it's terrible. And that's one of the things that I, um, you know, in conversations I have, I push people including Peter on a lot.Eric: Yeah. Are you still, are you still gonna donate a lot, or what was, what's your, are you as animated about the Democratic party and working through sort of donor channels at the moment?Reid: Well, what I would say is I think that we have a responsibility to try to make, like with, it's kind of the Spider-Man ethics. With power comes responsibility, with wealth comes responsibility, and you have to try to help contribute to… what is the better society that we should be living and navigating in?And so I stay committed on that basis. And I do think there are some really amazing people in the administration. I think Biden is kind of a good everyday guy.Eric: Yeah.Reid: In fact, good for trying to build bridges in the country. I think there are people like Secretary Raimondo and Secretary Buttigieg who are thinking intensely about technology and what should be done in the future.And I think there's other folks now, I think there's a bunch of folks on the democratic side that I think are more concerned with their demagoguery than they are with the right thing in society. And so I tend to be, you know, unsympathetic to, um, you know…Eric: I know, Michael Moritz, it's Sequoia, that oped sort of criticizing San Francisco government, you know, and there's, there's certainly this sort of woke critique of the Democratic Party. I'm curious if there's a piece of it sort of outside of he governance that you're…Reid: Well, the interesting thing about woke is like, well, we're anti woke. And you're like, well, don't you think being awake is a good thing? I mean, it's kind of a funny thing. Eric: And sort of the ill-defined nature of woke is like key to the allegation because it's like, what's the substantive thing you're saying there? And you know, I mean we we're seeing Elon tweet about race right now, which is sort of terrifying anyway.Reid: Yeah. I think the question on this stuff is to try to say, look, people have a lot of different views and a lot of different things and some of those views are, are bad, especially in kind of minority and need to be advocated against in various… part of why we like democracy is to have discourse.I'm very concerned about the status of public discourse. And obviously most people tend to focus that around social media, which obviously has some legitimate things that we need to talk about. But on the other hand, they don't track like these, like opinion shows on, like, Fox News that represent themselves implicitly as news shows and saying, man, this is the following thing.Like there's election fraud in 2020, and then when they're sued for the various forms of deformation, they say, we're just an entertainment show. We don't do anything like news. So we have that within that we are already struggling on a variety of these issues within society. and we, I think we need to sort them all out.Eric: Is there anything on the AI front that we missed or that you wanted to make sure to talk about? I think we covered so much great ground. Reid: And, and we can do it again, right. You know, it's all, it's great.Eric: I love it. This was all the things you're interested in and I'm interested in, so great. I really enjoyed having you on the podcast and thanks.Reid: Likewise. And, you know, I follow the stuff you do and it's, it's, it's cool and keep doing it. 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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.

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 the podcast I talk with Eric about the value destruction of App Tracking Transparency, the limitations of SKAdNetwork, and how to thrive as an app developer in this new paradigm.My guest today is Eric Seufert. Eric has deep operating experience, having worked in growth and strategy roles at consumer tech companies such as Wooga and Rovio, but he also founded and sold a marketing business intelligence company, Agamemnon, and is an active investor in the mobile gaming and ad tech categories. Eric has a depth and breadth of experience with mobile apps and games that few can match. Over the past year Eric has written extensively about App Tracking Transparency and the future of mobile advertising on his trade blog, Mobile Dev Memo.In this episode, you'll learn: Will Apple's ATT be a net loss for Apple? Can SKAdNetwork be saved, and does Apple want to save it? Is focusing on organic traffic a flawed strategy? What does the future of app install ads look like? Links & Resources Rovio Snapchat Apple's Private Relay Tim Cook Outbrain Taboola AllTrails SubClub AllTrails podcast episode Stitcher Eric Seufert's Links Follow Eric on Twitter Mobile Dev Memo Heracles Freemium Economics: Leveraging Analytics and User Segmentation to Drive Revenue  Eric is on LinkedIn Follow us on Twitter: David Barnard Jacob Eiting RevenueCat Sub Club Episode Transcript00:00:00 David:Hello. I'm your host, David Bernard, and for the first time ever, I'm flying solo today. RevenueCat CEO, Jacob Eiting is busy CEO'ing.My guest today, is Eric Seufert. Having worked in growth and strategy roles at consumer tech companies such as Wooga and Rovio, Eric has a depth and breadth of experience with mobile apps and games that few can match. He also founded and sold marketing business intelligence company Agamemnon, and is an active investor in the mobile gaming and ad tech categories.Over the past year, Eric has written extensively about App Tracking Transparency and the future of mobile advertising on his trade blog, Mobile Dev Memo.On the podcast, I talk with Eric about the value destruction of App Tracking Transparency, the limitations of SKAdNetwork, and how to thrive as an app developer in this new paradigm.Hey Eric, thanks for being on the podcast.00:01:09 Eric:Thank you for having me on the podcast.00:01:11 David:So, we're going to start off with a bit of a dead horse that's been beaten over and over again. Apple's motivation in enacting App Tracking Transparency, but I did want to take kind of a different perspective on it. The most interesting thing to me personally about Apple's motivation with App Tracking Transparency is what it says about what they are going to do in the future.Did they build SKAdNetwork purposely handicapped, or did they not really understand how handicapped it was? Were they really trying to kill Facebook, or was that a kind of a side benefit? I think that their motivations are important, because it forecasts what changes they may or not make moving forward as they start to see the impact.So, I think the first thing I wanted to ask you is, how do you see Apple's reaction and how they perceive ATT to be going, now that we're seeing snap drop 25% after the quarterly earnings report, and see more of the disruption that you and others were predicting, but maybe Apple didn't quite see coming? How do you think Apple sees this going currently? And what does that say about the future of privacy on iOS?00:02:42 Eric:I think Apple's primary motivation was not to capture mobile advertising market share. I don't think that was a primary motivation. I think that's happened, and I think they expected that to happen, but I don't think that was the primary driver of this decision.What I think they wanted to do was, there's kind of like a big picture idea here, and then an immediate consequence idea. I think what Apple did not like, was that they had kind of lost control over content discovery on the iPhone.When the App Store was first launched, that was how you discovered apps. It was through going to the App Store, and some small part search, but then in large part just like the editorial curation that Apple exposes there. That changed over the years, and up until the announcement, or the enactment of of ATT, the way that people discovered apps was through advertising, and primarily Facebook advertising.Apple totally lost control. The content that people interacted with on their phones was not the result of any deliberate decision on Apple's part or some deliberate consideration. It just happened to be whatever could scale ads the best. Whatever companies could scale their ads the most efficiently, that's what people interacted with. That's what became dominant on the platform, and Apple really had no say in that.Short term, narrow aperture view of this, they just wanted to regain control of that. They wanted to be the kingmakers. They wanted to be the tastemakers; the people that decided—the party that decided—what became popular on the iPhone and how the iPhone was used.And I mean, that's, it's, if you've worked in, in gaming, especially, but if you've worked in mobile apps at all and you've ever had to go and, you know, go, go through the whole process of pitching your app to Apple, and pleading for featuring You know, that that's what they want.They, they like to having that control because that allowed them to percolate their new iOS features into the app community through almost horsetrading it's like, you want featuring, We'd be happy to give you featuring, but you've got to integrate X, Y, Z thing into your app.Once you do that, we're happy to feature you. that, that was sort of the, that was the, the, the negotiating process. You know, that that process, even that process itself became less important and less prominent in the life of a developer over the last few years, In 2012 to 2015 that's what you did every time you were launching a new app, or even if you're doing a major update, you flew, you flew to San Francisco, you went to Cupertino, you went into a, conference room at Apple HQ and you pitch somebody.That just stopped being something that people did. Like just people realized that, even if we get featuring, it's not going to be that meaningful for our business, what we really need to be able to nail what we, what we have to do. Our success is dependent on our ability to scale the product with paid advertising, you know, and explicitly, you know, specifically through, through Facebook.So, I think that was the primary motivation to regain that control right now. I think there's a bigger picture idea here. There's a bigger picture motivation or, or like, projection here, which is that, you know, we're, we're moving into a paradigm where, you know, the phone you have, the, the device you have that you consume content with is totally unconstrained, in terms of what it accesses, right?Like, and, and how it accesses content. And that's what that's, that's the sort of, that's the behavioral, norm that, that people are moving into, they just expect their favorite stuff to be available from whatever device they have in their hand, at that moment, as long as it's connected to the internet, they expect to be able to connect to Disney to Hulu, to Netflix, to Facebook, to anything, they use every day.You get to a point where, you know, if you run this gatekeeping platform, like at the App Store or Google play If, if, if users have leapfrogged that paradigm into no, my favorite content is always available. It's, you know, sort of like, it's just, just persistent in the cloud and I should be able to access it however I want at any, at any given point in time.Then you've lost control of that sort of, of that gatekeeper positioning. I feel like what Apple wanted to do they, they, know that that's inevitable. we'll get there, but they wanted to prolong this dominance and the prominence of the App Store in terms of, you know, the consumer relationship, that's the first stop you've got to go through them to get to the content. because then that also, like that also provides them with some leverage over the, over the developer. And I think w w we've I think we've probably accelerated. But, but maybe not, maybe this, maybe this, you know, buys two to three more years of, okay, well, I have an iPhone that means I go through the App Store to get content, right.Or I have an Android. Maybe that means I go through Google play to get to content. And not that like, this is it. Matter what device I'm using, I'm using my Samsung TV or my iPhone and my iPad or my Facebook portal or whatever, or my, my, Amazon, echo. I want to get to the content that I have available to me in a persistent way in the cloud.Right. And so I think that was, that was also the primary motivation, or that was part of the primary motivation, but that was like, sort of like the bigger picture consequence of it.00:08:18 David:Right. I mean, where do you put, Apple's kind of stated motivation of privacy in this hierarchy of, of motivations and, and outcomes because, you know, a lot of people have said, oh, well, Apple was clearly acting anti competitively to favor their own ad business and crush these other ad businesses. It was, you know, primarily driven by the greed to expand their ad revenue.And then I think yours is really interesting as far as like the control, but then of course Apple goes and just in the quarter results recently and has stated over and over again. That it was 100% privacy motivated. do you just not buy that00:08:58 Eric:No, not at all. And I don't, I don't necessarily even think at this moment that consumer privacy, has been benefited or protected as a result of this. Right. And we can get into that in a second, but you know, I've been publishing a lot about, they're still allowing fingerprint and they said they wouldn't, that's in the policy.Right. It's explicit. Like there's no ambiguity there and they're allowing for it. Right. And they're not policing. And they could, because they've done it in the past. And so I think if you want it to be protective of privacy, That would be one of the things that you would prioritize is, preventing that from happening.00:09:33 David:And you don't think that? Not that I mean, diving into fingerprinting real quick, do you think that. It's potentially that they're just delaying the enforcement to kind of smooth some of the disruption that tra App Tracking Transparency has already caused it because them not enforcing it immediately doesn't mean they're not going to enforce it.So, but I find it baffling as well. That they're not. So do you see them enforcing it sooner do you think that this really is an indication that they don't actually care about privacy and that this is not ever going to be enforced?00:10:08 Eric:They can enforce it at some point and like they're there, there wise, like I think kind of a widespread. That in the developer community, that there was going to be a grace period. Right. They would introduce NTT, but they're going to allow for fingerprinting for some amount of time, because, you know, if, if you just, you know, made this very radical change and it was like absolute from day one, the impact would have been even more severe than, than what we saw.So I, there was a belief that there would be a grace period, but you know, we're going on like four months now. Right. And, and the thing is, you know, my, my sense was when, as soon as they, because they, you know, they talked about private relay at WWDC this year, I was like, oh, okay. That's how they do it.Right. Because, and I've talked a bunch about how it would be clunky to police fingerprinting through App Store review the store review process. Right. I talked about that in a piece. I just wrote two weeks ago or last week, and it would be clunky, but they could have introduced us in private relay.I thought that that's what they were going to do. Or at the very least they would roll private relay out. Cause it applies to, you know, safari traffic now. And they would say, look, well, we have to reach parody. Our treatment of the web and or treatment had been app traffic. And so therefore, you know, maybe for whatever technical reason we can't, we can't, obfuscate the IP address of in app traffic, it'd be too expensive or it's a technical challenge that we haven't solved yet.But like, this is the moment, you know, ad tech when you must stop fingerprinting. And I think if they said that, you know, these ad tech companies would, right, because the way that they've sort of implemented this in a lot of these solutions is it's like an option, right? Like they say, you can turn it off if you want.Right. Cause I think that these ad tech companies are surprised. They thought fingerprinting was going to be. More we're policed early on, maybe not on day one, but you'd get like two weeks a month. and so they kind of introduced this as like an optional feature. Right. And then, you know, and they, they presented it as like a, Hey, it's a feature for developers if they want it.And so, you know, it's, it's something that they could switch off and they, they they're ready to switch off. I think. So I think even if, if Apple just sort of like, you know, kind of pantomime those motions, people would stop doing it because, okay. It's, it's actually, you know, it's sort of like actually against policy now versus just before where it was like ignored, but, you know, I, I thought they were gonna introduce in iOS 15 for that reason, or at least again, like, just make the, go through the motions of saying that, that it's, it's not allowed, but, but so just, just back Betsy, it wasn't about like, where does privacy sit in the, in the sort of list of motivations?I think it's probably so my, my, the heart, the hard time that I have with like, reconciling this idea that like, and you hear this a lot, like Apple cares about policy that people say that privacy, Apple cares about product. How could it have Apples on a person Apple. Apple's a corporate structure.There's there's however many employees at Apple. They don't all agree on things. Right. Who and Tim cook is not a dictator. He can't just run the company like that. Apple shareholders, have some control. His board has some control. Right. And so, you know, at least they have influence. And so like, the Apple as a, it can't have is it doesn't have a monolithic opinion about stuff.It's not an entity in its own. Right. I I just don't buy this idea that a company can care about some abstract concept. Right? Like, here's another question for you. Apple makes the Apple watch, It's a health tracker. Does Apple care about your health Do they, are they really concerned? Are they genuinely, you know, invested in your health Or do they want to sell something. so the idea with privacy is okay. It gives us an opportunity to strike a juxtaposition juxtaposition against Android, which you know, has, is, is perceived, I believe, as less privacy-safe but even Android has gone to great lengths or Google has gone to great lengths to bring privacy to the forefront in Android.A lot of it is about informing consumers about their data being accessed, but still there. They've done some things. Right. So anyway, I just, I don't believe that a company, a corporate entity can care about an abstract concept. Right. putting that aside, what does privacy buy them It buys them that juxtaposition, and then it buys them cover, It buys them cover to do all this other stuff. Right. And then to, and then they spin up this big narrative that probably helps us sell iPhones. Because you know what I00:14:07 David:Or future AR glasses 00:14:10 Eric:Exactly 00:14:10 David:Some ways,Positioning themselves, they they care about privacy insofar as it's an incredible marketing tool for them. it, gives them cover for future devices. They become more and more and more and more private. this thing you wear on your wrist biometric sensors and tracking your sleep and everything else, customers are going to feel more comfortable wearing AR glasses that have cameras on.When it's Apple branded, than when it's Facebook branded, there's been backlash with the Ray-Ban, glasses from Facebook. So, yeah, I get, you I, you know, the Apple fanboy in me wants to believe that, you know, Apple you know, wants to do good in the world, but I've, since lost my Apple religion, but I, but I do think to a certain extent that they care about they do care about privacy whether or not any of that's motivated by Goodwill or otherwise it's incredible marketing for them.That being the case, you know, and this is where maybe our opinions diverge, or at least how we interpret some of, of what's been going on. I still am of the opinion, as naive as it may be that that privacy was a primary motivation for them, whether they're altruistic or marketing or, whatever other reasons they have to be to be positioning themselves this way.I still think that that that was primary and, and that, I don't know that they even fully understood or expected some of the. the things that have been happening, I think they thought SKAdNetwork was a better solution than it actually is. I don't know that they expected to see a company like snap that is actually fairly aligned with them, at least, in marketing and public perception as being a more privacy-focused company to see this company that has been reading and talking positively about App Tracking Transparency and see them drop 25% in a single day, because, and then say specifically it's because SKAdNetwork isn't delivering.I still think personally. This has more to do with Apple, not understanding and not listening to the industry, which we've seen for decades, Apple doesn't listen, they're not good at receiving outside feedback on roadmaps, on, on their APIs, on anything else. They think they know what to do.And they think as a product company, they can just build this product bring it to the world. And it's going to be the best thing since sliced bread SKAdNetwork is just another. Yeah. Another example of them trying that approach and then just falling flat on their face. I think this is important because if that is the case and if they really, if the primary motivation really was privacy, then maybe we do see an SKAdNetwork 3.0, that's way better than this current one.After they realized they've destroyed tens of billions of dollars of value, and also potentially handicapped their own platform because as ad efficiency goes down and as apps struggle to gain traction, they lose too. So, yeah, I mean, I guess just, I'd love to hear your kind of response to that. Cause I know we probably disagree on this a bit.00:17:37 Eric:I guess it doesn't really matter. Like it, you know, if we, I don't know, at this point it kind of seems like semantics a little bit. Cause it's like, well, all they care about privacy because privacy is good marketing messages. But my point is like, I don't think they genuinely care whether people's data is being accessed by advertising networks.Right. I don't think they cared about that to the, to the degree that, it didn't impact. It was, it was, it was happening sort of unawares, right? Like, or, you know, that these users were like sort of unawares, once it became, like a, like a sort of social rallying cry around, you know, Facebook and, you know, it's the congressional testimony and you're listening on our devices.And then once it became something that I think that they could, you know, exploit the insured, then maybe they care about it because it is a differentiator for the products and they can help them sell more products. Right. But, but I think so, first of all, so we are on a scanner 3.0, they released 3.0 3.0 is just like a minor improvement.So 3.0 added view through attribution. And I think it added one more thing. And then also with, I was 15, they allowed the post-bacc to be sent directly to the advertiser, not just the networks. I mean, those are improvements, but I don't see them continuing to do. S K I know work. I just, I just don't see that, but I think I do. I do agree. I agree with you that, that they didn't understand how consequential that this would be to the advertising. I think it's an example of like the left hand, not talking to the right hand.Apple is like a super secretive organization, not just to the outside world, right. Internally Apple teams are very secretive. Right. And, you know, I, I don't know that the App Store