Podcast appearances and mentions of James Wallace

Matt Forbeck is all that and so much more. He grew up in Wisconsin as what he describes as a wimpy kid, too short and not overly healthy. He took to gaming at a pretty early age and has grown to be a game creator, author and award-winning storyteller.   Matt has been designing games now for over 35 years. He tells us how he believes that many of the most successful games today have stories to tell, and he loves to create some of the most successful ones. What I find most intriguing about Matt is that he clearly is absolutely totally happy in his work. For most of Matt's career he has worked for himself and continues today to be an independent freelancer.   Matt and his wife have five children, including a set of quadruplets. The quadruplets are 23 and Matt's oldest son is 28 and is following in his father's footsteps.   During our conversation we touch on interesting topics such as trust and work ethics. I know you will find this episode stimulating and worth listening to more than once.     About the Guest:   Matt Forbeck is an award-winning and New York Times-bestselling author and game designer of over thirty-five novels and countless other books and games. His projects have won a Peabody Award, a Scribe Award, and numerous ENnies and Origins Awards. He is also the president of the Diana Jones Award Foundation, which celebrates excellence in gaming.    Matt has made a living full-time on games and fiction since 1989, when he graduated from the Residential College at the University of Michigan with a degree in Creative Writing. With the exception of a four-year stint as the president of Pinnacle Entertainment Group and a year and a half as the director of the adventure games division of Human Head Studios, he has spent his career as an independent freelancer.   Matt has designed collectible card games, roleplaying games, miniatures games, board games, interactive fiction, interactive audiobooks, games for museum installations, and logic systems for toys. He has directed voiceover work and written short fiction, comic books, novels, screenplays, and video game scripts and stories. His work has been translated into at least 15 languages.   His latest work includes the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game Core Rulebook, the Spider-Verse Expansion, Monster Academy (novels and board game), the Shotguns & Sorcery 5E Sourcebook based on his novels, and the Minecraft: Roll for Adventure game books. He is the father of five, including a set of quadruplets. He lives in Beloit, Wisconsin, with his wife and a rotating cast of college-age children. For more about him and his work, visit Forbeck.com.   Ways to connect with Matt:   Twitter: https://twitter.com/mforbeck Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/forbeck Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/forbeck.com Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mforbeck Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mforbeck/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/forbeck/ Website: https://www.forbeck.com/     About the Host:   Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset .   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.       Transcription Notes:   Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:21 Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of unstoppable mindset today. We get to play games. Well, not really, but we'll try. Our guest is Matt Forbeck, who is an award winning author. He is a game designer and all sorts of other kinds of things that I'm sure he's going to tell us about, and we actually just before we started the the episode, we were talking about how one might explore making more games accessible for blind and persons with other disabilities. It's, it's a challenge, and there, there are a lot of tricks. But anyway, Matt, I want to welcome you to unstoppable mindset. We're glad you're here.   Matt Forbeck ** 02:02 Well, thank you, Michael for inviting me and having me on. I appreciate it.   Speaker 1 ** 02:06 I think we're going to have a lot of fun, and I think it'll work out really well. I'm I am sure of that. So why don't we start just out of curiosity, why don't you tell us kind of about the early Matt, growing up?   Matt Forbeck ** 02:18 Uh, well, I grew up. I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I grew up in a little town called Beloit, Wisconsin, which actually live in now, despite having moved away for 13 years at one point, and I had terrible asthma, I was a sick and short kid, and with the advent of medication, I finally started to be healthy when I was around nine, and Part of that, I started getting into playing games, right? Because when you're sick, you do a lot of sitting around rather than running around. So I did a lot of reading and playing games and things like that. I happen to grow up in the part of the world where Dungeons and Dragons was invented, which is in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, about 30 miles from where I live. And because of that I was I started going to conventions and playing games and such, when I was about 12 or 13 years old. I started doing it when I was a little bit older. I started doing it professionally, and started doing it when I was in college. And amazingly enough, even to my own astonishment, I've made a career out of it.   Speaker 1 ** 03:17 Where did you go to college? I went to the University   Matt Forbeck ** 03:21 of Michigan over in Ann Arbor. I had a great time there. There's a wonderful little college, Beloit College, in my hometown here, and most of my family has gone to UW Milwaukee over the years. My parents met at Marquette in Milwaukee, but I wanted to get the heck out of the area, so I went to Michigan, and then found myself coming back as soon as we started having   Speaker 1 ** 03:42 kids well, and of course, I would presume that when you were at the University of Michigan, you rooted for them and against Ohio State. That was   Matt Forbeck ** 03:50 kind of, you know, if you did it the other way around, they back out of town. So, yeah, I was always kind of astonished, though, because having grown up in Wisconsin, where every sports team was a losing team when I was growing up, including the Packers, for decades. You know, we were just happy to be playing. They were more excuse to have beers than they were to cheer on teams. And I went to Michigan where they were, they were angry if the team wasn't up by two touchdowns. You know, at any point, I'm like, You guys are silly. This is we're here for fun.   