team was talking to the iTunes team. I, I mean, I don't even really know how that, how, how this sort of corporate structure separates those two teams.But my sense is that like the App Store team, the people that work with developers, Aware of this, like, and I I've been told that I've been told that they learned about it at WWDC two years ago. Right. And then they got up, they had to field a bunch of angry emails and phone calls. Right. you know, I think, there, there wasn't a whole lot of consensus internally around what the impact of this would be.I think the impact was underestimated. And to be honest, I don't think they would have released something if they knew that it was going to wipe out, you know, just a late, a quarter of snaps market cap in a day. Right. I don't think they would have released something if they knew it was going to annihilate a fifth of Zynga's market cap in a day last quarter, you know what I mean?I don't think they, you know, and what we saw with Facebook was that there's like this kind of slow erosion of, of, of market cap, you know, from, from like the all time high, a couple months ago. but you know, th the damage hasn't been just, just in terms of stock price, hasn't been as, as, as severe to Facebook, as it has to some of these other.You know, who weren't really doing the things that Apple wanted, you know, to sort of, to mitigate. Right. So I, I don't think that they fully, you know, first of all, they didn't, you know, workshop this with advertisers. Like I know that to be true, or, or I believe that to be true, unless some people did it in like, you know, deep secret and they've never revealed it, but I don't think they, I don't think that's true because I've talked to a lot of people.No one, no one was consulted about this that I've spoken with. you know, I don't think that they really truly grasped how sort of like fundamental performance advertising was, or is to a lot of these businesses, right. In terms of, they're just, they're, they're sort of, you know, operational success.Right. And so I think, because of that sort of differential between. I think what they thought was going to be the result of this and what the actual result was. You know, I, I feel like that does call into question, you know, not only just the wisdom of this, but you know, how well they can defend it, right.When, you know, against maybe some, some, some lines of inquiry, you know, that, that are, that are sort of like, you know, kind of a more powerful and, sort of socially instrumental than, than ours than mine are then, then app advertisers or app developers. Right.I think they've, they've invited a lot of questions about this through, through, through the severity of the impact that we've witnessed over the last couple of weeks and months.00:21:35 David:And that's where I totally agree with that. And that's been my perception as well. And I talk to folks as well, is that Apple didn't fully understand the implications. And if there were people inside Apple who had a better understanding of what might play out, they didn't have enough of a seat at the table.And that a lot of this was just ivory tower thinking was Apple building ski network thinking, oh, this is going to be a great solution with. Like you said, workshopping it with the people who would actually have to use it. And then, you know, coming up with a better solution. So then, then my question for you is, okay.You know, you were kind of chicken little for a year, the sky is gonna fall. The sky is gonna fall. The sky is gonna fall. I mean, you've been really one of the most vocal people about how big these impacts were going to be. And you had a lot of people in the industry saying, oh, it's not going to be that bad.It's not going to be that bad. Well, now the sky fell. I mean, you know, a public company having 25% of its market value wiped out in a day due to one specific policy from a platform like the sky is falling, you were right. But then so now Apple sees it. They can't, they can't avoid seeing it. What do they do from here?You said, they're not going to make SKAdNetwork better. You know, are they going to not police, fingerprinting to, continue to soften the blow? Like where does it go? That's that's, what's so interesting to me about okay, whatever their motivation, what they do in the future. In reaction to what's actually happening now that we're seeing actual results matters, you know, to, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.And, and one of the things I put in the notes to talk about is a lot of this value that's being destroyed is not accruing to Apple. It's not as if you know, a hundred billion dollars of market cap wiped out of Facebook and Google and snap and other folks, it's not like Apple is actually capturing that because they don't, they don't have the ad inventory.They don't they're, they're not a big player in the space. So, yeah. W where does Apple go from here if they painted themselves in a corner,00:23:38 Eric:Maybe, I mean, I think what I would, you know, if I was an Apple, I'd be worried about, you know, they've got a lot of theirs are, they're already under a lot of scrutiny, right. Like, you know,00:23:47 David:Right.00:23:48 Eric:What did the DOJ, what just three days ago, decided to re reopen the investigation in that, in the Apple, related to, to the way they operate the App Store.I just think it's really tough to, to maintain this line on one front while, you know, you're obviously having to lose ground on, on another front. Right. because as we've seen, like there's just been this steady trickle of them, you know, seeding ground developers or, giving up a lot of, you know, Exclusivity and, and, you know, PR preferential treatment they have with, with apps or operation, right.Like, it just feels like maybe it's maybe it's they felt like, well, that will, it we'll expand one area of that, that preferential treatment while we're sort of like forced to abandon other, areas of preferential treatment. But I don't know that they were, I don't, but that would only make sense if they actually really understood how dramatic the consequences of, of ADT would be, which I don't think they did.You know, I don't know. Maybe they have painted themselves into a corner. I mean, I don't know. So that's the thing about asking, I know work is like the way it was designed. It's got a lot of features that on their own would be smart, you know, tech, progressive privacy, protective, you know, mechanisms.Right. But in combination just renders this thing, like totally. Dysfunctional. And that's the problem because now if they go back and they get rid of any of these given features, so like, or not features, but restrictions, right. So let's say they say, okay, so first of all, I mean, and I'm assuming most people listening are at least familiar with this.I don't want to, I won't, I won't go into the whole thing, you know, description of Muscat network from zero, but let's say they give up on the privacy threshold, which would be weird because there's a privacy threshold for Apple search ads to be fair, but let's say they gave that up. Right. then, then, okay.You move a little bit towards, you know, something that, that is functional and helpful. but you're, you've, you've, you've made a pretty, sort of like very kind of public facing kind of Mia culpa decision, which I don't, you know, or announcement. Right.Which I don't know, that is an Apple's DNA to do that kind of thing.00:25:49 David:And giving up the privacy threshold would actually allow tracking, which is what they're saying, they're trying to prevent. So that's the other problem with giving much ground on some of these things with SKAdNetwork.00:26:01 Eric:Well, it could, it00:26:03 David:And that that's kind of the broader question is like, can S K I network even be saved and, you know, let's say regulators did come in and say, this was completely anti-competitive what's the solution.I mean, if you roll back and give unique identifiers to every app, you're going to have all the same unintended consequences that came with the IDFA. yeah, I mean, that's like four questions rolled into a statement, but, can I ask that network actually be saved while maintaining some level of privacy?00:26:32 Eric:Maybe, but I don't know that you do give up. So I don't, I don't think you totally Naval tracking. If you'd give up the privacy threshold, what you'd enable would be the advertiser would be able to link the specific campaign to an individual user in their data environment. Now, if they chose to share that with a third party, Platform or as platform, I guess that that would be their decision, I don't think by default it would sort of instantly, you know, make that trackable. Right. Cause all you're really doing is adding a little bit more context every post-bacc versus just some, because you already get, I mean, if you get rid of the privacy rest, it, that just means those NOLs go away.Right. And so you're able to get a little, you're able to track, you're able to sort of observe the less frequent, transactions. Right. Or just tell me what it is. If you tell me what it is that I can design around that. Right. But we don't even know if it's dynamic they've, they've apparently changed it like without telling anybody.And so all of a sudden the number of Knoll conversion values exploded. Right? I mean, that's the thing, just make it public because if you do that, then I'm going to say, you know what? Okay, I'm going to design my app, such that like. The people I care about are going to trigger this or not. Right. It's not something that's in its early funnel.It's something that it'll happen. You know, I can build my, I can, I can sort of like Intuit, you know, just through like kind of statistical modeling, what, where I need to place this in order for it to trigger the number of people that satisfies the privacy threshold, such that I get the data that I really need to make decisions.Cause right now you have no idea. And you know, I have no idea where to place that. What, what is that? Unless you just experiment a bunch of times, but, but even then it's, it's the, the broader environments to variable because the, the campaign could go up and down in terms of like DAU or DNA every day, you know what I mean?And then if they change it, then there's like a totally unknown exhaustion is variable there. Right? So it's impossible to tune your app such that you, you say, okay, look, I get it. You're not going to let me have. conversion value if fewer than 25 people did it. Well, I know how much traffic I'm driving through all these campaigns every day.So, so I need to consolidate my campaign, such that each one drives 400 in new, new installs every day, because I know that, you know, an eighth of the installs will trigger that thing, but those will be the users that really care about. Right. And if you did that, then at least I know, and I can design everything around that, but I don't even know.I don't even know if that changes over time relative to the number of installs I'm driving. I don't know if you're changing it on the back end without telling me like, it's just, you can't operate in with that kind of opacity. It's just, it's just not functional. And then you've got the a hundred campaign ID limit, you know, you've got no creative, parameters in the post-bacc like, you just can't do anything with this.00:29:04 David:Yeah. I mean, that's where it does seem like this was designed as an academic exercise. How do we prevent any. Identification of any individual ever from being even remotely possible. And, and it was an academic exercise that they played out. Whereas if they had workshops with the people who actually have to use it and had, thought through the kind of business use cases and you made a valid point earlier, you don't automatically, enable tracking by, reducing the privacy threshold.But I think, you know, Apple She kind of rethink some of the priorities around this so that you get better business metrics, even if one or two people can slip through the cracks of being able to be uniquely identified. And I think the argument there is like, it doesn't matter at scale, like if one person slips through the cracks, Facebook is not going to build technology around finding that person here and there that slips through the cracks because it doesn't matter to their business to find one or two.It matters too to have more data on everyone. So the campaign ID limit the creative ID, like all of these seem very ivory tower thinking that just is not going to play out in the real world. So, a few minutes ago you were saying you don't think Apple will improve SKAdNetwork, but now we're talking about how they could.Where does the rubber meet the road what's going to happen?00:30:31 Eric:I mean, I don't. Cause I mean, the thing is like, you know, we're just kind of riffing right now. Right? I think like if we sat, we sat down with the chocolate or the whiteboard or something, you know, because we, I wrote an article a couple months back, right. It was, it was like right after this was announced and I kind of like, here's some suggestions here's, here's what you can do to make STI work.More helpful and you know, some really smart people in the Mobile Dev Memo, slack pointed out holes in my analysis. They know if you do this, I, I, if we, if we had enough, post-tax going, I could sort of encode the idea of V over enough of the post-tax like, event in a post-tax. I could put like one character from the 90 fee and every single one, I could get the users.So it's, that's why you can only have one post-bac per install, right. Because if you did 50 or so, that makes sense. So, I mean, the thing is like, if I'm just ripping, what I do believe though, is like, you can eat, you can either have the privacy threshold or the random. Right because I need so like ramp the privacy threshold up to a million.I don't care, but let me have real-time install accounting because without that, I can't do anything. Right. If you, if I, if you're off you skating, even the date of installed in that I can't, I can't do in Sauk county. I can't, I can't, I can't, assess the economics of my campaigns because I don't even know when the installs are produced and I can't make changes to campaigns.Right. Without having to shut the whole thing down and wait, and to reuse that, one precious campaign ID within the, within the sort of like constraint of a hundred. Right. So. my sense is that like, if you just solve for that allow that allow real-time install accounting and then do whatever after that you have to do to prevent me from figuring out who those people are.Okay, that's fine. But at least then I know this campaign drove this many installs today. These were the targeting parameters. This was the audience I was reaching. This is how much I spent. Right. And like, even if we just went, cause I don't think you would lose a lot if you just went back. Cause right.You know, the, the frontier that we reached was like, we're in, especially on Facebook, I'm optimizing for value. I'm not demising for ROAS. Right. And that was like the sort of the final form of, of, of mobile advertising measurement is like, I'm telling Facebook, give me 110% ROAS on day seven. If you do that, I don't care how you target, who you target.You know, w how much you see CPI is, is irrelevant. I've got unlimited. You know, from a, from a sort of like practical standpoint on any given day spend as much as you can, but just make sure we'll get a hundred times that was the final form. And I think even if we sort of like retreated from there back to just like CPI, the average LTV of this campaign is X and the average, you know, the CPI was Y and so therefore I'm making money.That would be much less efficient, but still like it's workable right now. What we have is not workable.00:33:10 David:Yeah, well, I think you and I could riff on all this wonky stuff for another couple of hours and, I hope Apple's listening and actually going to make some changes and, listen better now that they're starting to see some of this stuff, but I did, I did want to change gears and kind of start talking through.What this means for developers and specifically, you know, sub club podcasts, what it means for subscription app developers and, and what you were just talking about. I think, I think is actually a really important, topic that not a lot of people fully understand you've written about it in the past, but I think it's still somewhat abstract enough, that I wanted to, to kind of have you describe it in more concrete terms.And that's the fact that with these, you know, day seven ROAS campaigns and value optimization and event optimization campaigns, Facebook with all of its data and AI in incredible targeting efficiency has kind of, in some ways been doing the job of developers. It's been finding. Those unique profiles, user profiles of who's actually going to spend money.Who's actually going to enjoy the app. And, and it's like, in some ways they, they became this really efficient black box of user profiling and understanding users that developers had kind of in the past done. And then maybe now need to get good at again in the future. know, again, you've written about this before, but just describe that process, maybe a little better of, of how amazing Facebook really was at finding the best users for an app.00:34:51 Eric:Well, they were very, you know, as you said, very, very good at it. Right. So, you know, it was based on like an approach that is, was very, simplistic, right? I mean, I just gonna, I'm gonna, if I can observe everything, then I know everything about this user and I can just target most relevant ads to them.Cause I know everything about what they interact with. Right. And I know what they like and you know, it gets to a point where that, that that ability to observe is so pervasive. That I, I do agree like that, that had, gone too far. Like the pendulum has swung too far in that direction.Like it is not, I find it unsavory to think that like, literally everything I do on my phone is observed and instrumented and ingested as a data point by one company. Right. Like that's, I'm uncomfortable with that. So, you know, and, but, but like, I think, you know, to your point, like going, you know, if you go back to when, when UAC was introduced, right.So Google their mobile product UAC is that's they describe it. I think that they themselves describe it as a black box as like a selling point. Right. Because it's like, look. Worried about any of that, you will handle all of this difficult analysis for you. We'll find the best users for you. You don't have to iterate across audience, definitions, or even creative, you know, and do all that experimentation yourself.We'll do that on your behalf with our superior tools. And when they announced it, there was a lot of, you know, disquietude in the, in the developer community. Cause people are like, look, we built this. We want to do it. I don't trust you to do it. I trust you to do it well, but I also trust it to do it to your advantage.Right, right. To pursue your best interest. Not necessarily mine, what I think you'll do. So this is, and this is exactly what these platforms do is they sort of, they take whatever boundary you set or whatever standard you set around efficiency. And they, they reached that. Right. They'll they'll get you to exactly what you say is like the sort of quality threshold or the efficiency threshold for your campaigns to keep spending money, but they won't give you any more than that.Right. So they could blow out your campaigns and get you 400% real ass. but if you told them you only need 110 by day seven, that's what, that's what you're going to get. And if they get you to that 400, then they're going to buy you a bunch of crappy traffic that brings the sort of average down until it hits that one 10.Right. And so, you know, that's, that's the power that they had, which, you know, to be fair, it's like, they were really good at that. And they would probably be, and, and, and them being really good at it. And then, and then present and providing that as a product productizing that and making that available to everyone.Meant that anyone could spin up a Facebook campaign, you know, any, any Shopify retailer, any Shopify merchant, any small time app developer and spend money and grow their product, grow their audience, right. Versus go back to 2012 and like, you know, the best UAA teams won. And, and a lot of times these were like big teams, big companies that raised a lot of money.You know, now, you know, it is way more egalitarian to open it up to anybody. And, you know, the small shop owner, in, I don't know, the middle of Kentucky or whatever could, could have access to this world-class machine learning infrastructure to grow their business. Right. And then they only really had to compete on the quality of their product and not the quality of their user acquisition infrastructure.So in a way it was, I mean, it was a giant gift to these SMBs and, and if the proof is in the pudding, look at Facebook's advertiser mix, 10 million advertisers, vast majority SMBs, right? 10 million average. Right. Think about any company that has 10 million customers, that's just an absurd scale. Right?And these are people spending, you know, in aggregate tons of money on Facebook. So like, it made sense, but, but, you know, there was a lot of pushback when UAC announced that. Cause developers said, look, we, that was our competitive advantage. Like, well, should it be, if we go back to basics and everybody has access to the same quality of infrastructure and the same quality of like, sort of like, you know, marketing tools and then you can be on the basis of your product.00:38:49 David:So then are we kind of going back to that world? I mean, after I think transparency is going to degrade, Facebook's targeting efficiency because they're not going to have that pervasive tracking where they know everything that's going on on your smartphone. So, so where do we go from, from here as far as, you know, what developers need to be thinking about?And, and I forget exactly when you were at this post, but, but I really appreciated you. You kind of talked through some, some tactics even around. developers needing to get better at capturing intent about potentially kind of bifurcating experience in the app is that we're we're developers should be headed of, okay.Now Facebook can't bring me the perfect user for my app as it exists today. and instead developers need to get back to the basics of understanding their user base and kind of building out those user profiles and understanding who they should be going after. Is it, is that where we're headed?00:39:48 Eric:I think so. I mean, I think we talked about this last time I was on this podcast, but like, you know, so when I wrote my book, Freeman, economics, I mean, this was like 2013. Right. And so this AEO didn't exist yet. You know, VO was didn't exist yet. This was, you bought installed. Right. And the idea of freemium or my sort of thesis with freemium is that like, it gives you the ultimate power to personalize.And so you need some minimum scale because you need a minimum amount of people to experiment with in order to make, you know, some small percentage of people that do monetize meaningful to you. but in order to do that, you need like a sort of like very large surface area for experimentation, right?You need a lot of content to be able to test against people and make sure that, you expose to them the exact perfect thing that they want. And in order to do that, you eat a lot. And so what ended up happening was that idea of flip. And it, and it became less about doing that in the product and more about doing that with the creative, right.And allowing Facebook to do that with four year on your behalf with the creative, then they found the perfect user and you need to do any personalization in the app because they probably the perfect user just make the app for the perfect user, that individual profile, that one profile. Perfect. You make that app, Facebook will find those people through like mass, you know, wide-scale experimentation with creative.Well, now it's flipped again. And so, you know, when someone comes into your app, you don't know who they are. You don't know how qualified they are, because the targeting has been degraded to the, to the point where, you know, th th there's, there's not a whole lot of, of sort of like operatory, you know, relevancy that you can Intuit there.And so you've got to parse that out from their behavior, show them something, see how they react to it. If they react positively to it, show them more of that. And if they don't show them more. And, and that kind of personalization though. I mean, it was very powerful and I talked and that's, I wrote a whole book about it, but it's hard to do.You need a big team, you need data infrastructure, you need that's, that's the thing. And then you revert back to like, well, only big developers can do this. Right. And so you've kind of just edged out the small guy. you know, the developers that are just like a couple of people and they got to just whiff, or they, they got to take a flyer on some idea, and they better hope that it works right.Versus being able to kind of iterate into that and provide one app that gives like personalized experiences to sort of everybody that comes through.00:41:56 David:Yeah. So then those, I mean, what would your advice be today knowing that you can't just, you know, throw a hundred grand at Facebook and let them figure out your perfect user? How, you know, if you're, if you're building an app today from scratch, or let's say you're at 20 or $30,000 in MRR and you want to make that leap and really grow, what do you do?00:42:18 Eric:Well, I think so. I mean, in that post, I mean the one thing that is, you know, it's a worthwhile exercise, but it is trying to instrument these, these signals with the conversion values for SKAdNetwork. Now, the problem with that was, you know, going into this before NTT was launched and, you know, I worked, you know, I worked with some companies to do this and it's like a data science exercise, right?You just, you, you run these, you know, you go back and you have like, kind of look back models and you find out what the commonality was amongst people that ended up being good users. And you try to surface that in the app and you encode that as a signal for a scanner. The problem is going into that exercise.You're thinking that sci network was like a good faith solution. it made sense, but now we realize, well, we don't even know when they're going to te when they're going to, how many of these we need to trigger before they even start reporting them to us. Right. And so like, it's like, okay, well, that's not really an option.You know, I think the other thing is, you know, you approach this as more of like a product marketing, you know, project and just trying to figure out who your audience is right here. And that's like, going back to basics, that's saying, okay, like, what are the demo features of the groups that like this type of product and that's what I have to target against.Right. And then just, and then trying to get, you know, cause you can't do mass creative testing anymore, at least on an iOS. And so, you know, trying to work out some pipeline of like, we try concepts on Android where we can still do kind of mass testing and then we promote the, the conceptual winners to iOS, but then we've got, you know, fewer, various success there.So we've got to kind of adapt that for the iOS environment. Like it's just, you lose a lot of, there's very lossy that each time you, you sort of transfer some sort of component of understanding from a totally separate platform. To iOS and then from iOS to like different environments to, to other environments on iOS, you just, you lose signal there, you lose precision.So I mean, it's it's, but that's it right. And then, you know, trying to get away. So I think another thing is that, you know, you talk to some of these companies and Facebook had become like kind of a drug for them. I mean, it's just like they were addicted to it. and it was just so easy to only use Facebook, right?Because you could accomplish everything you want it to, but you know, that's a classic, you know, sort of, that, that that's a classic sort of blunder from, from just a commercial perspective. You never want to be totally dependent on another platform. You know, now Facebook didn't make this decision.Apple did, but, you know, nonetheless, you know, your sort of devastated by it, right. Because of that dependency. So I think the other piece of this is just trying to, is doing, doing the work you should've done a long time ago, which is diversify your traffic mix. Right. And that's actually kind of difficult because Facebook, again, they did all that creative exploration for you.You know, they have such a broad user base that you could find all these different groups in scale, right at to, to scale like these even niche audiences, niche, look, any, any sort of like niche for X strategy game. You find enough people to build out, a big da you base and that's not true.I don't the other platforms. Right. And you got to really nail the form factor for those like snap is totally different. Like the way to approach the app is totally different. The Facebook, the way to approach tick talks to even snap, right? The way to approach Outbrain, Taboola totally different than any of those.You know, the way to approach YouTube is even different. Like every, all these, these are very, you know, particular, unique, channels and, and, and the way that the ads are are exposed in the products is different across them. And so you've to, you've got, gotta go through the work and the investment it's, you're investing in a data and, and, and sort of institutional knowledge.And all was never went through that exercise because it's like, I can just00:45:46 David:Right.00:45:46 Eric:Spend more Facebook.00:45:47 David:Yeah. And, where do you think organics fall into this mix? I know, like we talked to all trails on the, on the episode before that I said, not only are they a unicorn app, likely evaluation, but in, in their success with organics, I mean, there are apps that just find incredible success with that, right.Kind of search optimization or finding that right niche that really drives organic installs. Where do you think the average app should be placing organic and how much focus should they be putting on trying to get some of this free attention and build, you know, user generated content and links and things like that.00:46:35 Eric:I mean, do it to the extent that you can. I mean, why not? you know, I, I don't think you've got to choose one of the other, right. I mean, you should be ideally maximizing the effect of both of these strategies, but I will say one thing it's that you always have to turn on paid UI, right. You've always got to turn on paid marketing.There's varying, you know, sort of, timelines, you know, over which you have to confront that reality, but it is reality. You've always got to turn it on and like, I've done enough, like advisory for like private equity funds and just big companies that are looking to buy other companies.And it's always, the reason they bring me on is because I'm going to say, we could triple this business. If you did paid UA, right. We could cut Drupal this, like how, how, how much, how much bigger could this get? Right. And you know what I mean? Like, there's always a point where they've capped out. They never developed this, you know, expertise.Internally, right. It never became like domain knowledge that they possessed. And for that reason, there been a lot of false starts. Cause it's like, well, we can always sort of lean back on organic and it's going to take time to spin up paid and they bring someone in. And within two months they haven't really materially improve the business and they spend a bunch of money.So they get fired or, you know, they get the budget cut and they quit. And then they do that three more times and then they realize we're stalled out in growth. and no one wants to come work to be our CMO because like, it's pretty obvious that they're not gonna be. You know, the full freedom and the only way to sort of like break out of that cycle is to have the company get acquired right by a private equity fund is going to say, yeah, we're going to bring in a CMO and you know, these management's kind of gone and, or they're gone, but, or they can stay with it to play ball with the new, you know, the new execs and, and we're just gonna spin up paid marketing and that's, and that's how we grow this asset and that's how we make our money.So I've just been on enough of those deals where you always turn on page away. If you, even, if you, even, if you think you never will, it happens, you know, outside of your, approval.00:48:28 David:Yeah. I didn't mean to phrase the question anyway, that made it a black or white that you had to choose one over the other. And actually I was, I was trying to, to, to kind of, throw a softball at you, because I think your, your thinking on this, is great in that the sooner you do spin up some level of paid marketing, the sooner you, you can understand the different audiences that are going to be coming into the app.And, and that's something that you've talked a lot about that I think is really fascinating. Yeah. If you can find a good organic channel, go for it and bring traffic in, but know that when you spin up ads, those that traffic is going to look different. They're going to convert different. They're going to be interested in different things.And if you, yeah, I'm stealing your, your kind of playbook here. So yeah. Tell me why you think. even if you do have a very successful organic channel and maybe that's the strategy, you kind of get from 10 K a month to a hundred, 300 K a month. But to get from there to the millions a month, you're going to have to spin it up.So what's the playbook for, for kind of building that expertise in house. And when do you start, when do you have to start ramping it up?00:49:43 Eric:So thank you for reminding me of my thoughts here. so, so the idea, the idea there is like, organic's never going to be the ultimate scale channel, right? Like it's gonna, it's gonna, it's, it's gonna, you're gonna reach some sort of asymptote with growth there and it's gonna flatten out and probably at, you know, if you kind of close your eyes and you pictured your app at like the sort of greatest potential, right?Th this sort of like greatest sort of like intrinsic potential paid is 80% of daily, you know, new users, right. Or 60 or whatever, but it's a majority. And so if you've only. You know, grown via, you know, just sort of like organic traction and organic like magnetism, and you've, you've gone through like many sort of cycles of app or product iteration to sort of optimize the product for that group of people that do look distinct that will look distinct from people that have responded to some kind of stimulus, right.And have some sort of intent, sort of like, you know, driving their, their adoption of your product, then you've optimized for the group. That's that at the greatest potential scale of your, of your product is in minority. Right. And what you really want to do is you want to optimize the product for the majority, the, where all the growth, where the growth can be, right.And so that, you know, if you delay layering in pay traffic and you, and you delay, then you delay understanding what they want out of your product. And the sooner you bring that in the sooner you can sort of, Optimize the product for them, the more efficient your pay traction will be, and you'll get an organic halo effect from that.Right. And so like, it's like, well, the sooner that you do that, the faster that you sort of reach that, that sort of, you reached that potential on the organic side. So it's more about like, are you thinking about like how, I mean, an exercise that I always love to do is it's just like pause and think about like, what would success look like?And for most apps, success looks like, yeah, we're spending a ton of money on paid you way. And there's a lot of organic too, because that's just a function of being a successful app that a lot of people know about, but, but we're spending a ton on UI. That's a good thing. That's not a bad thing. It's a great thing.And so, but, but the majority of our users came in through paid UA and so we've optimized the app for them. and so we've, we've, we've made the economics better over time. And then the other piece is like in a, talked about this a lot too. It's like, you've got to change it. Over the life cycle of your app.It, because you know, a lot of times what you see as, you know, you see an app that's new they've got like explosive growth, right? And you look at the, just like a kind of stacked, a bar chart of the cohorts by age. And it's like, well, on any given day, the vast majority of users are new or they're less than a month old.Right. And then like you go, you fast forward two years or three years, and a really good app, that'll be flipped because you've, you've retained people. The vast majority of people that use your product every day are old. I mean, in terms of like when they adopted your product, because it's sticky because it's retentive, right.And that's a, that's a great place to be. But that, that you've got to change the way that you think about product optimization at that point. Like when you're going through the product iteration process, like, well, you're not optimizing for the newbies anymore because there's way fewer than you got to keep the old timers involved and engaged and.Right. Cause, you know, that's just where the vast majority of your revenue is coming from. Right. And, and, you know, and, and at that point you've probably reached, you know, some proportion of your Tam. And so you might not even be doing new user acquisition as such anymore. You might be doing a lot of retargeting re-engagement.And so it's just like, you gotta be very conscious of like the life cycle of the app, what the, what the user base looks like in terms of composition by age and like all that kind of stuff. And it just, it just takes a lot of consideration and it's it's, you know, and if you get to any point where like any of those, any of those distributions is skewed to an extreme, to an extreme one direction or the other, you probably got a problem.Like if you're all organic, you're not you leaving money on the table. If you're all old timers, when you're not growing anymore, if you're all 00:53:39 David:Right, 00:53:39 Eric:Retaining enough. Right. It's like all these different levers that you got to pull to make sure that you hit the optimal sort of combination.00:53:45 David:Yeah. That's great stuff. I love the way you put that too. I think there is some level of magical thinking that if I have just the right app, I never have to do marketing, marketing is a dirty word. Spending money on marketing is. It is wasteful or only companies with bad products have to do marketing and that's just not true.What's especially funny. a lot of these folks or indie developers who hold up Apple to be the end, all be-all Apple spends tens of billions of dollars on marketing, Apple measures that marketing while at the same time, you know, enacting ATT. App Tracking Transparency So it is funny that dichotomy of, and the magical thinking of I shouldn't have to pay for users.My product should be good enough it, really is just magical thinking. ultimately, spending money on marketing is a good thing. Not a bad thing. I love that perspective.00:54:39 Eric:Yeah, my, we had a Halloween party for my son and his classmates he's, he's very young and he was, he like, he did this thing where, you know, he wanted to be two things for Halloween. So they had like a, you know, a parade of their school. And then, we had, you know, we just had Halloween day country competing and stuff anyway, so he wanted to be a dinosaur.And then he decided he wanted to be a vampire for the Halloween day. so we had to get him a second costume. He was a vampire and a, and we're having this party and someone was like, oh, you look like such a scary vampire. I was like, I work in digital advertising.I'll show you what a vampire. looks like, It's this idea about digital advertising. Oh man. It's, so disgusting. it's crass gross. You have to spend money to acquire users That's that's that's that's so, vulgar, but in reality, you're leaving money on the table.If you could be doing it and you're not00:55:35 David:Right. 00:55:36 Eric:That's not good. 00:55:37 David:Yeah, totally. So, so, that, that's actually a great place to wrap up. Like where, where do we go from here? So ATT App Tracking Transparency is what it is. We don't know what Apple's going to do. We hope they make things better, but, what is the future of, of app install ads? What is the future of, of marketing your app successfully?00:55:57 Eric:It's funny because I, have been the biggest, crypto skeptic since day one. I remember people were telling me about Bitcoin in 2011 and I was like, this is a joke. Like, this is a, there's no need for this. There's no use case for this. I still feel that way, but it's gotten to a point where I feel like it's actually inculcating new behaviors where this is just.Crypto in general is probably the thing that introduces us to these ideas. it's like an imperfect way to implement them, but it makes us think about them. then there's going to be a solution that follows The structure of crypto. that is, is actually the better way to, to, to implement these ideas.But I've worked with a number of web 3.0 gaming companies. Right. And, and their challenge is that they can't be on the App Store. they're running like web properties. how do you promote that? And, the thing is if you're running it on the web, you can access it from your mobile device.I can access these games from my device It's just not on the App Store. if you get one of these that blows up, you get the halo of web 3.0 games. You get the, hit game that, creates the space for this category to thrive.Then. Maybe it just becomes, you know, acknowledged that yeah, we can go through the App Store if we want specific types of games, but if we want these other types of games, we just go straight to the browser. my big question is why did Apple do privacy really in the first place? maybe it was to actually route everything through the App Store, That would be the cynical conspiratorial take. It's that they want to prevent your access to the open web or they want to gatekeep it. so they're going to decide what you're able to access. But anyway, There are a lot of web 3.0 companies thinking about this right now.They can't go to the App Store, So there's no app install ads for them. It's all web-based. and, and also, you know, they've done a great loves Web 3.0 companies have done a great job of fostering community-driven marketing, Getting a discord server with 20,000 or 100,000 people in it.And That's where you advertise. you never have to pay for anything. now that's a first-mover thing. And I think that declines as more people enter the space. There are just, you know, there's just too many of these, these sort of games to, to sort of rely on that.But a lot of companies are thinking about that right now. How do we drive people to the web to do acquisition? Right. A lot of, you know, as, you know, a lot of, subscription companies, have been doing that for a long time, There are well-worn strategies for doing this. And they've been monetizing that way for a long time too.They haven't been screaming about it. But they've been doing it. now that, well, okay, now that's probably, that's, that's a policy that's allowed to, you're allowed to do that. Apple blesses. Well, they don't, they, anyway, they say we can't stop you. Maybe the consequence of this whole thing is that it just moves people into the browser. there's the web 3.0 piece of it, which, who knows maybe that is a dud. Maybe it's a gigantic category. I'm not convinced either way yet, but you've got people that are saying I'm going to set up web shops I made the point that like, look, I don't think that, you know, there's, there's, there are systematic reasons why that probably doesn't become a mass-scale solution.A lot of people are doing that anyway. A lot of games are doing that anyway. That's the other dirty little. secret A lot of gaming companies were sending emails saying, Hey, you know what, don't buy these IAPs in the app. Be