Speaker 1 ** 04:17 But it is amazing how seriously some people take sports. I remember being in New Zealand helping the Royal New Zealand Foundation for the Blind. Well now 22 years ago, it's 2003 and the America's Cup had just finished before we got there, and in America beat New Zealand, and the people in New Zealand were just irate. They were complaining that the government didn't put enough money into the design of the boat and helping with the with the yacht and all that. It was just amazing how seriously people take it, yeah,   Matt Forbeck ** 04:58 once, I mean, it becomes a part of your. Identity in a lot of ways, right for many people, and I've never had to worry about that too much. I've got other things on my mind, but there you go.   Speaker 1 ** 05:08 Well, I do like it when the Dodgers win, and my wife did her graduate work at USC, and so I like it when the Trojans win, but it's not the end of the world, and you do need to keep it in perspective. I I do wish more people would I know once I delivered a speech in brether County, Kentucky, and I was told that when I started the speech had to end no later than preferably exactly at 6:30pm not a minute later, because it was the night of the NCAA Basketball Championship, and the Kentucky Wildcats were in the championship, and at 630 everyone was going to get up and leave and go home to watch the game. So I ended at 630 and literally, by 631 I timed it. The gym was empty and it was full to start with.   Matt Forbeck ** 06:02 People were probably, you know, counting down on their watches, just to make sure, right?   Speaker 1 ** 06:06 Oh, I'm sure they were. What do you do? It's, it is kind of fun. Well, so why did you decide to get started in games? What? What? What attracted to you, to it as a young person, much less later on?   Matt Forbeck ** 06:21 Well, I was, yeah, I was an awkward kid, kind of nerdy and, you know, glasses and asthma and all that kind of stuff. And games were the kind of thing where, if you didn't know how to interact with people, you could sit down at a table across them and you could practice. You can say, okay, we're all here. We've got this kind of a magic circle around us where we've agreed to take this one silly activity seriously for a short period of time, right? And it may be that you're having fun during that activity, but you know, there's, there's no reason that rolling dice or moving things around on a table should be taken seriously. It's all just for fun, right? But for that moment, you actually just like Las Vegas Exactly, right? When there's money on the line, it's different, but if you're just doing it for grins. You know, it was a good way for me to learn how to interact with people of all sorts and of different ages. And I really enjoyed playing the games, and I really wanted to be a writer, too. And a lot of these things interacted with story at a very basic level. So breaking in as a writer is tough, but it turned out breaking as a game designer, wasn't nearly his stuff, so I started out over there instead, because it was a very young field at the time, right? D and D is now 50 years old, so I've been doing this 35 years, which means I started around professionally and even doing it before that, I started in the period when the game and that industry were only like 10 or 15 years old, so yeah, weren't quite as much competition in those   Speaker 1 ** 07:43 days. I remember some of the early games that I did play, that I could play, were DOS based games, adventure. You're familiar with adventure? Yeah, oh, yeah. Then later, Zork and all that. And I still think those are fun games. And I the reason I like a lot of those kinds of games is they really make you think, which I think most games do, even though the video even the video games and so on, they they help your or can help your reactions, but they're designed by people who do try to make you think,   Matt Forbeck ** 08:15 yeah. I mean, we basically are designing puzzles for people to solve, even if they're story puzzles or graphic puzzles or sound puzzles or whatever, you know, even spatial puzzles. There the idea is to give somebody something fun that is intriguing to play with, then you end up coming with story and after that, because after a while, even the most most exciting mechanics get dull, right? I mean, you start out shooting spaceships, but you can only shoot spaceships for so long, or you start out playing Tetris, and you only put shapes together for so long before it doesn't mean anything that then you start adding in story to give people a reason to keep playing right and a reason to keep going through these things. And I've written a lot of video games over the years, basically with that kind of a philosophy, is give people nuggets of story, give them a plot to work their way through, and reward them for getting through different stages, and they will pretty much follow you through anything. It's amazing.   Michael Hingson ** 09:09 Is that true Dungeons and Dragons too?   Matt Forbeck ** 09:13 It is. All of the stories are less structured there. If you're doing a video game, you know you the team has a lot of control over you. Give the player a limited amount of control to do things, but if you're playing around a table with people, it's more of a cooperative kind of experience, where we're all kind of coming up with a story, the narrator or the Game Master, the Dungeon Master, sets the stage for everything, but then the players have a lot of leeway doing that, and they will always screw things up for you, too. No matter what you think is going to happen, the players will do something different, because they're individuals, and they're all amazing people. That's actually to me, one of the fun things about doing tabletop games is that, you know, the computer can only react in a limited number of ways, whereas a human narrator and actually change things quite drastically and roll. With whatever people come up with, and that makes it tremendous fun.   