I found a somewhat quiet spot. And I'm earthing. And I was thinking about how talking so much about all of this related to mental health is really to learn about it, just to be free of it, not to keep talking about it forever, to be free of it and be that other kind of human being that I've experienced myself to be. And that really requires looking without condemnation, but really wondering, to figure out how it all works. And in order to learn about it, if one calls it good or bad, it prevents learning. And I was thinking about how it's important to be free of fear, because it's the fear that drives us to seek help from the mental health system. And to me, that exacerbates things more than necessary. And it could take a good amount of practice and wondering and tweaking to find a way to make it so one can avoid the mental health system. So I wanted to take a second and read a quote by Krishna merde. I feel like what he points to, has something to do with mob consciousness. And I'm not saying it's totally equivalent, but he says, I think man has come to a point where he feels that one must have a new mind, a new quality of mind. I mean by mind, the activities of the brain consciousness, sensory perception and intelligence. Is it possible before man destroys themselves completely, to bring about a new mind? Is it possible for human beings to bring about a totally different category, or dimension of the mind. And to me, I feel like math consciousness is consciousnesses attempt to bring about this new dimension and category in the mind. And it's not really working so easily as people at the level of thought, consciousness, transform it into something else. Sort of capture those minds and convert that process back into a process dominated by thought and thinking about oneself and one's own problems, and making it into a me mental illness. So maybe it's already happening. It's just a matter of people supporting people to journey through it. Maybe nothing else needs to be done except for that. Just having more compassion while people go through this process without dragging them back into believing that they have a mental illness. And he says also, when you put away something false, the mind becomes lighter. And the mean is false. And when we put that away, we become lighter, we become more energetic. And he describes something interesting, he says, discard everything that is false, which is everything that thought has put together. Then the mind has no illusion. And he talks about reading the book of oneself. And he says, I began with the first chapter which says, Be aware of your senses. And the next chapter says, human beings have their partial senses, exaggerating one sense and denying the others. The third chapter says, See all the senses can operate. That means there is no center of a particular sensory operation, and the fourth chapter, and so on and so on. I'm not going to read the book for you read it and explore it so much with what he points to is talking about map consciousness and I feel like he had a transformation experience he definitely did. But luckily, he was held and kept safe by so many people who didn't think that anything that was happening was wrong. Plus, it was 100 years ago now, so there wasn't really that paradigm so much. So I'm starting to read more Krishna Murty stuff again, instead of focusing on mental health, and I have done a lot of writing, but I feel not so compelled to go to it. It's like that process could go on forever. And I don't know if I want to keep fueling that. Just because it can go on forever doesn't mean that I should feel like to go on forever. And I could change my mind and get right back into it very soon. But for now, I'm not sure how much of my notes I'll go over. I remember reading through some of it just to see if there was anything I really wanted to say. And I wrote down that thought in a way is yesterday sound at sound of yesterday. And something I realized today was that I was watching a talk by Krishna Murthy. And he was talking about how we live very mechanically in the thought, programs basically. And I feel like these thought programs are in our brain. And they're soundscapes in there yester sound. And I feel like the sound is actually blocking the energy of our heart. So our heart is love. And we all have a heartbeat, we all have that love. But it's being blocked by this cage of yester sound. And I feel like when that breaks open, it's just living according to love and not this mechanical thought programs. And so I wonder if I can live according to love, and I was seeing a lot more beauty lately, but that seems to have decreased somewhat, I'm not sure why I think it could be because I've been taking this Seroquel for longer than I've wanted to mainly to get myself to ecpr which is in a couple days. So after that, I will stop taking the circle. I'm kind of tired of needing to drag myself to stay in this sort of limited form. And today, I met somebody who wrote a book on her journal of being a psych nurse. And it had several stories about her connecting with patients on the psych unit that she worked on. And I read the whole thing in one sitting. And then I told her and she's like, wow, that was quick. And I said, well, it's my genre. And it's interesting, because I'm pretty sure in a video yesterday or the day before I said to myself that I feel like I want to do something just to put myself in that mode of mental health. And then it just came up in conversation that she wrote this book, and she happened to have a copy. And she gave it to me to read and I read it and it was quite touching is very much exactly in alignment with ecpr. So I feel like it could be a synchronicity in a way. And I told her that I have a label and she was surprised that I wear the bracelet with my label on it and I explained why. Even though I was almost thinking well, it would be good to not have that immediately as how I would be helped, possibly but whatever. And these last couple days I've had a bit of doubt on the self dialogue process in general. Not the process but possibly about sharing Or I feel it's important to always be dropping the meanings that I make. So I make all these meanings to have a different context. But it's important not to cling on to any of them. The greatest moment of the day was saving a little beetle from a spiderweb, I saw him walking in circles because his leg was attached to a spiderweb. This little guy stuck on spider web. And I saved him with a stick. And I don't know how many people take the trouble of saving insects, but his little life will live on as it's meant to. Speaking of which, that's really good timing, there's a fly on my head. And I can't remember if yesterday I talked about how a blue bird nearly landed on my hand, I would hold it out like this. And he might have thought there was food, but he attempted to land twice, and there was no food. So that could have been why he didn't land. But I'm going to try and see if one day he'll land just for the sake of love, not for the sake of food. Because I haven't fed this bird because it's not the greatest to feed wild birds. And I haven't yet attached my grasshopper takeoff video or my feet relaxing video. So yeah, I feel like something shifted these last few days. And it could be taking this Eric Well, it could be taking the Hardy nutritionals or both. And I feel a bit more calm. In terms of doing the self dialogue, I just want to really enjoy being in California. And I don't want to be doing two hours of self dialog day. So maybe I'll keep it more to a journal of what's happening in terms of this hardy nutritionals process. And seeing if I can be off the Seroquel in California, seeing how long I'll be able to stay in California. I am hoping mid July at least. And maybe mid August, but we'll see how it goes. Because I may just have to go home and and come off these medications and up the Hardy nutritionals or something. I'm not gonna stay down here and take circle every day. I feel like my job is partly to stay sane in an insane world. And I was watching a video by Simon Sinek and I didn't wash the whole thing because he started talking again about navy seals, like he likes to do and I just don't think promoting killing is my thing. So using that as an example of high performance is, I don't know just a little bit it shouldn't be Just so yeah, anyway. But he did say that a tip for something along moving towards your spark or something is, as long as what you're doing isn't getting in the way of what other people want. Are you getting what you want getting in the way with what other people want. So this self dialog is good because this doesn't prevent anyone from getting help from psychiatry, if that's what they want. It's just creating other contexts to help myself, avoid psychiatry, get through it when I do have to access that, hopefully transcend psychiatry, and and also, maybe one day move this whole process into a realm that isn't a medical problem. Right now it's turned into a medical problem, anything can be turned into a medical problem. But yeah, part of this shift, I think, is something to do with just remaining kind of quiet and seeing what other layers just need to fall away. And this is a good place to do it, just because I'm in California somewhere quiet. It's just going into this sort of healing mode, I think. Maybe healing some of the stuff that has more, has more of an opportunity to heal in this quiet, beautiful place, instead of just self dialogue, self dialogue, writing down insights all the time. Because the thing with that process is when I decided to go back into it, it will definitely just reignite. That's not something that one loses. So knowing that I can kind of turn off that faculty and and just be for a while. Like today I was sitting outside and I was very content with just listening to the flies buzzing around, land on leaves and play Chase. And as two of them would fly by me about four inches apart. I swear I could hear where the producers of Star Wars got their inspiration for all their aircraft flying through space in those fighting scenes like war. And today, I saw a lizard that just the way the sun was hitting the side of his abdomen. There was a rainbow on his skin, and it must have just been the perfect angle for me to see that and it's probably like that on all of them all the time. But he was really absorbing all the colors of the light, not just the heat of the sun. And I took a video of a lizard that I put my toe near and he wouldn't move. I was kind of cool. That infinity of nature is always there to connect with it any moment. And I heard somebody talking about accents. And then sometimes words, like my brain have a hint of something regarding my consciousness, but I was thinking of mania as a sort of accent of a different language. Just like there can be many different kinds of English accents. One could be accented with mania, and speak in a little bit different way, like some people say that gay people speak in a way that is gay. And that's sort of a stereotype that may or may not be true. And people may or may not want to ascribe to but there could be, at some point, just a manic accent. In that if we're able to prune the process and remain somewhat functional, we might just have an accent of mania instead of this thing that psychiatry would like to call a mood disorder. I think we're moody because we're reacting to society. And we're calling it out to the detriment of ourselves. So in my consciousness, the me isn't doing well, but the mind is just fine. What other layers of this me can fall away, because I'm in a safe place where I don't really need those defenses right now. I'm not working in mental health, I'm not needing to get all up in arms about stuff. So can I release that and practice abiding in this other state, and bring that back when I go back home versus being so charged by things? And I really don't know. But I have been sitting quietly and meditating many nights, and I don't think it's necessary, per se, but I could, in a way help to calm my nervous system. And I did call this sort of glad Park thing in a way. So this would be an ideal scenario. And that in that ideal environment, permeate my biology and my nervous system and and see what happens, if there can be some healing there. And that might show more than talking about stuff in circles, to be able to abide in that calmness and take that back. So I will talk about a few things. But I'm seeing now as I'm talking about it, the value of perhaps just calming down with it all. Maybe that calmness will help to ground some of that manic energy if it comes when I eventually journey off these medications. And it's the gesture of the mind to reach out and touch us. And I really feel like it's breaking up these mechanized thought structures, and we're actually learning how to be human beings without these mechanical actions. And I wonder how to really bring in the love and the compassion and to have that animate and to be really grounded in that and not reactive even when it comes to mental health stuff. Like, can I bring acpr back home without even needing it? Can I use this time to heal. And there's another thing that Krishnamurti said in a video that really struck me with what I've been talking about with language and stuff was the observer creates the linguistic difference between the observer and the thing observed. And he talks a lot about being with fear and facing fear. And I think that by taking Seroquel, I definitely don't face the fear. And I'm not with the fear, I Medicaid it away. And he also talks about authority. And I feel like when I go to the psych ward, it's like, using that authority to save me because I can't face the fear. And I really don't know, I haven't gotten into that. But the fear will need to be faced. And maybe it's not fear at all. Maybe it's just this strong physiological reaction that I interpret as fear so I don't allow it to run its course. And Krishnamurti talks about a non mechanical way of living. And he says, the way we live now is very mechanical. And I know from the felt sense of mob consciousness, that it's definitely not a mechanical state is breaking out of that mechanized way of being and being totally fluid and flowing with the moment. And I just wonder why that can't be maintained. Why can't that effortlessness be maintained? And then when we go back down to the level of mechanization, it feels so difficult. It feels like so much more effort, and that effortlessness requires sensitivity and intelligence. But the trouble is, there's too much noise in this world to live that way and be that sensitive.So this is my rental car. So I'm getting packed up for my trip to LA. It looks like I am going to make it to ecpr. I'm going to leave tomorrow morning at 6am. But this is some of the stuff on packing and some of the stuff I carry with me always down here. I always carry my phone charger, because I'm making videos or editing them or so many different things on the phone. So I don't like to run out of charge. And sometimes, depending on what I'm doing on my phone, it can run out pretty quick. And I always have my headphones and an extra charge for my phone separate. And I love my little macro lens. It's super awesome. And I like to capture small little things being cool. And I'm always carrying with me my zap straps, I have to because I can strap one roll my wrist and one around an object and tie them together and be quite secure. Or I can use just one and tie it around my wrist. And then there's just enough Seroquel to knock me out cold as well as to trazadone as well. If I ever get in the position where I just want to knock myself out and and lay there. It's total emergency never had to use it. But I find it helps me feel safe. And this is like a little towel a little travel pal. I always forget to use it. I haven't ever put myself in the habit of using it. If there's oranges around my wad an orange peeler, a little mini knife. I used to eat avocado, so I'd open it with a knife and then eat it with this mini spoon. But I don't think I'll bring these or this. But I do have in my bag. He may or may not want your own little plastic fish. I will have a bathtub at the hotel. So I might want to bring this probably not. I'll put it in the to go pile. And my love was probably well, maybe I will bring this. And I always have chapstick with me. So these are always with me. And my rental car keys probably only need to bring one and a water bottle. Somebody gave this to me. So one thing I didn't bring with me to California and I hadn't bought one yet. And then somebody gave one to me and it's for hot and cold. So that's awesome synchronicity. And I always carry a hankie cuz I have a runny nose, so bad. So I use this when I can. And so like chapstick and hanky are like the most important things in the whole thing, and then probably the charger. And then probably the lens. Well, this is always going to be with me since I've had a bit of struggle. And last night, I did okay on the half circle and one trazadone as well as lithium. And I will do that when I'm in LA as well and have my passport in case I need it. And my wallet with some money and credit cards and ID and stuff. And then this is my hardy nutritionals for the time, I'll be away for three times a day. And this is the book that I read that I told you about. It makes me a little bit inspired to write a book and just create a little something of information about what it's like to stay in a psych ward or something like that. And earplugs I wear those every night. And this is really important. Super important squeaky fart buddy. Probably won't bring that to the workshop though. But it might help if I was supporting somebody and they're talking their distress, I would just go there we go. That's the motion. I won this prize. Very awesome. So anyway, and have some snacks. You know, have some coffee. annex and close my, my medication which I'll probably just take enough, I'm not going to take all that and my new notebook. So I was listening to a talk. And I haven't listened to all of it but it was by Matthew Federici, and he was talking about some studies where people with the best outcomes that our patients are mindfully non adherent. And I love that term. And it definitely describes me and it's describes what I was trying to be when I was in the psych ward. Last year, I was trying to be mindfully non adherent. But unfortunately, that doesn't always work in the psych ward when a person is certified and has no say whatsoever, unless the doctor actually happens to listen, which didn't happen in my instance. And he said, it's the highest level of self advocacy. When somebody has a belief system, and they speak up about treatments they would or would not want. And it has actually been studied. So it's not something just made up. And I heard somebody before, say they read a study that people who were non compliant actually did better in the long term. which just shows we know best. And we know what's best for ourselves and what resonates and what doesn't. So yes, mindful non adherence. And I'm really hoping that ecpr helps with that sort of approach, and gives more space for mindful non adherence, because there's more other types of support. So one can further the range of one's mindful non adherence. So I'm going to bring this book tomorrow just maybe to show people or I'm not sure what will happen. But I'm spending the day looking at some stuff to just get back into that mode, somewhat. I stole my blue feather. And tonight, I'm going to go to a full moon meditation at this meditation place. And the full moon time tonight is exactly 9:09pm, where I am, and the ceremony or the meditation is from 730 to eat 30 or something. So wonderful get to be up there, while it's the actual full moon. And another part of the significance of this is that it's full moon in Aries. And probably because it's the Aries time of the year. And the thing for me is that I am an Aries. My birthday is in a week. So it's really cool to be able to go to this full moon, meditation, whether it's wishes of peace for the world. Whereas last year at this time, not only was I not in California, I was in carcere rated in a psych ward. So it's amazing to one year later be living my dream. not perfectly because I'm taking some Seroquel to get by right now. And probably taking it even more because I'm not at home with my network of support, but I'm here partly to heal and partly to move towards facilitating bringing more of a network of support to my hometown. ecpr is not yet in my country. And it would be amazing to be able to bring it so I'll be talking more about that I think because by this time tomorrow, probably have an idea about if I'm going to do that. And I probably will even if I'm not quite certain because who knows what we'll expand out of it. But it's pretty amazing. Because this time last year, I wasn't sure if I was going to turn 34. Part of that whole people who die at 33 like Kurt Cobain and other celebrities, even though I wasn't thinking of myself as a celebrity, I was just thinking, I really don't know if I'm going to make it to 34. I almost ran away from the hospital one of the days and who knows what would have happened to me if I would have done that, because they probably would have locked me up in isolation and things. But it was so terrifying to get through. Even when I decided not to run away, it was just the scariest 33 days of my life. And this time last year, that's what was happening. I spent my birthday in the psych ward. And previous days, I voted in the psych ward, done some weird things in the psych ward. And it seems like this year, I won't celebrate my birthday in the psych ward. And I'm not in this place where I'm thinking that I don't know if I'm going to live another day. Whether it's by my own hand, or it was just the most terrifying thing. If you've been through it, you know what I'm talking about. It's so scary, and it was made worse by the medication. And that's why I will never go back of my own volition. I will never go back there on my own two feet. And this is a blessing in disguise, because this will make me extra diligent. And it has made me extra diligent. Another thing I want to do with this car, and I'm not sure if I will, uh, depends on how I feel being away for a night in LA for ecpr. But I'm thinking about driving to Vegas for one night to see Celine Dion. And the reason is, because when I was first hospitalized and diagnosed when I was out of the hospital, I spent a lot of time just watching her videos, her world tour video, and then her live in Boston video. For some reason I was just completely untrained. And just watching her saying and also be silly with people on her tour. And everything just really helped me it was very grounding. And I don't know why Celine Dion, it just sort of was something that I found very calming. And because of that, I've wanted to go and see her in Vegas. And I tried to in 2014 I think it was, but she actually ended up canceling her show. But I went to Vegas anyway, but I didn't see her. And my sister is going to be kind of mad at me. But I'm not going to tell her because she would definitely be mad that I'm going without her. And I am too but the thing is that the way things are with my brain, I never know if I'm going to get back to the states again. I don't know if when I go back and I get back into advocacy and mental health somewhat if my brain might freak out and I might end up who knows, like I really don't know how much longer I'm going to live I could live another 50 years I could live another two days I really don't know. So knowing that I kind of want to go it's a five hour drive. And I really like driving more so than flying. So I'm wanting to go and we'll see how it goes if I do end up making the trip and I will tell her later and it just feels like somewhat of a completion in a way of going and seeing her and honoring that energy seeing her live and I don't really create that many goals per se but that was one that created just as one of those bucket list things but I don't want it to be a bucket list thing. I want it to be a an acknowledgement of of the The journey of making it from a place of sitting there hopeless, watching her and feeling somewhat calm to being able to go and see her live in Vegas. And another thing I'm realizing with this, putting less attention into the self dialog of insights is that it's moving towards that embodied thing I was talking about, but I sort of ignored in favor of continuing to just talk about abstractions is helpful context. But I could create that forever. And that might be to the detriment of my physical body. And I feel like I need to be strong, I need to be strong for the journey ahead, the next part of the journey in being embodied in such a way that it might help others to know if I end up coming off my medication, it might help others if I bring the CPR back home, and and I feel like in order to do that, I need to be physically and mentally strong. And I'm somewhat mentally strong and in navigating, if I do feel the stress for myself, but I don't know if I'm mentally strong to face some of the stuff that might be some of these unanticipated consequences of that which I feel this energy to do. developing some of that equanimity that Tom Wooten talks about, and, and having a physically strong body right now I feel out of shape and slightly overweight. And that's not really good for going back and trying to do what it is I want to do, to sort of feel my best in my body and be mentally and physically strong would be the most beneficial. So if someone told myself that, after my birthday, I'm going to put some more effort into eating healthy and, and getting into some form of shape. And perhaps I'll share more of that as opposed to this whole abstracting stuff, though, I do want to look through it and make sure I didn't miss anything really good. I've been looking at it and seeing that there's a lot of stuff that I see that I've already talked about, or it's just not that interesting, maybe it wasn't the time when I wrote it down. And that could be one thing is just writing stuff down and then taking pictures of the pages and sharing it on my blog. I think part of the reason to do that is that some of the stuff that I say sounds like it could be from somebody else, maybe I don't know, but just showing, showing the process a little bit showing that there's this other source of information that we connect to as people who are bipolar. And that's part of what this is to is just to show what it's like to have a bipolar brain, and maybe other people will resonate with it somewhat. And it might show ways to actually harness the process in a way so it doesn't get out of hand and and take on a life of its own and then take away from one's life. Because I've been in spaces where I write stuff down and I literally feel like I'm gonna have a panic attack that was years ago. So as a process and and that was part of the process was to share that there's something else happening and it's not just this meaningless mental illness and it's something that one can have a relationship with, one can have a relationship with this other information coming through. And this process to me shows that relationship somewhat. And shows that it doesn't really have to even mean anything. It's just like, in a way, one could See oneself as almost having this addiction to this other information that we're not making up ourselves. It's not really an addiction, but I'm just saying, there's this urge, there's this urgency, there's something there, there's this energy that drives us to write this stuff down. And we write it down, it doesn't even feel like our own yet, when we read it, we have this desire in a way to make some sense out of it. And maybe it doesn't really make any sense. Maybe part of it is just to have that relationship with it. So the energy doesn't make us feel like we want to explode in a way. If we can write and listen to ourselves, then maybe we don't feel so much like oh, I need somebody to listen to me, I need to change the world. Maybe it's just changing one's own world, but having some sort of relationship with this information, these insights, this other way of seeing these visions. And maybe the what to do with it will come about one day. Because I pretty much establish with myself that it's an unending unlimited process. And now instead of it taking me over and running my life, which it hasn't, for a long time, I can sort of tap into it and turn it on if I want, and then turn it off. Sort of like we can close our eyes, if we don't want to see is like turning that sense off. And I really do feel like it's this other dimension of the human mind. And even Krishnamurti said that in his quote, and to me, it's just incredible that he says those things yet. To me, it's so obvious that this other dimension of the mind is trying to boot up. But the trouble is, there's more people in the world that this is not happening to. And when they see this happening to people, they get scared. And they do something that messes up the process, instead of just remaining curious and open and unconditionally loving. And that's all stuff that's part of ecpr. So to me, ecpr could even be providing space. For those brains, who have this flowering of their brain happening, goes through the process and see what happens, nobody knows what happens, not even the people who are going through it. And we don't know what happens when we provide space for a lot of people to have this dimension of their brain open up instead of closing it off. And I don't think that has been done at all, because even with what is being done right now, that's considered good. And it has some value is still filtering and warping people's brains back into fitting into society as if society is the gold standard. And I don't think it is, I think there's a gold standard opening up in our brains that we have not even begun to scratch the surface of what it can do. And providing safety, psychological safety is one thing, but when I move into something beyond that, I really want to support people to really move into their magic move into their superhuman capabilities. Which we don't even know what that is. But we really have to provide the space and love for that to happen. The human brain really needs this space and love and non judgmental ness, or it's, I don't know what's gonna happen. Well, things are already happening, we're just not really making the connection and people want. Because the human brain only thinks about itself. It doesn't think about the human brain as a whole of humanity. And other entities that are conscious, and it's just, it's just a Gong Show, really. And in saying that I need to transform myself into my superhero, superhuman version of myself, which might not look very much different. And partly, one of the promises I made when I was still in the map conscious state the very first time I was so intense, I felt like I was dying. I felt like I was in a coffin. I could hear people at my funeral. But I was laying there next to a friend, and I immediately just jumped up and I thought I said out loud, I stand up for my niece. And I sensed in myself that I need to be the best I can be for my nieces and other innocent young children who At this point, don't stand a chance in life, even if they get the best of what life has to offer. If I'm alive and something happens to somebody that I care about, I would not let this happen to them what's happened to me? I would not, I would know better. And so I feel like this whole thing is done, like this way of treating people is done. It's going to be made obsolete. So the real question has nothing to do with mental health. And Krishna Marie's quote, again, is, is it possible for human beings to bring about a totally different dimension, or category of the mind. And I really feel like this is already happening. The mind the, the totality, Gaia, is putting people into these states to energetically animate us in this different way to bring about this other dimension. But unfortunately, it wears out and then the way it's received as a person is falling out of it prevents it from taking hold, because really what that needs, what that seed brain who's going through that transformation needs is unconditional love and space. And something else will happen then if someone's judged and labeled, obviously, it makes if somebody is judged and labeled by some kind of professional, what is their trajectory versus this other way? And it really is an act of faith by people who don't know what's happening for to be that supportive and trust that something good is going to happen. Can we go from labels to loveSome days with me the last rays of waves it's 844. And I don't know if I'll be up here until 909, when it's exactly full. I don't think I've ever been to a group meditation like this before. guy was talking about Christ and the Christ ification of many. And I feel like my consciousness is that it's calibrating us for that. Christ ification energy. And it's interesting how so many people who go into that state, often at some point, connect with a feeling of being Christ. And I think it's an advantage to have that calibration happen. Because if all of a sudden a massive amount of that energy does come in, and there is a Christ, suffocation of many, the people have already tasted it, or gonna understand it more. Blah, blah, blah. And he also talked about receiving a higher spiritual imprint, which to me sounds like the blueprint, a map consciousness. I feel like there could be a school of philosophy of map consciousness of people who actually experientially touch these realities that are pointed to so many different wisdom traditions. But when they come back from that they sound like crazy people. If that state that they're pointing to was just like the state we're in now. It wouldn't be anything different. So wouldn't be that which they're pointing to. When we're in that state, we're actually pointing to it. But it just appears kind of wonky. better move towards my car. So it's just hitting nine or nine now. So the full moon is officially full. Still, no, no, no. This is the full moon. So I'm ready to go to ecpr and La. I have an hour and a half drive at least, but I'm leaving extra time just in case. Let's see if the traffic is as bad as said to be. And I have my breakfast ready. I'm not going to drink any fluids because I don't want to have to pay. If I would have been doing better, I would have booked a hostel and stayed for a couple of nights. But since I'm not feeling the greatest, I'm only going for one night. I'm laying here in my weirdest hotel room ever in a kind of creepy area of LA. And I did the first day of ecpr today and I feel really good about the training information even though it might not seem like it because I'm really tired. I woke up super early to drive to LA which took about two and a half hours and then I was in training all day. And now I'm in my weird hotel room. This is what it looks like. And there's like the weirdest little kitchen thing that I think it's all mine. But it's so weird, I don't even want to go out there. Not sure if anyone else has access to this weird kitchen. And then there's a balcony, which I think is shared, and I don't want to go out there either. And I am supposed to go for dinner with the trainers, which I really want to do. It's a great opportunity to get to know them. Find out more about what they're doing. Look, it's my toes. And I'm going for dinner with the facilitators. So I feel like I need to study up a little bit. Get my mind in the right orientation. Like, what am I doing here again, what is my passion in this area. During the training, I had this idea to create my own class, but not really a class, but something about alternatives and options. And I created a document about that. Maybe I'll talk about it some other time. But it's about creating a safety first. And it's whatever works for the person. So for me, I have advanced directives, sabse, draps, servqual, things like that. And then also creating connection and, and then moving towards thriving, and have a bunch of stuff written down. But I was also thinking it'd be cool to set it up to helps have people co create that. And others have done that too. That's how rap was created. I'm pretty sure ecpr had an element of that in it too. And I don't know what the difference with what I'm envisioning is, but I think it's a little bit of having a person understand that they're really purposefully going to attempt to thrive. Attempt thriving, instead of just getting by. And it's great to have emotional CPR on the times of distress. And it's great to have wrap plans. I remember talking about creating a Wham plan, which is more about thriving. I don't really know what I'm talking about, because I'm tired, but and I think I do need to create some kind of social enterprise. With me being the first social enterprise person in the social enterprise. And they talked about learning through participation. Well, I need to continue learning through just continuing to create this stuff. And I feel like in my consciousness, we go from sharing gestures of mania, all that energy and all those gestures. And when the energy runs out, we actually need gestures of love and unconditional regard, in order to gain some of that energy back that we lost by sharing it all away. We try to share it and when people don't play back with us, then it's lost. And I wrote down that I'm not trying to do anything. We are meaning the collection of all of us as a narrow tribe, we're all trying to do something. But when we try to do it separately, it's not as powerful as if we were to get together and dial dialogue and play in order to see what it is that we're trying to create. And also awakening that dimension in the brain. So the Potential project came back to mind again. And I've been wanting to think of a word for positive triggers. And I realized that it could be energizers things that are energizing, because we're taught to be aware of our triggers. But I'm curious about energizers. And what spurs us into being in the energized state where we're sharing energy and connecting and reaching out and caring. So hopefully, dinner goes well, and I'll be able to share stuff. And who knows what will happen. I'm here with Dr. Daniel Fisher, who talked about psychosis as a monologue. And it's really cool to be heading in this direction. In my big, weird hotel room, this little ladder of mine, I'm gonna let it shine This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine, this little ladder, man, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. That song popped in my head. So I figured I would just sing it. Songs pop in my head, sometimes, like they do for all of us. But often, there's nothing going on in my head. And then a faint song comes in. I have the sense that as this dialogue goes on, and a more embodied in actually creating something alongside with this process of self dialogue. Hopefully I'll smile more. Before I started working in peer support, two years ago, I worked at a medical office. And I was always smiling and laughing, and joking around, and being loving and caring, and I really was thriving. And then and then I got involved in mental health, working in mental health, and I lost that. But I think that's what I want back the most is that joy. And being able to laugh at myself, again, so much of the self dialogue I feel will come across as very serious. But if I was embodying my mania, I wouldn't be serious at all. And I also feel that before I can share any of that context that I created, I kind of have to live it. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of words. So I need to move towards embodying my mania and be firmly rooted in that before sharing this process of self dialog as something beneficial to help one embody one's mania. I did the harvest phase for sure. And now practice part of practices taking this class in LA, just going forward. And I have the car for another number of days after I go back to where I'm staying and I'm probably going to drive to Vegas now that's definitely something a manic would do. Drive to Vegas for one night to see Celine Dion. So that's definitely concrete action embodied. It's not just abstractions. So those would be things that show this embodying the mania. And I feel like as a person who goes into altered states I don't really have I don't really have a bucket list because my life is not really in entirely my own, I don't always have a say over what happens to me. And I don't know how much longer I get to live or how much longer I get to live the way I want to. So I feel like a bucket list almost implies you have this whole bucket of things you want to do. But I guess it's because it's the things you want to do before you kick the bucket. And I don't know where that saying came from kick the bucket. But I feel like it could be something around attempting thriving list that doesn't have a good ring to it, though, could be called like a crazy days list. Something you would do if you're crazy, but also something you would do before you go crazy again, because you don't know if you'll get a chance to. So you better do it. Now, it's almost the opposite of a bucket list where one day we'll get to it, it's like we have to do it now. And that's something we feel in mania too is we have to do it right now. But can we still have that feeling yet not be manic. The point of all this, too, is embodying one's mania, and thriving, as one would win in the state of mania. Without the state of mania, which I've talked about before, it's important to practice these thriving gestures when we're not actually thriving, when we're sort of even not just spending the even time waiting for the next crisis to happen. or doing the things we would do if we're waiting for the next crisis time to happen. And not really taking advantage of those times where we're even. And we actually can do stuff. Because a lot of what rap talks about is wellness tools to make you feel better when you're not feeling good. All the sections except for one or based on when you're not doing well. And there's seven sections and one is about maintaining Daly. And then if you're not doing well, and you're doing worse and you're doing worse, well what about when you're not just maintaining, but when you're in this space where you can put some energy towards thriving. We don't even talk about thriving in this genre of living as a labeled person. And I think it's time for that to change. And I can't remember if I share it, I created this love to experience project have people come in and have fun experiences, who've been labeled and just have a chance to come in and have fun, like improv and stand up comedy and practice of play and a voice coach to connect to one's voice. So important, because we lose our voice we lose our communication. So that's why I'm determined to create this safety. So then, when one attempts to thrive and maybe comes down from that, because they've shared all their gestures and sort of run out of juice. It could almost be a juice list or maybe just an energy list. Things that one will do with one's energy when one has some energy and what one wants to put one's energy into and it's probably something that is going to give one energy I feel this is kind of mapping new territory to purposefully be manic without being manic and I don't think manic or mania is a bad word actually really liked those words. They're just energy people use them for different things. Like super sales will be called mania like price Oh mania or something. So it's usually positive connotations. And even manic I like to say, Man, I see man and the letter I in the letter C. Meaning man, I as n eyes and see seeing or see the speed of light. So there's a lot of good stuff in there. I will continue my report later from my weird hotel room. I'll be kind of happy when it's tomorrow. And I'm across the street and my car is parked outside the building and I'm no longer at this hotel and I don't have to sleep in this town again. I don't usually think that way but I don't love being alone in creepy hotels. So I made it through the night at my creepy hotel. I went for dinner with Dr. Fisher and Maria and had a good chat. And then I go back to the hotel and I talked to my friend on the phone for a while and then we got on to some cool stuff about ideas after talking about some of our challenges, which is cool, and I was laughing my butt off from what we thought we might try to create. So I'm here with my coffee waiting for day two vsepr don't have to go back to the hotel because I'll be driving back to my spot tonight. And I got a tip to try Benadryl for sleep. So I will pick some of that up and try that for tapering off the Seroquel basically just not taking the circle anymore only been taking half. So I reached my goal. I got myself to ecpr and who knows what's next statue over there. I think that could be the inspiration for avatar to ground. Pretty sure that's where they got the inspiration. And I got this little Dave's buttermilk bar from my hotel continental breakfast. So I'm gonna see what that's all about.So I'm back from LA. And back in the peace and quiet. And the beauty. My hair is a bit messy because I was driving with the windows down. And Google Maps took me a different way, I guess, because it was a bit faster, and it was very beautiful. And it was just nice to see all the green in the hills and the trees and stuff that I couldn't really look at very closely because I was driving. And the CPR training was really good. And the group was great. I learned a lot about facilitating. And I learned a bit about the people who are involved in this movement to make ecpr more available. And for me experiencing that it just felt very natural, like, that's the way things should be. So in my mind, it wasn't this amazing thing, because it was just like, well, this is how it should be. Even though it is an amazing thing. It's hard to really say what I'm trying to describe. But after the training, I also felt kind of like I had less hope in a way because this ecpr training isn't cheap. And it's sort of beyond my control to get that kind of funding to start that sort of movement, at least is partly beyond my control. Whereas something like going out for a walk is within my control. So I started thinking about that. And I started thinking about how there's no answers, really. I keep searching for answers, and there are no answers. And even if this isn't answer, it's not something that I have complete control over. I can't just go back home and just be like, yeah, we're just going to run a group because it costs money. And I just feel like the recovery movement, even though it's new, it's already old. I want something like a rediscovery and recreation movement, rediscovering the energy when connected with rediscovering lost parts of oneself, recreating oneself daily. I just feel a sense of what can I really do? What do I really have the power to do. And so I feel like going through a few of my documents and just editing them and editing out everything that is outside of my direct power. Like if I want to get healthier, I can eat healthier food, that's something I can do. But if I want to have ecpr as a group at home, I don't have the direct power to do it. I thought I did. But they were saying it needs a sponsored agency and blah, blah and stuff that I don't have that position to offer. I'm still going to move towards seeing if I can help if I can do some presentations on a CPR and get people to hopefully pick it up. But I have to also make sure to focus on the things that I do have power to do a power to do self dialog. I power to go to Vegas, I have power to start eating healthier and getting some exercise because I really haven't been doing that. Simple things. I feel like for finding the dimensions that I want to work through me not necessarily work on but what do I want to work through me. And so part of it is thinking back to some of the stuff I talked about myself with which I don't remember if I tried to just think of it and summarize it. I don't think I could but perhaps things Come to me. I know laughter is important. And altruism, which I haven't really connected with fully at all. And I guess I feel like there's just not that many people in the world I connect with my friend who were going to share brains and get creative, I really connect with him. And I connect with my family, because they're my family. And other people, for sure. I guess I feel sad that many of us who have been labeled, are sort of medicated into mediocrity and medicated into a shorter lifespan. And, and I find it sad. I find it sad to hear people talking of such simple things and painful things. It's almost like keeping one's life so simple, because life has been so painful. And that's just really sad to me. And and I don't even want to wait for an ecpr movement for people to be thriving. I just I don't know, I don't even know what I'm trying to say or what I'm feeling. But I talked today with them about how I'm sort of walking a fine line staying down here in California, because I have to take this half a circle to sleep, and I've been taking it longer than I would ever want to just to get to ecpr. So tonight, I'm not going to take the half circle, and I'm gonna see if I sleep. I didn't stop and get the Benadryl and maybe I should have, but I'll take the circle if I can't sleep. But if I can good. I'm just tired of relying on these medications. And I talked about that. And I'm taking the Hardy nutritionals. I don't know if it'll work. So it's just I don't know, and I don't have a lot of energy. And I just don't feel the greatest. I was thinking that labeled Lives Matter people with labels and diagnoses that whether they're correct or not. And then the people trying to help and support them are burning out. And it's just, it's all messed up. And and when I watched that talk by Matthew Federici, he mentioned, too, that people can move beyond needing service and needing medication. And that people shouldn't be told that they're going to need this stuff for life. And he also mentioned something interesting. That reminds me of exactly what I'm doing with this process of self dialogue. He said, new dialogues emerge out of new eyes, different perspectives than the traditional perspective. And what I've been talking about is many different perspectives than the traditional perspective, as I've seen from my numerous perspectives, because part of what happens through meta consciousness is the ability to take perspectives and see from many different perspectives. And I think he said new dialogues and new insights, he either said that, or I just wrote it down and even say, crisis defined with a mental health label. So implying that it doesn't necessarily have to be defined in that way. And I really feel like people who are advocates yet still connected to the system. They know a lot more and they're just holding back. They're only saying