Speaker 1 ** 10:04 Do you think AI is going to enter into all that and maybe improve some of the   Matt Forbeck ** 10:09 old stuff? It's going to add your end to it, whether it's an ad, it's going to approve it as a large question. Yeah. So I've been ranting about AI quite a bit lately with my friends and family. But, you know, I think the problem with AI, it can be very helpful a lot of ways, but I think it's being oversold. And I think it's especially when it's being oversold for thing, for ways for people to replace writers and creative thinking, Yeah, you know, you're taking the fun out of everything. I mean, the one thing I like to say is if, if you can't be bothered to write this thing that you want to communicate to me, I'm not sure why I should be bothered to read this thing well.   Speaker 1 ** 10:48 And I think that AI will will evolve in whatever way it does. But the fact of the matter is, So do people. And I think that, in fact, people are always going to be necessary to make the process really work? AI can only do and computers can only do so much. I mean, even Ray Kurzweil talks about the singularity when people and computer brains are married, but that still means that you're going to have the human element. So it's not all going to be the computer. And I'm not ready to totally buy into to what Ray says. And I used to work for Ray, so I mean, I know Ray Well, but, but the but the bottom line is, I think that, in fact, people are always going to be able to be kind of the, the mainstay of it, as long as we allow that, if we, if we give AI too much power, then over time, it'll take more power, and that's a problem, but that's up to us to deal with?   Matt Forbeck ** 11:41 No, I totally agree with that. I just think right now, there's a very large faction of people who it's in their economic interest to oversell these things. You know, people are making chips. They're building server farms. A lot of them are being transferred from people are doing blockchain just a few years ago, and they see it as the hot new thing. The difference is that AI actually has a lot of good uses. There's some amazing things will come out of llms and such. But I again, people are over the people are selling this to us. Are often over promising things, right?   Speaker 1 ** 12:11 Yeah, well, they're not only over promising but they're they're really misdirecting people. But the other side of it is that, that, in fact, AI as a concept and as a technology is here, and we have control over how we use it. I've said a couple times on this this podcast, and I've said to others, I remember when I first started hearing about AI, I heard about the the fact that teachers were bemoaning the pack, that kids were writing their papers just using AI and turning them in, and it wasn't always easy to tell whether it was something that was written by AI or was written by the student. And I come from a little bit different view than I think a lot of people do. And my view basically is, let the kids write it if with AI, if that's what they're going to do, but then what the teacher needs to do is to take one period, for example, and give every student in that class the opportunity to come up and defend whatever paper they have. And the real question is, can they defend the paper? Which means, have they really learned the subject, or are they just relying on AI,   Matt Forbeck ** 13:18 yeah, I agree with that. I think the trouble is, a lot of people, children, you know, who are developing their abilities and their morals about this stuff, they use it as just a way to complete the assignment, right? And many of them don't even read what they turn in, right, right? Just know that they've got something here that will so again, if you can't be bothered to read the thing that you manufactured, you're not learning anything about it,   Speaker 1 ** 13:39 which is why, if you are forced to defend it, it's going to become pretty obvious pretty fast, whether you really know it or not. Now, I've used AI on a number of occasions in various ways, but I use it to maybe give me ideas or prepare something that I then modify and shape. And I may even interact with AI a couple of times, but I'm definitely involved with the process all the way down the line, because it still has to be something that I'm responsible for.   Matt Forbeck ** 14:09 I agree. I mean, the whole point of doing these things is for people to connect with each other, right? I want to learn about the ideas you have in your head. I want to see how they jive with ones in my head. But if I'm just getting something that's being spit out by a machine and not you, and not being curated by you at any point, that doesn't seem very useful, right? So if you're the more involved people are in it, the more useful it is.   Speaker 1 ** 14:31 Well, I agree, and you know, I think again, it's a tool, and we have to decide how the tool is going to be used, which is always the way it ought to be. Right?   Matt Forbeck ** 14:42 Exactly, although sometimes it's large corporations deciding,   Speaker 1 ** 14:45 yeah, well, there's that too. Well, individuals,   Matt Forbeck ** 14:49 we get to make our own choices. Though you're right,   Speaker 1 ** 14:51 yes, and should Well, so, so when did you start bringing writing into what you. Did, and make that a really significant part of what you did?   