so much because they know they can only say so much. And they say quite a bit beyond what the system would think. So they're providing valuable insight, but I still think they hold back So perhaps the more of us who have more contacts and more perspectives and more of a voice, a stronger voice, then people who are in the position of advocates can actually speak up even more, because there's more evidence. It's, it's the people speaking up, or the evidence, that's going to be the biggest evidence. So yeah, I've talked about a lot of different possibilities in these dialogues from the very beginning talking about creating respite, I'd love to create a respite where people that get labeled get to help homeless people, because people that get labeled often connect to altruism, and then that way they could help homeless people and then be altruistic, and then feel better about themselves and put their newly acquired sensation and orientation in their brain to use instead of just trying to bend it back to the old egoic way of being. And then when that starts to happen, it starts to get bent back, a person seems even more egoic because they're not liking this. This shift back from the way that they were growing. So so those are like dream size projects, that again, I don't have the power to carry out on my own. And then there's things like, I'm going to create something just to remind myself of what is within my control, and what can I move towards in terms of being superhuman to be able to help people with their magic. I don't want to help people with mental illness. I want to bring about this totally different dimension in the human mind, this other category, to category beyond categorization, and haven't been in touch with it for a long time. So for the scary aspects of it, and I want to re invite it into my life. But I feel like I need to be prepared to live that energy. live with that energy. Live as itI sit here and I really don't know how I feel. ecpr was all about connecting with and talking about feelings. And I say I feel a lot, but generally I don't share feelings, partly because a lot of them are suppressed by the medications. Last night, I definitely felt something. I went to sleep without taking the half a Seroquel. And at some point during the process of falling asleep, my heart did that thing where it sped up and was beating really fast and strong, and I was terrified. And this time, it actually didn't wake me up right away. And I remember just laying there with this intense fear of death. Like I don't want to die one day, or I don't want to die right now. It actually seemed different than last time. Last time, a few weeks ago, it felt like that sensation of panic where I thought I was going to kill myself, like I have to kill myself, but I don't want to. And this time it was different. It was a different experience of that death terror. It really felt like I really don't want to die one day. Yet at the same time, I fear that when I do die, it'll be by my own hand. So it's kind of paradoxical that I would have that intense. Not wanting to die one day yet, fearing dying by my own hand. That's quite something I don't know what it is. But so when I did wake up after probably like 20 seconds, I took the half a Seroquel last time it was different. It woke me up immediately because I jumped up feeling like I might actually do something to end my life. But it's always about getting to my safety plan. Before I do that before I feel I need to do that. And I always do. So once I got my zap strap. And once I took the Seroquel, I felt fine, not fine, but I went to sleep. So this time it was a different flavor of death. And I have to remind myself that it could just be psychological death, then part of my psyche dies. It creates a bodily reaction just like if I think of something scary, my body's gonna react even if I'm sitting right here. And we're doing that to ourselves all the time. We're thinking things and our body's reacting. So it makes sense that if the psyche is dying, there's a bodily reaction. And if I wasn't here in California, I might actually see what that turns into without taking the Seroquel and I talked about getting Benadryl and I didn't get Benadryl. So today I did because of that reaction to it. And I talked to the people at hardy nutritionals and they said, it's better to go off it. Bye going down to a quarter and then going down to an eighth. So I feel tired and I feel out of shape and I feel like I'm not eating healthy. When I got here I was at least eating okay ish and under eating a bit and I was slender, which I prefer that, especially when I'm taking medications so my body can deal with all the toxins of the medication. And I feel a little bit like going home. And then I realized that I wouldn't be able to sit outside I wouldn't have access to this. expansive nature doesn't mean that I won't go home. It's just I'm a bit conflicted. I'm not really feeling that great mentally. So I'm getting through the days but not in the greatest fashion, I'm kind of blurred out and the days are a blur and I i've talked recently about things like super humaneness. And it's like I'm wanting to talk myself into those possibilities yet at the same time. Aside from being in the psych ward, I'm not in the greatest place right now. And it almost seems like when I go to those far off possibilities, by speaking about them. It feels like I crash even more after that. So it's difficult to know what to do. I feel like I need to focus on doing nothing and getting healthy and I keep talking about this, but I just ate a bunch of chips with some kind of dip. I just feel so lazy when it comes to that stuff. So I'm supposed to go down on my medication 1/8 at a time for the next eight weeks. So right now is me not doing the greatest but not doing terrible either. I wonder if I'll stay here for the weeks and do that process at the same time or what will happen. Anything could really happen right now I could end up going home tomorrow. Or I could end up staying till mid August. I miss my family I miss my community of people is beautiful here. But it's also beautiful just to have a community of people that one cares about. I really care about my community. Here there's a community of beauty and there's a few people around but but not a lot. And I've talked about before how I do best when I'm around people. So here I have sun, I have nature. I have wildlife and insects. tried to save one of your brothers earlier from the road, but I just kept walking. They were very determined to walk across the path. And now I sit down and there's one of you on me. Oh, you're looking away. Right now there's four butterflies doing a dance. That's beautiful. And the other thing about the death thing. Krishnamurti talks a lot about death. And I feel like I could just go through it somehow. They're so cute or they go What I'm thinking of is that we all die at some point. Yet, we're so worried about this life when we're living it. We're all gonna die. So it doesn't really matter. And I'm not saying that in the sense of do nothing or it doesn't matter. So just be mean. It's more just the fact of it all and. And I've also been thinking about reward and punishment. And when I was thinking about how we've all been forced into mediocrity, I'm not sure why I would care if people have something negative to say about what I'm sharing. When most people just have mediocre minds. And I'm not saying that I don't, and I do too. But why would I care? What a mediocre mind who can't really grasp this? has to say about it? Why am I not more concerned about if it might be helpful to somebody? Why am I so afraid? And there's people out there that are courageous, they'll just share and say what they want to say and share their message. And and if somebody says something about it, they just aren't concerned. Even if somebody does say something, they forget about it the next day, they go on with their lives. So in a way that people that might benefit will put more energy towards it than the people that would not. I guess it's partly because what I have to say sounds like it's against psychiatry. And part of it is it's against the way it's delivered. Yeah, at the same time, I feel like I still utilize psychiatry stuff, and maybe I will have to in the future. So I guess it's difficult, because I want to be strong and have transcended it yet. I'm in this place where I feel on the tipping point of being in some major distress. Another thing I've been thinking about a little bit is that if I feel like I'm in distress, or I'm afraid of death, or whatever it is, it's it's a common human experience. It's not just me, it's not mine. Maybe I'm feeling that and experiencing that, but it's not mine. It's, it's from somewhere. It's just part of the collective and part of mine as well. To feel like I'm struggling Well, we are struggling, we're all struggling. I guess I just hope in eight weeks I'll have come off some of this medication, I'll feel better. It's probably better to do it here. Otherwise, I'll be just sitting at home in somebody's basement. Maybe it would be beneficial if I just spent all my time sitting outside doing nothing. Because it's something that I wouldn't be able to do if I was back home. And at this point, I don't know if I'm gonna go see Celine Dion. I have this rental car for four or five more days and that's what happens. I have these plans, but then a lot of times it just becomes a waste because I'm not even feeling like I can use Lies it sucks to not be able to trust that one can just do what one wants to do when one wants to do it. That little butterfly over there so cute. He looks like he is this little fluffy body and he's flapping his wings up and down like measuring the wind or something and waiting for his friends to come along so you can join their dance and see now I'm off self dialog yet. I feel like I'm doing worse than when I was on that and talking on feeling some kind of urge to do so. And then I forget so yeah, death reward and punishment. And I wrote a bit of my story for Katie motorhomes emerging proud campaign for the blog, and I think I'm gonna give word for to go ahead and publish it. I wanted her to wait until after I got to ecpr even though I'm feeling kind of low and not clean. I almost feel like I don't care anymore. But I do care. But it's I'm not. I'm tired of caring about worrying. My family, I'll see the story and they might worry or I don't know, I just I don't know. Okay. Usually you would run away by now. Did you get hurt? Yeah, right. Good luck. And then I was reading a talk by Krishna Reddy. And he was talking about how we always wait for this pressure before we do anything. And I was thinking a bit about math consciousness when we're in it. We have this pressure of the universe making us act. And then when we're not in that anymore. It reminds me a bit of harvest practice and body. Can we do those things without the pressure being applied? And then yet, it seems like this other pressure is happening for me where it's something building up and then leading to this thing happening at night where it feels like dying. And being afraid of that. Maybe it'll just pass maybe I can just let it pass. Why do I have to be afraid of that? And what's causing that pressure to build up is being in California and just sort of doing whatever causing a different kind of pressure to build up Maybe the butterflies now. Maybe I could just ask what's the cause of this pressure butterfly. He left. His friends flew by and he left his back. Oh, oh. I have no idea if I caught that on camera. But if I do go back, I think I'm gonna buy a stand up paddleboard and just spend time on the water. But it's not water season there yet. So, maybe last year or day, maybe last year, another month, maybe two, maybe three. Somehow I need to take an interest in this body. Think I'm going to quit drinking coffee to start maybe I'll just sit out here and start doing some of that self dialogue. At least it's something even if it's just for my own entertainment not doing anything altruistic right now. Maybe releasing this blog article be good. Start some conversation. Dr. Fisher was talking about how relationships heal. yet here I have a couple relationships but they're new and it's not like home so I came down here and it's beautiful in so many things but I don't have my relationships which are the strongest and most important thing. We some learning relationships are important. So tonight, I really hope that I sleep better with that Benadryl and I'll take a quarter of a Seroquel and the trazadone and see what happens. Maybe it's good that some of this is coming out, but just little by little. I think I just want my energy back. Life is more challenging when one doesn't have energy.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/bipolar_inquiry. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

About EricEric Dynowski, Managing Partner and Chief Solutions Officer at Deft, has been developing software, designing global infrastructures, and managing large technology installations for over 20 years. His background in complex infrastructure design and integration has helped him reduce customer budgets by millions.Links: Deft: https://www.deft.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: You could build you go ahead and build your own coding and mapping notification system, but it takes time, and it sucks! Alternately, consider Courier, who is sponsoring this episode. They make it easy. You can call a single send API for all of your notifications and channels. You can control the complexity around routing, retries, and deliverability and simplify your notification sequences with automation rules. Visit courier.com today and get started for free. If you wind up talking to them, tell them I sent you and watch them wince—because everyone does when you bring up my name. Thats the glorious part of being me. Once again, you could build your own notification system but why on god's flat earth would you do that? Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It's an awesome approach. I've used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there's more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It's awesome. If you don't do something like this, you're likely to find out that you've gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It's one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That's canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I'm a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. For a while I've been talking about how I started The Duckbill Group as a highly niche, highly focused consultancy aimed at one very expensive problem—the AWS bill—and that's all we do. We don't do implementation; we simply do the thing that it says on the tin. And it turns out that you can get fairly good at the problem like that in not a tremendous amount of time.And today's promoted episode of Screaming in the Cloud. My guest is Eric Dynowski, Chief Solutions Officer and Partner at Deft, which is a consulting company that is almost inverted, in the sense that they do an awful lot of stuff. And we're going to argue about it now. Eric, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.Eric: Great to be here, Corey. Can't wait to dig in. [laugh].Corey: So, when I started this place back almost five years ago now, I was coming out of an engineering career that I found deeply unsatisfying. I had a bunch of working with computers skill sets, and I wanted to apply them to something that I could use as an independent consultant—because who would ever build a team or a company out of this?—that I could wind up doing repeatedly, so I could, you know, make money, not have a boss, and ideally work less than 80 hours a week. And fixing the AWS bill was the first one I tried; it turned out that, yeah, there is, in fact, an awful lot of expensive business problem hidden in there. And that's what I've been focusing on ever since. I get the distinct impression that your story doesn't quite sound like that one.Eric: Well, it's a little bit like that one, in the sense that I was once an engineer and a technician doing things, and had the crazy idea to go off and start a company that consulted and helped people with their technology needs. And maybe we're a little bit alike in the sense that we also have a very singular focused offering—I'm going to tease you a little bit here, Corey—is that we do one thing: we provide technology solutions for our customers. But probably what you are getting at is, “Well, that's a really broad statement, Eric, what is a technology solution?”Corey: It is. And the reason I did this is because my marketing budget was 50 bucks. So, I wanted something that the Rolodex effect is what I was after, where when someone says at a party to someone else, “Well, I have a problem: my AWS bill.” I want the answer to be, “Hey, I have someone for you to talk to.” You don't generally tend to see that with more broad statements around positioning most of the time.Eric: Sure. Sure.Corey: I also felt like if I was going to be, all right, I'm the best cloud architect advisor ever. Great, now I'm competing against folks like you and the giant consultancies that are in every country. And honestly, those folks have better airport ads than I'm going to be able to put up, at least at the time. Now, I have a platypus for a mascot. So, one wonders whether that would still hold true. You took a very different approach and have done fantastically—Eric: Yeah.Corey: —well with it.Eric: Yeah, I mean, maybe a little bit of history here is helpful. When I started my company, which was Turing Group back in 2013, we did actually focus pretty tightly just on AWS, and that's all we did. We wanted to help customers get in AWS, fix their problems in AWS, scale in AWS, manage their costs, all these sorts of things. And along the way, we had customers coming back to us saying, “We love you guys. You're doing great in [laugh] AWS, but I have other needs too.”And I started saying, “Well, I know a guy over there that does that.” And, “I've got a good friend over here at this company that does it.” And, you know, we're referring back and forth. And kind of parallel to that, one of my business partners who is running a company called Server Central was having the exact inverse problem. And, you know, they were providing managed services within the data center, managed networking capability, things of that nature, you know, helping customers build out an infrastructure to operate at scale, where it's like, “Oh, we need 1000 servers, and we need them really inexpensive, and we have to be able to manage them at scale.”And they were crushing it, doing a great job except his customer start getting back to him saying, “Love what you guys are doing. We're also using AWS, and we want some help with that.” And so, he would pick up the phone and call me and say, “Eric, can you guys help here?” And in some sense, we were competitors. I wanted to move everybody out of the data center into the cloud.And he wanted to move everyone out of the cloud back into the data center or keep them in the data center. And it was like, “Okay, this is weird, but we both have the same problem.” And so we went out to lunch and started this conversation of like, “Well, what if we weren't competitors?” [laugh].Corey: “Maybe there's alignment here.” Yeah. I think Ben Franklin once said that three moves is as good as a fire when it comes to cleaning out old cruft. And migrations are like that. I do want to call out that since I make a frequent practice of saying that multi-cloud as a best practice is foolish, I want to be clear that is in the absence of other constraints.If you're building something new, you probably should pick a provider and go all-in. I don't care which one you do—you might; I don't—but beyond that, at a significant point of scale, when a company says, “All right, we're in one provider—or a data center—and we're going to move to a cloud or other clouds.” Generally, they're correct. They have context that I don't when I'm speaking in the general case. I am not anti-multi-cloud; I am anti-multi-cloud when it is foolish and when it's badly done. Just to set my bias out there and, ideally, avoid getting some letters.Eric: You know, I tend not to disagree with that in the right context as well. When we were doing just AWS only, I think I would have argued that multi-cloud, yeah, there's no place for it. If you're going multi-cloud, you're giving up on all of the greatness that a single public cloud has to offer. You know, and by the greatness, I mean, the proprietary services they offer, and the APIs, and things like SNS and SQS and Route 53, all of those things that you could build into your application and just start using them without having to build all the infrastructure to run it. And so I would agree with you, I think, in that sense.But I wish the world were that simple and I wish the companies that we worked with operated in a nice, clean, unambiguous context. But the more you dig in, I think you realize that when you start dealing with a company, maybe, that has 20,000 employees and offices all across the country, and 25 years of legacy applications—or maybe a vision for the future that just is so massive that it requires a different point of view—and this is really where we engage. And it's interesting that you mentioned about the context, and usually, if a customer approaches us and says, “We want to go multi-cloud,” the first thing we do is put the brakes on and get away from the discussion around multi-cloud and move straight into, “What are you trying to accomplish here?” And navigate that conversation before it turns into—you know, let's not start with the solution type of discussion.Corey: Part of the problem, it seems, that when you start talking to folks about these things, especially in some vendor corners, an awful lot of self-interest that winds up informing the answers that immediately come from it, where it's, “Oh, yeah, you want to go multi-cloud.” And you scratch underneath the surface and the reason is that if you go all-in on one provider, they have nothing left to sell you, in some cases. Other times, it's by a cloud provider themselves pushing multi-cloud strongly because they know that if you go all-in on one provider, it will absolutely not be them. So, the hard part is finding someone who can serve as a trusted advisor. And I mean that in the actual sense of a person, not the crappy AWS service that tells you everything's fine when it isn't. That's ‘Plausible Advisor' at best. Let's be clear here.Eric: Well, come on. If it wasn't for Trusted Advisor, we wouldn't have a market for all the third-party analysis tools [laugh] and people like you to help us manage our costs.Corey: Believe me, if I thought a tool could solve the problem, I would have built it years ago. Tried, turned out it didn't, and well, here we are. You position what you do at Deft as starting from an advisory perspective. You're not pushing a particular product, you're not pushing any particular vendors that I'm aware of, you have a partner list that is not a single vendor, what a concept. So, it's clear that you're doing something that goes one of two ways.Either it is, yeah, we'll take money from anyone who will pay us, or alternately you're approaching it from a thoughtful perspective of trying to figure out what's going on with the customer. Based upon our conversations, I'm going to go ahead and guess it's that one.Eric: It definitely is the latter, Corey. We've certainly had many customers approach us over the years and ask for things that are a bad fit. And a bad fit might be, they're asking for technology experience we don't have. If someone came to us and said, “We want you guys to be Oracle DBAs because you do technology,” our answer is very likely going to be no. Could we learn to be Oracle DBAs? Yeah, we probably could. Do we want