Matt Forbeck ** 15:03 Well, pretty early on, I mean, I started doing one of the first things I did was a gaming zine, which was basically just a print magazine that was like, you know, 32 pages, black and white, about the different tabletop games. So we were writing those in the days, design and writing are very closely linked when it comes to tabletop games and even in video games. The trick of course is that designing a game and writing the rules are actually two separate sets of skills. So one of the first professional gig I ever had during writing was in games was some friends of mine had designed a game for a company called Mayfair games, which went on to do sellers of contain, which is a big, uh, entry level game, and but they needed somebody to write the rules, so they called me over, showed me how to play the game. I took notes and I I wrote it down in an easy to understand, clear way that people had just picked up the box. Could then pick it up and teach themselves how to play, right? So that was early on how I did it. But the neat thing about that is it also taught me to think about game design. I'm like, when I work on games, I think about, who is this game going to be for, and how are we going to teach it to them? Because if they can't learn the game, there's no point of the game at all, right?   Speaker 1 ** 16:18 And and so I'm right? I'm a firm believer that a lot of technical writers don't do a very good job of technical writing, and they write way over people's heads. I remember the first time I had to write, well, actually, I mentioned I worked for Kurzweil. I was involved with a project where Ray Kurzweil had developed his original omniprent optical character recognition system. And I and the National Federation of the Blind created with him a project to put machines around the country so that blind people could use them and give back to Ray by the time we were all done, recommendations as to what needed to go in the final first production model of the machine. So I had to write a training manual to teach people how to use it. And I wrote this manual, and I was always of the opinion that it had to be pretty readable and usable by people who didn't have a lot of technical knowledge. So I wrote the manual, gave it to somebody to read, and said, Follow the directions and and work with the machine and all that. And they did, and I was in another room, and they were playing with it for a couple of hours, and they came in and they said, I'm having a problem. I can't figure out how to turn off the machine. And it turns out that I had forgotten to put in the instruction to turn off the machine. And it wasn't totally trivial. There were steps you had to go through. It was a Data General Nova two computer, and you had to turn it off the right way and the whole system off the appropriate way, or you could, could mess everything up. So there was a process to doing it. So I wrote it in, and it was fine. But, you know, I've always been a believer that the textbooks are way too boring. Having a master's degree in physics, I am of the opinion that physics textbook writers, who are usually pretty famous and knowledgeable scientists, ought to include with all the text and the technical stuff they want to put in, they should put in stories about what they did in you bring people in, draw them into the whole thing, rather than just spewing out a bunch of technical facts.   Matt Forbeck ** 18:23 No, I agree. My my first calculus professor was a guy who actually explained how Newton and Leipzig actually came up with calculus, and then he would, you know, draw everything on the board and turn around say, and isn't that amazing? And you were, like, just absolutely enamored with the idea of how they had done these things, right? Yeah. And what you're doing there, when you, when you, when you give the instructions to somebody and say, try this out. That's a very big part of gaming, actually, because what we do this thing called play testing, where we take something before it's ready to be shown to the public, and we give it to other people and say, try this out. See how it works. Let me know when you're starting out of your first playing you play with like your family and friends and people will be brutal with you and give you hints about how you can improve things. But then, even when you get to the rules you're you send those out cold to people, or, you know, if you're a big company, you watch them through a two way mirror or one way mirror, and say, Hey, let's see how they react to everything. And then you take notes, and you try to make it better every time you go through. And when I'm teaching people to play games at conventions, for instance, I will often say to them, please ask questions if you don't understand anything, that doesn't mean you're dumb. Means I didn't explain it well enough, right? And my job as a person writing these rules is to explain it as well as I humanly can so it can't be misconstrued or misinterpreted. Now that doesn't mean you can correct everything. Somebody's always got like, Oh, I missed that sentence, you know, whatever. But you do that over and over so you can try to make it as clear and concise as possible, yeah.   Speaker 1 ** 19:52 Well, you have somewhat of a built in group of people to help if you let your kids get involved. Involved. So how old are your kids?   Matt Forbeck ** 20:03 My eldest is 26 he'll be 27 in January. Marty is a game designer, actually works with me on the marble tabletop role playing game, and we have a new book coming out, game book for Minecraft, called Minecraft role for adventure, that's coming out on July 7, I think, and the rest of the kids are 23 we have 423 year olds instead of quadruplets, one of whom is actually going into game design as well, and the other says two are still in college, and one has moved off to the work in the woods. He's a very woodsy boy. Likes to do environmental education with people.   Speaker 1 ** 20:39 Wow. Well, see, but you, but you still have a good group of potential game designers or game critics anyway.   Matt Forbeck ** 20:47 Oh, we all play games together. We have a great time. We do weekly game nights here. Sometimes they're movie nights, sometimes they're just pizza nights, but we shoot for game and pizza   Speaker 1 ** 20:56 if we get lucky and your wife goes along with all this too.   