to probably not? Maybe?Corey: There are some very qualified Oracle DBAs out in the world, and it's—Eric: There's—Corey: —great.Eric: —there's places for people to specialize. And I think one of our virtues is to know and recognize where we belong and where we don't belong. And the good thing is, not only have we sort of built up our own partner list in terms of technology partners, strategic partners, but we also have our own internal list of referral partners where we know that something's out of our wheelhouse, and I got another company and another team here that I know can crush it and help them out. There's other areas of work that we just don't get into. If you want to outsource your IT and have a company that's going to help you figure out why your printer is not working, definitely not us.You're going to be wasting your money with a firm like us. Or maybe you want to partner in a way that isn't going to take the best advantage of the capabilities that we have, meaning you just want to take advantage of us in a halfway manner, and you want to keep an internal team and the two teams are up against one another and fighting about stuff constantly. We need to have good strong trust between our two companies and our partnerships. And so if we feel like there isn't an opportunity for that, we might walk away from it as well.So, it's not a case of everything that walks in front of us, here's a proposal. [laugh]. We definitely do some opportunity vetting and analysis. We ask a lot of questions upfront about how our customers work, what their internal teams are like, what their expectations of us are, what they want in that relationship. Is it transactional or is it strategic? We're interested in the strategic partnerships with our customers.Corey: I think this is something that is not well understood by a lot of the fly-by-night folks, for lack of a better term. I don't mean to sound disparaging, but the folks who don't seem to understand that long-term reputation is important. I mean, both of our consulting companies, although radically different in focus, have pages on our site where we list reference customers. In fact, there's some overlap between our customers. And as we look at this, you aren't allowed to put a customer logo up if they're going to take umbrage to you doing it, first off. And secondly, you don't want to put a customer logo up if people are going to ask them about their experience with you, and the response is, “Oh, they were crap.” At some point, no, let's not do that.Eric: [laugh]. That's right.Corey: The only way to get there is to deliver on an engagement in such a way that the response is, “That was great. Would you do it again?” “Can I?” And the idea of excitement of delivering an outcome where people who you've worked with become some of your biggest advocates, that's how I always viewed the proper way of building a business.Eric: Yeah. Now, I'd ask you, in terms of when you guys are providing advice to your customers about AWS spend, or someone approaches you, obviously, you're probably first thinking, “Okay, well, how much AWS spend do you have in a month and is this worth my time?” But there's probably another element of evaluation that you must do in terms of is this a good customer for us, and can we do the right thing for them? What are pieces that you guys think about?Corey: Oh, absolutely. As a general rule, we do a lot of AWS contract negotiation. And that is, if you have an AWS offer in front of you for committing to something, come talk to us; it's fun. That's half of our engagements today. The other half are cost optimization projects, and generally speaking, we aren't going to be able to effectively deliver return on investment for much less than about a million bucks a month in spend.So, I do at some point want to explore how to help people who are not already paying a king's ransom to AWS every month, but that is down the road. The next step is a conversation. It's a, “So great, you want to optimize your AWS bill.” And then my favorite is the—I get the quote-unquote, “Dumb question.” “Why? Why do you care? Why is this an actual problem other than it looks like a phone number and your CFO has some questions, what is the actual concern?”Very often, we'll find that it's not that you're spending too much on cloud, in many cases, it's that it's not understood what it's doing. “Okay, the bill is 20% higher this month. Is that new normal? Is that something that's going to inform our planning and we do adjust our expectations for what this is going to cost to run this? Is it just a mistake that someone left up?” The same questions would have arisen if the bill were 20% lower, except somehow it never is.Eric: Right, right. You know what's interesting about that, Corey is, too, also I think that you tend to tease AWS from time to time. And also I think the work you do would not be in Amazon's interest, right? They want customers to spend more money on their infrastructure and their services and their capabilities, and you're helping customers spend less. But what's interesting about that is that we're one of the few managed service partners in the country.And I don't know how much you know about that program, and what it takes to get into that program and to maintain the certification in that program. It's like a three-day audit; there's 500 control items that we have to go through. In fact, it was that program that took our business to the next level. It was that program and its rigor that took what we were doing and actually matured it and turned it into what I would consider a respectable world-class operation. But one of the interesting aspects of that audit is that there's several control items in there that ask us to show Amazon that we are taking steps to manage our customers' costs on AWS and reduce spend. And it's interesting that Amazon is the one pushing that on us and instilling that requirement as we support our customers in Amazon.Corey: It's counterintuitive, but this is one of those areas where there's no one on the other side of this issue. Of course, Amazon wants customers to spend more money with Amazon—I swear the company spends half its time lying awake at night worrying someone who isn't them is making money somewhere, at least that's how it feels some days. But they want that spend to be intelligent. They don't want the narrative to be that the cloud is just as expensive a bunch of nonsense. If there's a bunch of instances that are sitting there idle, they will advise you—if they're on top of the game—to turn them off because that is the goal. They want it to be—Eric: That's how they deliver on their promise. Right.Corey: Well, yeah. Pandemic aside, with most of our customers, what we notice a year after an engagement is that they're in fact spending more than they were when we started. But it's more efficient; it's growth that's tying into this. It becomes a component of cost of goods sold where, “Yeah, we're doing more business, so it costs us more to fulfill that business; we're perfectly happy,” is generally the response to that. And I think that everyone with a vision that extends beyond this quarter's numbers is likely to start to get into that, on some level.Eric: Right.Corey: One thing I do want to ask you is—relevant to what you just said—one thing that we do at The Duckbill Group explicitly is we have no partners, full stop. And the reason behind that is because with what we're doing around billing, and money, and contract negotiation, and the rest, as soon as we have a partner, it suddenly gives rise to a bunch of real or perceived conflicts of interest. And in this particular niche, it makes an awful lot of sense not to do that. Now, if you're in any other arena, where you're in—“Oh, you're in security, for example. Oh, we have no partners with any vendors,” the answer question becomes, “Well, what's wrong with you? What, there's no one willing to trust you? Do you think somehow you're better than all these other people?” It's the wrong answer. So, my question for you is, how do you evaluate whether you should partner with a particular company or not?Eric: Sure. Great question. Deft's reason for existence—when we think about ourselves, we reframe it as our purpose—is to deliver on the promise of technology. And if you unpack that statement a little bit is like, “Well, what the heck is the promise of technology? What does that even mean?”And what we get down to is that technology itself doesn't make any kind of promises. That router you just bought, it doesn't promise really anything; that EC2 instance you just booted in AWS doesn't really ultimately, at the end of the day, promise anything. It's incapable of making promises, but people are. And what we promise is that we can wrangle that technology, we can configure it, we can set it up in a particular kind of way, we can bring in the right components into the solution, and deliver on a promise of, “Yes, you can scale to 100 million users,” or, “Yes, you can reduce latency and improve the customer experience for your customers.” It's all about the people, and that's what we have the most of.And that's the best thing that we have in our house.s we have an inventory of highly qualified, talented, empathetic, compassionate, excited people. So, when we start thinking about our partners and who we want to partner with, what we take into consideration is what technology, tools, and capabilities do our people need to have in their toolbox, such that when we start working with our customers crafting that promise and that solution, we've got the right things at hand and at the right time. And then the second piece of it is, does the partner align well with us in terms of our vision? And in some sense, keeping us relatively technology-neutral, in the same sense that you're trying to stay neutral from that billing perspective and making sure that you're looking out and advocating for your customers first.So, when we're thinking about our partners as well, it's not that, oh, well, we want to build our whole business on top of AWS, or Azure, or in our data center. And those are the on—you know, we try to remove dogma from the picture in that sense, and try to probably be dogmatic mostly about the customer and what it is that they're trying to achieve, and being honest with them. So, it's more of a, “Hey, let's scan the horizon. Let's listen to our customers, let's understand what problems they're trying to solve, what challenges they have today. Let's evaluate the technology options on the table across the world.” Our partner might be [unintelligible 00:18:36], it might be VM, or it might be Amazon, it might be a small little company somewhere that does a niche service. But our job is to come together with all of those things and present a cohesive solution.Corey: And it's clearly working. You were the Turing Group and you wound up partnering with—you said your business partner—who was over at Server Central, which I'm just guessing from the name and assuming I hadn't paid attention to the industry for a while, sounds like it might not be fully cloud-focused, on some level, given the name. What did they do? And why was merging the right answer?Eric: Yeah. I mean, it's funny that you bring that up. Server Central. Wow, a server; who's talking about servers anymore, right? It's containers and virtualization and—Corey: But they've got to run somewhere.Eric: That's right. Serverless applications. Like, hmm, is this the right name? And I think it speaks to the 20-year heritage that Server Central has had and how they built their business. And they do and did, and we do have a cloud focus that's not related to the public cloud.We have a significant number of customers that operate on private clouds that we've built for them and manage for them, for various reasons. Some are legit and some maybe not so legit and mostly about how they feel about something. And some of them are technically driven. And after we brought the companies together, we realized that hey, you know what, we have a lot of brand equity and history and Server Central and we have to respect that. Turing Group had its own set of brand equity in the market that we had established and promoted a certain kind of ideology and thinking.And so for a short period of time, we were a little bit unsure of how are we going to bring this together in any kind of cohesive fashion? And it actually went out into the world for about a year as Server Central Turing Group. And I think my tongue twisted as I said it, [laugh]. It's a lot of words and it mostly just confuses people and makes them scratch their head. And so we went off on a journey to figure out what our reimagined new company is going to look like with all the combined services and capabilities that we have.And that's how we arrived at Deft and the idea that's how we want to engage with our customers; that's what we want our solutions to be like; that's what we want the experience in working with us to be. And we want to remove the friction and anxiety that technology can bring. It reminds me of when I was starting my first company. I spent a lot of time sort of navel-gazing, saying, “What do I like about this, and why am I doing this?” And went back to my early days as an engineer, and at the core of it was a really simple idea and it was the idea that when I helped somebody with a technology problem, they were elated. They thought it was magic. They thought it was black magic.They didn't understand how I took this goofy, strange, cryptic thing and made it do what they wanted, and I did it quickly and I did it deftly. And there was joy and they were happy and I loved that; I loved that response. I loved knowing that I helped fix this mysterious problem for somebody that just didn't even know where to begin. And I did it time and time again and it helped me grow my career. And when we started the first company, it was sort of like, I want to continue that feeling.I want to create that feeling for our customers where they feel like maybe they're stuck with some crazy complex technology problem, and because I happen to have the innate skill for understanding these things and figuring these things out and I have a team that can do it, we can create that same feeling for our customers. And we want to continue doing that today.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense. Corey: I do want to point out that, at least in my mind, there's always a little bit of, I guess, we call it technical elitism, on some level, where, “Oh, someone is working through a partner. They must be a company that's stuck in the past.” But a glance at companies that you're working with, make it very clear that's not the case. I mean, Ars Technica, New Relic, Wildbit. You've got some companies that are very forward-looking, and by no definition are these companies that don't understand cloud or understand how the internet works. It's something that I think is not fully understood among a subset of the industry that, in many cases, having a third-party partner, in many cases winds up helping you go faster, further.Eric: Yeah. It might be cliche to say—oftentimes, in cliches, there's a little bit of truth—which is, focus on what you're good at, and focus on what you're best at, and focus on your core products. And with a lot of these technology companies where you might read on the surface that, “Oh, yeah, they're a smart bunch over there. Why do they need a partner?” Technology is complicated. The stack is deep.Whether you're talking about deployment pipelines, or should I use a fiber connection on this or should I use copper? Or should we have jumbo frames enabled? Or should we be using API Gateway and Lambda functions for this? I just listed a broad range of technologies and things that solve different problems. And these customers have their own products that they have to put out into the world; those products need to be meaningful and thoughtful and aligned with their customers.And because that technology stack is complex and deep, it creates an opportunity for companies like ours—for partners—to step in, and grab a piece of that complexity, and manage it, and handle it, and help a customer with it to create the space for them to create the most excellent product. And so even though they are technology companies because you're managing this big wrangling layered technologies, abstractions, and—well, even when we talk about containerization, right, and running a small application, there's seven layers before you get to the CPU. [laugh]. And within that seven layers, there's I don't know how many lines of code, and there's how many hidden assumptions and configuration files, and you name it. And there's areas of that entire stack that we're really good at and customers derive value from that.Corey: One area that you've been relatively active within is the hybrid universe. My talking point on that has generally looked a lot like the snarky take of, “Well, you have a company in a data center today, and they're going to go all-in on the cloud. And it turns out halfway through that it's hard to move some workloads. There is no AWS/400 and they have a mainframe.” So, what are they going to do? They give up halfway, plant a flag, declare victory, and now we're hybrid as a best practice. That is not entirely accurate, but there's an element of accuracy in some cases to it.Eric: Yeah.Corey: But I don't get the sense that's how you see it. I'm left with a strong impression that it's a very intentional choice for some of your customers, that in some cases, workloads that are live in data centers, were at one point living in a cloud provider. Talk to me about that.Eric: Yeah, I like to think of it not as, like, a binary situation. And something that exists on degrees, and often times has a lot to do with the lifecycle of a product or company and the scale of a company. And we touched on this earlier in our conversation, which is that if someone approached us—maybe a startup or a smaller company—trying to migrate off of half-dozen servers and move into the public cloud, and they approached us and said, “Yeah, we need to be hybrid for this thing,” I would probably question that and I would question it really hard, and say, “Really, what are you going after here? You're going to give up a lot if you choose to go hybrid, and you won't really take advantage of some of the amazing opportunities that a full-on single cloud solution has to offer.” On the flip side, we've seen companies that started like that, were a hundred percent in public cloud on a single provider, everything's working fine.There was no issues whatsoever, except the bill, or maybe a fear of what the bill could be. And this is something that happens at scale. There's just a point where the public cloud just doesn't make sense anymore, even despite those benefits. And for the bottom line and in terms of the margins and your cost of revenue, giving up some of those additional benefits that allow you to grow and scale is worth it. And if you look at the technology landscape, there's a reason Facebook's not in AWS. [laugh].There's a reason a lot of these larger technology companies where we have hundreds of millions of users or bazillions of petabytes of data, that move out and get out of there. I mean, look at Dropbox right? [laugh]. Is Dropbox storing all their data in the public cloud? Not really, and they are a public cloud in a sense on their own, right?Corey: Yeah, they did just launch a 34-petabyte data warehouse for analytics on AWS, and they've made a bunch of big—Eric: Yeah, yeah. I mean—Corey: —deals out of that, but the core storage workload, yeah, that does not economically make sense, given their access patterns and how they have built that offering. So yeah, that is a very well understood, very specific, very niche workload. Yeah, that does not belong in AWS.Eric: We've even gone as far as launching our own multi-petabyte managed object storage solution, it's totally S3 compatible. It works identically to the way S3 works, but we have customers that actually can do better on our platform, either because we can provide lower latency, we can provide custom contracts that aren't just purely pay as you go; there's all kinds of different options that we can give our customers that are more custom and tailored to their needs that you're going to get from, “Here's your API keys have fun.” [laugh]. And so there's still a market for that stuff and there's still a need for that stuff.Corey: There really is.Eric: So, the answer is it depends, Corey. [laugh].Corey: It seems to be the answer to any nuanced question. So, if people want to learn more about what you're doing at Deft, and potentially whether it might help them with some of the challenges they're facing, where can they find you?Eric: Easy. deft.com, D-E-F-T dot com. Great, short four-letter domain name that you wouldn't believe what we had to go through to get. [laugh].Corey: I can only imagine. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Eric: You're welcome, Corey.Corey: Eric Dynowski, Chief Solutions Officer and Partner at Deft. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment telling me that no, customers should in fact go all-in on your third-rate cloud.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Kelly and Steve bring their personal 90 Day Fiancé relationship and 25+ years of marriage to the table as they talk about this series of TLC Shows.This week, we discuss:90 Day Fiancé - Happily Ever After? Season 5 Episode 8Colt and Jess – Here comes Debbie throwing grenades into this relationship…let the bodies hit the floor.Larissa and Eric – Well…what did you expect. Another week and another fight. This one is a whopper and Eric shows you his notebooks.Michael and Angela meet Dr. Pettigrew again and share some news and a cigarette.Asuelu buys meat. Paul. Wow. You can go see our previous episode, but his mom does everything but call him a deadbeat as she buys him dog food for his two shepherds.Coupled with Chaos can be reached as listed below:Email: Coupledwithchaos@gmail.comFacebook: @CoupledwithchaosInstagram: @CoupledwithchaosTwitter: @CoupledwChaosFollow their adventures both here and on their other podcast – Coupled with Chaos

Kelly and Steve bring their personal 90 Day Fiancé relationship and 25+ years of marriage to the table as they talk about this series of TLC Shows.This week, we discuss:90 Day Fiancé - The Other Way Season 2 Episode 9 90 Day Fiancé - Happily Ever After? Season 5 Episode 7Colt and Jess – Show us why we don’t go to the beach.Larissa and Eric – Well…what did you expect.Angela saves the day with Michael’s mom by busting out the pizza.Asuelu apologizes to Kalani, but we are not sold yet.Paul has his best week ever finding Karine a place to stay.Ariela and Biniyam get approval from her mom for the hospital, but Janice turns into a Karen when it comes to figuring out how they are going to make it.Kenneth and Armando continue on their trip showing us how different they really are.Tim travels all the way to Columbia to get Judy Judy’d by Melyza.Brittany and Yazan go to see Yazan make out with his uncle IbrahimDeavan’s translator goes haywire and Jihoon pulls a Paul and runs away.Coupled with Chaos can be reached as listed below:Email: Coupledwithchaos@gmail.comFacebook: @CoupledwithchaosInstagram: @CoupledwithchaosTwitter: @CoupledwChaosFollow their adventures both here and on their other podcast – Coupled with Chaos

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.  

In this episode, I break bread with Eric Curts. Not just break, fatty brisket to be exact. We have a great conversation all about well-being. And what a more perfect time to discuss well-being than Spring Break! Eric gives some great advice as to how he has focused on digital well-being in order to be a more balanced individual. So make sure you check this episode out and hear what Eric and I have to say about well-being... and fatty brisket. Buen provecho!