Matt Forbeck ** 21:00 She does. She doesn't go to the game conventions and stuff as much, and she's not as hardcore of a gamer, but she likes hanging out with the kids and doing everything with us. We have a great time.   Speaker 1 ** 21:10 That's that's pretty cool. Well, you, you've got, you've got to build an audience of some sorts, and that's neat that a couple of them are involved in it as well. So they really like what dad does, yeah,   Matt Forbeck ** 21:23 yeah. We, I started taking them each to conventions, which are, you know, large gatherings gamers in real life. The biggest one is Gen Con, which happens in Indianapolis in August. And last year, I think, we had 72,000 people show up. And I started taking the kids when they were 10 years old, and my wife would come up with them then. And, you know, 10 years old is a lot. 72,000 people is a lot for a 10 year old. So she can mention one day and then to a park the next day, you know, decompress a lot, and then come back on Saturday and then leave on Sunday or whatever, so that we didn't have them too over stimulated. But they really grown to love it. I mean, it's part of our annual family traditions in the summer, is to go do these conventions and play lots of games with each other and meet new people too well.   Speaker 1 ** 22:08 And I like the way you put it. The games are really puzzles, which they are, and it's and it's fun. If people would approach it that way, no matter what the game is, they're, they're aspects of puzzles involved in most everything that has to do with the game, and that's what makes it so fun.   Matt Forbeck ** 22:25 Exactly, no. The interesting thing is, when you're playing with other people, the other people are changing the puzzles from their end that you have to solve on your end. And sometimes the puzzle is, how do I beat this person, or how do I defeat their strategy, or how do I make an alliance with somebody else so we can win? And it's really always very intriguing. There's so many different types of games. There's nowadays, there's like something like 50 to 100 new board games that come out and tabletop games every month, right? It's just like a fire hose. It's almost like, when I was starting out as a novelist, I would go into Barnes and Noble or borders and go, Oh my gosh, look at all these books. And now I do the same thing about games. It's just, it's incredible. Nobody, no one person, could keep up with all of them.   Speaker 1 ** 23:06 Yeah, yeah, yeah, way too much. I would love to explore playing more video games, but I don't. I don't own a lot of the technology, although I'm sure that there are any number of them that can be played on a computer, but we'll have to really explore and see if we can find some. I know there are some that are accessible for like blind people with screen readers. I know that some people have written a few, which is kind of cool. Yeah.   Matt Forbeck ** 23:36 And Xbox has got a new controller out that's meant to be accessible to large amount of people. I'm not sure, all the different aspects of it, but that's done pretty well, too   Speaker 1 ** 23:44 well. And again, it comes down to making it a priority to put all of that stuff in. It's not like it's magic to do. It's just that people don't know how to do it. But I also think something else, which is, if you really make the products more usable, let's say by blind people with screen readers. You may be especially if it's well promoted, surprised. I'm not you necessarily, but people might well be surprised as to how many others might take advantage of it so that they don't necessarily have to look at the screen, or that you're forced to listen as well as look in order to figure out what's going on or take actions.   Matt Forbeck ** 24:29 No, definitely true. It's, you know, people audio books are a massive thing nowadays. Games tend to fall further behind that way, but it's become this incredible thing that obviously, blind people get a great use out of but my wife is addicted to audio books now. She actually does more of those than she does reading. I mean, I technically think they're both reading. It's just one's done with yours and one's done with your eyes.   Speaker 1 ** 24:51 Yeah, there's but there's some stuff, whether you're using your eyes or your fingers and reading braille, there's something about reading a book that way that's. Even so a little bit different than listening to it. Yeah, and there's you're drawn in in some ways, in terms of actually reading that you're not necessarily as drawn into when you're when you're listening to it, but still, really good audio book readers can help draw you in, which is important, too,   Matt Forbeck ** 25:19 very much. So yeah, I think the main difference for reading, whether it's, you know, again, through Braille or through traditional print, is that you can stop. You can do it at your own pace. You can go back and look at things very easily, or read or check things, read things very easily. That you know, if you're reading, if you're doing an audio book, it just goes on and it's straight on, boom, boom, boom, pace. You can say, Wait, I'm going to put this down here. What was that thing? I remember back there? It was like three pages back, but it's really important, let me go check that right.   Speaker 1 ** 25:50 There are some technologies that allow blind people and low vision people and others, like people with dyslexia to use an audio book and actually be able to navigate two different sections of it. But it's not something that is generally available to the whole world, at least to the level that it is for blind people. But I can, I can use readers that are made to be able to accept the different formats and go back and look at pages, go back and look at headings, and even create bookmarks to bookmark things like you would normally by using a pen or a pencil or something like that. So there are ways to do some of that. So again, the technology is making strides.   Matt Forbeck ** 26:37 That's fantastic. Actually, it's wonderful. Just, yeah, it's great. I actually, you know, I lost half the vision of my right eye during back through an autoimmune disease about 13 years ago, and I've always had poor vision. So I'm a big fan of any kind of way to make things easier,   Speaker 1 ** 26:54 like that. Well, there, there are things that that are available. It's pretty amazing. A guy named George curser. Curser created a lot of it years ago, and it's called the DAISY format. And the whole idea behind it is that you can actually create a book. In addition to the audio tracks, there are XML files that literally give you the ability to move and navigate around the book, depending on how it's created, as final level as you choose.   Matt Forbeck ** 27:25 Oh, that's That's amazing. That's fantastic. I'm actually really glad to hear that.   Speaker 1 ** 27:28 So, yeah, it is kind of fun. So there's a lot of technology that's that's doing a lot of different sorts of things and and it helps. But um, so for you, in terms of dealing with, with the games, you've, you've written games, but you've, you've actually written some novels as well, right?   Matt Forbeck ** 27:50 Yeah, I've got like 30, it depends on how you count a novel, right? Okay, like some of my books are to pick a path books, right? Choose Your Own Adventure type stuff. So, but I've got 35 traditional novels written or more, I guess, now, I lost track a while ago, and probably another dozen of these interactive fiction books as well. So, and I like doing those. I've also written things like Marvel encyclopedias and Avengers encyclopedias and all sorts of different pop culture books. And, you know, I like playing in different worlds. I like writing science fiction, fantasy, even modern stuff. And most of it, for me comes down to telling stories, right? If you like to tell stories, you can tell stories through a game or book or audio play or a TV show or a comic, or I've done, you know, interactive museum, games and displays, things like that. The main thing is really a story. I mean, if you're comfortable sitting down at a bar and having a drink with somebody, doesn't have to be alcohol, just sitting down and telling stories with each other for fun. That's where the core of it all is really   Speaker 1 ** 28:58 right. Tell me about interactive fiction book.   Matt Forbeck ** 29:01 Sure, a lot of these are basically just done, like flow charts, kind of like the original Zork and adventure that you were talking about where you I actually, I was just last year, I brought rose Estes, who's the inventor of the endless quest books, which were a cross between Dungeons and Dragons, and choose your own adventure books. She would write the whole thing out page by page on a typewriter, and then, in order to shuffle the pages around so that people wouldn't just read straight through them, she'd throw them all up in the air and then just put them back in whatever order they happen to be. But essentially, you read a section of a book, you get to the end, and it gives you a choice. Would you like to go this way or that way? Would you like to go beat up this goblin? Or would you like to make friends with this warrior over here? If you want to do one of these things, go do page xx, right? Got it. So then you turn to that page and you go, boom, some, actually, some of the endless quest books I know were turned into audio books, right? And I actually, I. Um, oddly, have written a couple Dungeons and Dragons, interactive books, audio books that have only been released in French, right? Because there's a company called Looney l, u n, i, i that has this little handheld device that's for children, that has an A and a B button and a volume button. And you, you know, you get to the point that says, if you want to do this, push a, if you want to do that, push B, and the kids can go through these interactive stories and and, you know, there's ones for clue and Dungeons and Dragons and all sorts of other licenses, and some original stories too. But that way there's usually, like, you know, it depends on the story, but sometimes there's, like, 10 to 20 different endings. A lot of them are like, Oh no, you've been killed. Go back to where you started, right? And if you're lucky, the longer ones are, the more fun ones. And you get to, you know, save the kingdom and rescue the people and make good friends and all that good stuff,   Michael Hingson ** 30:59 yeah, and maybe fall in love with the princess or Prince.   Matt Forbeck ** 31:02 Yeah, exactly right. It all depends on the genre and what you're working in. But the idea is to give people some some choices over how they want the story to go. You're like, Well, do you want to investigate this dark, cold closet over here, or would you rather go running outside and playing around? And some of them can seem like very innocent choices, and other ones are like, well, uh, 10 ton weight just fell on. You go back to the last thing.   Speaker 1 ** 31:23 So that dark hole closet can be a good thing or a bad thing,   Matt Forbeck ** 31:28 exactly. And the trick is to make the deaths the bad endings, actually just as entertaining as anything else, right? And then people go, Well, I got beat, and I gotta go back and try that again. So yeah, if they just get the good ending all the way through, they often won't go back and look at all the terrible ones. So it's fun to trick them sometimes and have them go into terrible spots. And I like to put this one page in books too that sometimes says, How did you get here? You've been cheating there. This book, this page, is actually not led to from any other part of the book. You're just flipping   Speaker 1 ** 31:59 through. Cheater, cheater book, do what you   Matt Forbeck ** 32:04 want, but if you want to play it the right way, go back.   Speaker 1 ** 32:07 Kid, if you want to play the game. Yeah, exactly. On the other hand, some people are nosy.   