Join QuantumDigital’s CMO Eric Cosway as he interviews Alex Bruno, owner of RE/MAX 5-Star Realty in Florida. Alex is a top producer who also works with banks, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Alex is HUD-certified, and has a strong network of home buyers and investors.   Eric: Alex, welcome to the podcast.   Alex: Hello. How are you doing?   Eric: So, it sounds like RE/MAX 5-Star has been around since 2016. What led you to want to start the business, or create a franchise for yourself?   Alex: Actually, over the years, I thought it was important based on the experience that I got in real estate. I wanted to have an office with a little bit of a different perspective, and being a buyer’s and listing agent for many years, I understand how difficult it is to be an agent. I wanted to facilitate the tools and the support for the agents the way that I would like to have it myself. I wanted to be able to answer their questions, and at the same time provide the tools that they need. I didn’t want to be the office that was open for 30-40 years. Things change over the years. The real estate market changed. The real estate agent’s needs changed. The buyers changed. Everything is completely different. And more and more the market keeps changing every year. We need to make adjustments constantly.   Eric: Is your primary focus on buyers in Hollywood, Florida? Or do you do both buyers and sellers?   Alex: I work with buyers and sellers, and I work on South Florida, not just only on Hollywood. From Miami Beach to Pompano Beach, we are open to working with different cities.   Eric: Was that area impacted by the hurricane this past summer? Last couple of months?   Alex: Absolutely. Yes. And we’re still seeing the damages around.   Eric: How did that impact you? You’re right there in the center of it. You have a staff. Not only were you affected, but I’m sure the business was impacted as well.   Alex: First of all, it’s something that is out of our control. We need to take it the way it is, and try to make the best of it. So, we need to just continue life because it was definitely a huge impact for real estate, and also properties they were supposed to close. They have to be re-inspected again, and appraised again. Some of the sales fall apart, but we need to continue. When the market crashed in 2007, life continued. And you have to keep going. And there were always buyers. We were a little spoiled, some of the agent. Deals were so easy, then they were no longer that easy. We need to work harder. But everything is possible, and we need to adapt to the times.   Eric: You came into the real estate business in 2007. How was that first year for you as a Realtor?   Alex: It was a little sad. A lot of people were very depressed. It was like the end of the world. It was a commotion—many people taking time off, going away. Other ones struggling to figure out how to react to these major changes. And I personally think it was easier for me because I was not that spoiled. I was new. So, I figured out there are always buyers. People are going to keep buying homes and selling homes. This is not the end of the world. Maybe the end of a good market, but there were always FHA buyers. Much better buyers than before. Real buyers that can afford these houses. Because, after the market crashed, lenders were more conscious about the capability of a buyer to purchase a home. You keep going, and you have to adapt to the situation.   Eric: Is there something specific about a buyer that you’ve learned—the one or two things a buyer always needs that you just know what to do, and just handle a buyer so they’re fully happy and satisfied with all the work you do?   Alex: One of the most important is to listen to them, and try to build in your mind and try to understand what the needs are for they buyer. Try to put time into that buyer to show them that you want to work with them. Because it’s a very competitive market. Here in Florida, a lot of people have real estate licenses. So, everybody knows a friend, or a neighbor, or a coworker that has a real estate license. But, not everyone is dedicated to this career. A lot of people think it’s easy, but it’s not that easy. What you need to do is just listen to the buyer, and try to work on what they are asking. And be available. That is one of the most important things; build a criteria for the buyer, and try to work on finding what they are looking for.   Eric: I read your customer reviews, and I have to tell you, they’re excellent. Here are the common terms when people talked about you. They said you were responsive. Always calls back. Knowledgeable. Trustworthy. Honest. Knows the area extremely well. Is available 24/7. So, does that surprise you, or is that just who you are—your DNA?   Alex: It’s who I try to be all the time for my clients. I think it’s important for all these points to be met—to have a happy client, and to eventually get more referrals and more business. To be dedicated for this job.   Eric: Tell me about the dedication in this job. You have a team of 8 people, is that correct?   Alex: Approximately, yes. With the photographers, yeah.   Eric: Are you active 7 days a week being a team lead, or can you now delegate some of those responsibilities off?   Alex: I delegate, but as a team leader you have to keep pushing to make sure that you keep the standards.   Eric: WHen it’s really tough, what do you tell your team? How do you motivate your team to keep moving?   Alex: There are many sources, and some of the sources we learn from the old school. You have to go back to what used to work before, in order to add what works now. In order to get buyer’s and seller’s business—even in the tough times—you have to do a hundred things. It’s not like one thing is going to give you the business. If you have multiple options, most likely you’re going to have better results. Prospectings, For Sale By Owners, campaigns, expired campaigns… those are the old school. Open Houses—a lot of people don’t believe in open houses. Some people don’t believe in broker’s Open Houses. You have to try everything. And believe me you have more chances, you’re going to succeed with better results.   Eric: Sounds like technology has impacted your business. Has it made things easier for you? Has it given better exposure to your buyers and sellers? How do you leverage technology as a broker?   Alex: Technology makes smarter buyers. The buyers know how to look. And it makes it more risky for the agents, because you get a chance of losing a buyer going directly with a listing agent, or going a different route with another agent. The information is more available. You just Google the address, and you can get all the information regarding that property. It definitely helps us also to be able to locate a property the buyer is asking for immediately through our phones. But at the same time, we need to keep the quality of the work going, to keep that buyer, being more proactive about finding what they’re looking for. Because they buyer will be looking for those properties, too. So, you’re working with a buyer… a smarter buyer.   Eric: Now that there’s so much content available to buyers to be smart buyers, has that forced your game and your agents games up to be even more on top of the market than you might normally be?   Alex: I don’t think so. It’s just that we need to adapt to the changes and grow with the changes.   Eric: Are you a team that adopts new technology? Or are you a tad more service, belly-to-belly, a little more old fashioned in the way you approach your buyers and sellers?   Alex: It’s a bunch of things together, and we have to keep moving forward with technology, and adopting new trends, new programs, new marketing—different types of marketing that probably didn’t exist 10 years ago—and try to be creative for your business. That way, you can stand in the market as an agent.   Eric: You mentioned your referrals. Is that mainly how you drive business today?   Alex: Referrals are very important. And also, if you work for an international company, your exposure is even more. But referrals is one of the things that really helps your business. It’s on the top of the list, definitely.   Eric: There are obviously some benefits being a franchise, but in your market what are the big 2 or 3 benefits of having that RE/MAX brand behind you?   Alex: When I was exploring the possibility of buying a franchise, I met with multiple companies. And the RE/MAX platform was clean and easy for the agent. And at the same time—one of the most important things for me, especially referrals—is seeing how big it is. In 100 countries, plus. And have 110,000 agents around the world. That makes you feel safe. It’s a company that keeps growing, that gives you the tools to be successful. And that is exactly what I was looking for. I was not looking about quantity of agents per square feet. Everybody has different perspectives of somebody who opens a franchise. I think that those were very important points to make a decision to continue being part of RE/MAX.   Eric: Let’s change course a little bit. You have a background in interior design. You’re from Uruguay. Tell us about how interior design informs you, or helps you in your career in real estate.   Alex: I didn’t finish the career on interior design, so I didn’t get a license for it. But, it definitely helped me to help sellers, or give them advice on how to present the home to be sold faster, for more money. Seeing, from a different perspective, the home from the buyer’s side, and being able to tell just the sellers what they should do to accomplish that.   Eric: It sounds like a really complementary skill to what you’re doing day to day.   Alex: Honestly, I love my job. And I definitely put my heart on every transaction. It doesn’t matter how much the sales price is. Every transaction means a lot for me. The important thing is to make it happen, and have a good presentation, a good description of the property. You need to put a little bit of your heart on every property that you list. Going the extra mile for the client.   Eric: Well, you’re definitely passionate about your career. What would be the other things you’re passionate about?   Alex: My family, honestly. It’s the most important thing in my life. And also my country—even though I was born in Uruguay—I have the American dream, and I love this country. I’m proud of being an American citizen. And my career.   Eric: Alex, what a pleasure speaking with you today. I know being a team lead, and being a broker with all the responsibilities, your time is very limited so it’s precious. I want to to thank you for your time. I hope you found it informative. We certainly did.   Alex: Absolutely. And I want to help other agents who don’t see the light sometimes of this business. And a lot of people who feel limited, because maybe they are foreign people, or they feel different… this is a job where you can can shine. And not because you’re pretty, or you drive a nice car. You can shine for talent.   Eric: Congratulations! You’ve done a very nice job. Alex: Thank you!

Spotted: C and S are back, as Blair hosts the Welcome Back party of the school year, mingling with classmates, and getting in dark corners with Marcus, or is it Chuck? Dan and Serena get stuck in an elevator and their feels. Jenny put her foot firmly in her mouth again, but will she find a way to get it out? And will Vanessa help Nate to get away from Catherine? Or push him back into Catherine's arms? Also, where's Eric? We'll never tell...

asset title: Episode 13: Pronouns - The joy of stress filename: ra_13.mp3 track number: 13/22 time: 16:09 size: 6.63 MB bitrate: 56 kbps In Episode 13, The joy of stress, we will continue our discussion of double pronouns and how stress can affect the spelling and placement of object pronouns. We will also talk about when it is absolutely necessary to use a 'stressed' or tonic pronoun: to resolve ambiguity, to compare or contrast, to answer a question, or for emphasis. Dottor Balanzone will call to share his snack of the gods. What a treat - let's listen!Dialog: ItalianEric and an Eager Young Italian Grammar Cadet 1. --Il professore ti spiega la grammatica?--Sì, me la spiega.--Professore, mi spiegherà il congiuntivo?--Certo, te lo spiegherò domani.--Il professore vi ha spiegato i pronomi?--Sì, ce li ha spiegati.--Professore, ci spiegherà le poesie di Arlecchino?--Mi dispiace, ragazzi, non ve ne spiegherò neanche una. Nessuno potrà mai spiegarvele ...Dialog: English--Does the professor explain the grammar to you?--Yes, he explains it to me.--Professor, will you explain the subjunctive to me?--Of course, I will explain it to you tomorrow.--Has the professor explained pronouns to you?--Yes, he has explained them to us.--Professor, will you explain Arlecchino's poems to us?--I'm sorry, guys, I won't explain even one of them to you. Nobody will ever be able to explain them to you.Dialog: ItalianEric and an Eager Young Italian Grammar Cadet 2. --Il professore spiega la grammatica allo studente?--Sì, gliela spiega.--Professore, spiegherà il congiuntivo alla studentessa?--Certo, glielo spiegherò domani.--Il professore ha spiegato i pronomi agli studenti?--Sì, glieli ha spiegati.--Il professore spiegherà le poesie di Arlecchino alle studentesse?--Purtroppo no, non gliene spiegherà neanche una. Nessuno potrà mai spiegargliele ...Dialog: English--Does the professor explain the grammar to the student?--Yes, he explains it to him.--Professor, will you explain the subjunctive to the student?--Of course, I will explain it to her tomorrow.--Has the professor explained the pronouns to the students?--Yes, he has explained them to them.--Will the professor explain Arlecchino's poems to the students?--Unfortunately no, he won't explain even one of them to them. Nobody will ever be able to explain them to them.Dialog: ItalianIl Dottore per i supplì al telefono 'Supplifono' -- lo Spuntino Divino!La ragazza: Pronto? Pronto? Pronto? Ma chi è? Chi c'è?Dottore: Ha ha! Ma non è il Suo ragazzo che Le telefona. Non è il Suo cellulare!La ragazza: E allora?Dottore: È lo spuntino degli dei che La chiamano ... al Supplifono!La ragazza: Come?Dottore: Sì, i supplì al telefono del Dottor Balanzone! Eccoli, eccoli, eccoli! Deliziosi e nutritivi! Venite! Vedete! Assaggiateli! Li offro ora a voi come li offriva a me la nonna ... con amore ... perché con amore sono stati sempre fatti... Signorina, posso offrirgliene uno?La ragazza: Grazie. Uh!Dottore: Stia attenta! È caldo! Mi dica, signorina, come lo trova?La ragazza: Mmmmm ... riso ...Dottore: Sì, il riso, sì ... e ...?La ragazza: Mmmmm.... ragù di carne...Dottore: Esatto ... e ...?La ragazza: Mozzarella ........Dottore: Ecco! Questo è il supplì della nonna -- Supplifono!La ragazza: È squisito! Non me ne offrirebbe un altro?Dottore: Come no! Ecco a Lei, signorina!La ragazza: Grazie. Ahi!Dottore: Stia attenta! Sono ancora caldi! Oh! questo sì sarà il Suo fidanzato!La ragazza: Lasciamo perdere, Dottore. Da ora in poi ricevo solo le Supplifonate! Mmmmmm!Dottore: Supplifono! Sono gli dei che vi chiamano dall'Olimpo, ad invitarvi a condividere con loro lo spuntino divino!Dialog: EnglishIl Dottore for supplì al telefono 'Supplifono' - The Snack Divine!The girl: Hello? Hello? Hello? Well who is it? Who's there?Dottore: Ha ha! But it's not your boyfriend calling you! It's not your cell phone!The girl: Well then?Dottore: It's the snack of the gods calling you ... to the Supplifono!The girl: Huh?Dottore: Yes, Dottor Balanzone's supplì al telefono! Here they are, here they are, here they are! Delicious and nutritious! Come! See! Try them! I offer them to you now as my grandmother offered them to me ... with love ... for with love they have always been made... Miss, may I offer you one of them?The girl: Thank you. Ooh!Dottore: Watch out! It's hot! Tell me Miss, what do you think of it?The girl: Mmmmm ... rice ...Dottore: Yes, rice, yes ... and ...?The girl: Mmmmm ... meat sauce ...Dottore: Exactly ... and ...?The girl: Mozzarella ........Dottore: There you are! This is grandmama's supplì -- Supplifono!The girl: It's scrumptious! Wouldn't you offer me another one of them?Dottore: Why, certainly! Here you are, Miss.The girl: Thank you. Ow!Dottore: Careful! They're still hot! Oh! now this must be your boyfriend!The girl: Don't mind him, Dottore. From now on, I only take Supplifono calls! Mmmmmm!Dottore: Supplifono! It's the gods calling you from Olympus, inviting you to share with them the Snack Divine!Dialog: ItalianEric and an Eager Young Italian Grammar Cadet 3: The pronomi tonici in action!--Guarda chi sta entrando! Sono Arlecchino e Arlecchina! Li conosci?--Come no! Ascolto spesso lui su Radio Arlecchino, e ho visto lei molte volte a teatro.--Com'è possibile che Arlecchina ami non solo me ma anche Pulcinella?--Ama te perché sei un tipo in gamba, sportivo ... ama lui perché ha l'anima di un musicista, di un poeta ...--Chi ami?--Amo solo te, cara mia.--Che cosa mi dicevi?--Non dicevo niente a te. Parlavo con il Dottore.Dialog: English--Look who's coming in! It's Arlecchino and Arlecchina! Do you know them?--Of course! I often listen to him on Radio Arlecchino, and I have seen her many time at the theatre.--How is it possible for Arlecchina to love not just me but also Pulcinella?--She loves you because you're on the ball, athletic ... she loves him because he has the soul of a musician, a poet ...--Whom do you love?--I love only you, my dear.--What were you saying to me?--I wasn't saying anything to you. I was talking with the Dottore.Dialog: ItalianThe pronome tonico with prepositions.È arrivata una lettera per te!Vuoi venire al cinema con noi?Non ti scordar di me!Evviva Pulcinella! Stasera ci sarà una grande festa da lui!Non avremmo potuto farlo senza di voi!Dialog: EnglishThe tonic pronouns with prepositionsA letter has come for you!Do you want to come to the movies with us?Don't forget me!Long live Pulcinella! Tonight there will be a big party at his place!We couldn't have done it without you!Dialog: ItalianEric telefona ad Antonella a Roma.Antonella: Pronto ...Eric: Ciao, Antonella!Antonella: Ciao, Eric! Come stai?Eric: Bene, bene, grazie! E tu? Ti disturbo?Antonella: Sto bene, grazie! Questa volta non mi sto abbuffando di arte ma di cibo vero!Eric: Ottimo! Buon appetito! Proprio di cibo volevo parlarti. Con tutte le pubblicità di generi alimentari che stiamo trasmettendo qui ho finito per comprare un sacco di roba ... il riso Barobio, la mozzarella Rintupicchio, e figurati, pangrattato Crostafù!Antonella: E che cosa pensi di fare con questi ingredienti?Eric: Proprio per questo ti ho chiamato! Pulcinella non c'è ... mi devi aiutare tu ...Antonella: Momento migliore non potevi trovarlo! Infatti sto abbuffandomi in una rosticceria di quello che per me è il miglior fast-food italiano! Il supplì!Eric: Domani sera vengono a casa mia parecchi amici dello studio ... fammi fare bella figura con uno sfizio italiano ... Andiamo con i supplì?Antonella: Sarebbero perfetti! Ti do subito la ricetta per i supplì al telefono!Eric: Al telefono, per forza, altrimenti non c'è tempo ...Antonella: Quindi ... stasera prepara un ragù di carne e cuoci il riso con il ragù ...Poi, domani, usa il riso freddo, amalga al riso un uovo intero ...Prendi una manciata di riso, mettici dentro un pezzetto di mozzarella fresca. Appollotala il riso a forma ovale ...Copri il supplì con il pan grattato e appena l'olio nella padella è caldo, metti il supplì e friggilo.Ecco! Così avrai fatto i supplì al telefono!Eric: Be', spero di non farli proprio al telefono!Antonella: No, i supplì sono 'supplì al telefono'! Quando arriveranno i tuoi amici, servili caldi, e insieme, spezzate in due il supplì, portate una metà all'orecchio e l'altra metà alla bocca ... la mozzarella sarà il filo del telefono ... e dite:Eric: 'Arisentirci'?Antonella: Hai capito!Eric: Grazie, Antonella, saranno deliziosi!Antonella: Sono buonissimi! I miei li ho finiti tutti!Eric: Parleremo di nuovo presto attraverso il filo del supplì!Antonella: Buon appetito! Dialog: EnglishEric phones Antonella in Rome.Antonella: Hello ...Eric: Hi, Antonella!Antonella: Hi, Eric! How are you?Eric: Fine, fine, thanks! And you? Am I interrupting?Antonella: I'm fine, thanks! This time I'm not stuffing myself with art but with real food!Eric: Excellent! Enjoy it! In fact it was food I wanted to talk to you about. With all these commercials for food that we've been broadcasting here I've ended up buying a bunch of stuff ... Barobio rice, Rintupicchio mozzarella, and go figure, Crostafù grated bread!Antonella: And what do you plan to do with these ingredients?Eric: That's just why I've called you! Pulcinella's not around ... you've got to help me.Antonella: You couldn't have caught me at a better moment! In fact I'm stuffing myself in one of those rosticcerie with what as far as I'm concerned is the best Italian fast food. Supplì!Eric: Several friends from the studio are coming to my house tomorrow evening ... help me make a good impression with something Italian and fanciful. Shall we go with the supplì?Antonella: They would be perfect! I'll go ahead right now and give you the recipe for supplì al telefono!Eric: It'll have to be al telefono [on the phone], otherwise there's no time.Antonella: So ... tonight make a meat saucce and cook the rice with the sauce.Then, tomorrow, use the rice cold and add a whole egg to it ...Take a handful or rice, put a cube of fresh mozzarella in it and roll the rice into an oval shape. Cover the supplì with grated bread and as soon as the oil in the pan is hot, put the supplì in it and fry it.There! That's how you'll have mad supplì al telefono!Eric: Well, I hope I won't be making them right on the phone!Antonella: No, the supplì are 'supplì al telefono'--'telephone style supplì!' When your friends get there, serve them hot, and together, split the the supplì in two. Hold one half up to your ear and the other to your mouth ... the mozzarella will be the phone cord ... and say:Eric: 'Arisentirci'?Antonella: You've got it!Eric: Thanks, Antonella, they'll be delicious!Antonella: They're great! I've finished all of mine!Eric: We'll talk again soon over the supplì wire!Antonella: Enjoy them!

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 ...