Matt Forbeck ** 32:15 You know, I was always a kid who would poke around and wanted to see how things were, so I'm sure I would have found that myself but absolutely related, you know,   Speaker 1 ** 32:23 yeah, I had a general science teacher who brought in a test one day, and he gave it to everyone. And so he came over to me because it was, it was a printed test. He said, Well, I'm not going to give you the test, because the first thing it says is, read all the instructions, read, read the test through before you pass it, before you take it. And he said, most people won't do that. And he said, I know you would. And the last question on the test is answer, only question one.   Matt Forbeck ** 32:55 That's great. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah,   Speaker 1 ** 32:57 that was cute. And he said, I know that. I that there's no way you would, would would fall for that, because you would say, Okay, let's read the instructions and then read the whole test. That's what it said. And the instruction were, just read the whole test before you start. And people won't do that.   Matt Forbeck ** 33:13 No, they'll go through, take the whole thing. They get there and go, oh, did I get there? Was a, there's a game publisher. I think it was Steve Jackson Games, when they were looking for people, write for them, or design stuff for them, or submit stuff to them, would have something toward the end of the instructions that would say, put like a the letter seven, or put seven a on page one right, and that way they would know if you had read the instructions, if you hadn't bothered to Read the instructions, they wouldn't bother reading anything else.   Speaker 1 ** 33:42 Yeah, which is fair, because the a little harsh, well, but, but, you know, we often don't learn enough to pay attention to details. I know that when I was taking physics in college, that was stressed so often it isn't enough to get the numbers right. If you don't get the units right as well. Then you're, you're not really paying attention to the details. And paying attention to the details is so important.   Matt Forbeck ** 34:07 That's how they crash from those Mars rovers, wasn't it? They somebody messed up the units, but going back and forth between metric and, yeah, and Imperial and, well, you know, it cost somebody a lot of money at one point. Yeah. Yeah. What do you   Speaker 1 ** 34:21 this is kind of the way it goes. Well, tell me, yeah. Well, they do matter, no matter what people think, sometimes they do matter. Well, tell me about the Diana Jones award. First of all, of course, the logical question for many people is, who is Diana Jones? Yeah, Diana Jones doesn't exist, right? That's There you go. She's part game somewhere? No, no, it doesn't be in a game somewhere.   Matt Forbeck ** 34:43 Then now there's actually an author named Diana Wynne Jones, who's written some amazing fantasy stories, including Howell's Moving Castle, which has turned into a wonderful anime movie, but it has nothing to do with her or any other person. Because originally, the Diana Jones award came about. Because a friend of mine, James Wallace, had somehow stumbled across a trophy that fell into his hands, and it was a pub trivia trophy that used to be used between two different gaming companies in the UK, and one of those was TSR, UK, the United Kingdom department. And at one point, the company had laid off everybody in that division just say, Okay, we're closing it all down. So the guys went and burned a lot of the stuff that they had, including a copy of the Indiana Jones role playing game, and the only part of the logo that was left said Diana Jones. And for some reason, they put this in a in a fiberglass or Plexiglas pyramid, put it on a base, a wooden base, and it said the Diana Jones award trophy, right? And this was the trophy that they used they passed back and forth as a joke for their pub trivia contest. Fell into James's hands, and he decided, You know what, we're going to give this out for the most excellent thing in gaming every year. And we've now done this. This will be 25 years this summer. We do it at the Wednesday night before Gen Con, which starts on Thursday, usually at the end of July or early August. And as part of that, actually, about five years ago, we started, one of the guys suggested we should do something called the emerging designers program. So we actually became a 501, c3, so we could take donations. And now we take four designers every year, fly them in from wherever they happen to be in the world, and put them up in a hotel, give them a badge the show, introduce them to everybody, give them an honorarium so they can afford to skip work for a week and try to help launch their careers. I mean, these are people that are in the first three years of their design careers, and we try to work mostly with marginalized or et cetera, people who need a little bit more representation in the industry too. Although we can select anybody, and it's been really well received, it's been amazing. And there's a group called the bundle of holding which sells tabletop role playing game PDFs, and they've donated 10s of 1000s of dollars every year for us to be able to do this. And it's kind of funny, because I never thought I'd be end up running a nonprofit, but here I'm just the guy who writes checks to the different to the emerging designer program. Folks are much more tied into that community that I am. But one of the real reasons I wanted to do something like that or be involved with it, because if you wander around with these conventions and you notice that it starts getting very gray after a while, right? It's you're like, oh, there's no new people coming in. It's all older people. I we didn't I didn't want us to all end up as like the Grandpa, grandpa doing the HO model railroad stuff in the basement, right? This dying hobby that only people in their 60s and 70s care about. So bringing in fresh people, fresh voices, I think, is very important, and hopefully we're doing some good with that. It's been a lot of fun either way.   Speaker 1 ** 37:59 Well, I have you had some success with it? Yeah, we've   Matt Forbeck ** 38:02 had, well, let's see. I think we've got like 14 people. We've brought in some have already gone on to do some amazing things. I mean, it's only been a few years, so it's hard to tell if they're gonna be legends in their time, but again, having them as models for other people to look at and say, Oh, maybe I could do that. That's been a great thing. The other well, coincidentally, Dungeons and Dragons is having its best 10 year streak in its history right now, and probably is the best selling it's ever been. So coinciding with that, we've seen a lot more diversity and a lot more people showing up to these wonderful conventions and playing these kinds of games. There's also been an advent of this thing called actual play, which is the biggest one, is a group called Critical Role, which is a whole bunch of voice actors who do different cartoons and video games and such, and they play D and D with each other, and then they record the games, and they produce them on YouTube and for podcasts. And these guys are amazing. There's a couple of other ones too, like dimension 20 and glass cannon, the critical role guys actually sold out a live performance at Wembley Arena last summer. Wow. And dimension. Dimension 20 sold out Madison Square Garden. I'm like, if you'd have told me 20 years ago that you know you could sell out an entire rock stadium to have people watch you play Dungeons and Dragons, I would have laughed. I mean, there's no way it would have been possible. But now, you know, people are very much interested in this. It's kind of wild, and it's, it's fun to be a part of that. At some level,   Speaker 1 ** 39:31 how does the audience get drawn in to something like that? Because they are watching it, but there must be something that draws them in.   Matt Forbeck ** 39:39 Yeah, part of it is that you have some really skilled some actors are very funny, very traumatic and very skilled at improvisation, right? So the the dungeon master or Game Master will sit there and present them with an idea or whatever. They come up each with their own characters. They put them in wonderful, strong voices. They kind of inhabit the roles in a way that an actor. A really top level actor would, as opposed to just, you know, me sitting around a table with my friends. And because of that, they become compelling, right? My Marty and my his wife and I were actually at a convention in Columbus, Ohio last weekend, and this group called the McElroy family, actually, they do my brother, my brother and me, which is a hit podcast, but they also do an actual play podcast called The Adventure zone, where they just play different games. And they are so funny. These guys are just some of the best comedians you'll ever hear. And so them playing, they actually played our Marvel game for a five game session, or a five podcast session, or whatever, and it was just stunningly fun to listen to. People are really talented mess around with something that we built right it's very edifying to see people enjoying something that you worked on.   Speaker 1 ** 40:51 Do you find that the audiences get drawn in and they're actually sort of playing the game along, or as well? And may disagree with what some of the choices are that people make?   Matt Forbeck ** 41:02 Oh, sure. But I mean, if the choices are made from a point of the character that's been expressed, that people are following along and they they already like the character, they might go, Oh, those mean, you know that guy, there are some characters they love to hate. There are some people they're they're angry at whatever, but they always really appreciate the actors. I mean, the actors have become celebrities in their own right. They've they sell millions of dollars for the comic books and animated TV shows and all these amazing things affiliated with their actual play stuff. And it's, I think it, part of it is because, it's because it makes the games more accessible. Some people are intimidated by these games. So it's not really, you know, from a from a physical disability kind of point. It's more of a it makes it more accessible for people to be nervous, to try these things on their own, or don't really quite get how they work. They can just sit down and pop up YouTube or their podcast program and listen into people doing a really good job at it. The unfortunate problem is that the converse of that is, when you're watching somebody do that good of a job at it, it's actually hard to live up to that right. Most people who play these games are just having fun with their friends around a table. They're not performing for, you know, 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s of people. So there's a different level of investments, really, at that point, and some people have been known to be cowed by that, by that, or daunted by that.   Speaker 1 ** 42:28 You work on a lot of different things. I gather at the same time. What do you what do you think about that? How do you like working on a lot of different projects? Or do you, do you more focus on one thing, but you've got several things going on, so you'll work on something for one day, then you'll work on something else. Or how do you how do you do it all?   Matt Forbeck ** 42:47 That's a good question. I would love to just focus on one thing at a time. Now, you know the trouble is, I'm a freelancer, right? I don't set my I don't always get to say what I want to work on. I haven't had to look for work for over a decade, though, which has been great. People just come to me with interesting things. The trouble is that when you're a freelancer, people come in and say, Hey, let's work on this. I'm like, Yeah, tell me when you're ready to start. And you do that with like, 10 different people, and they don't always line up in sequence properly, right? Yeah? Sometimes somebody comes up and says, I need this now. And I'm like, Yeah, but I'm in the middle of this other thing right now, so I need to not sleep for another week, and I need to try to figure out how I'm going to put this in between other things I'm working on. And I have noticed that after I finish a project, it takes me about a day or three to just jump track. So if I really need to, I can do little bits here and there, but to just fully get my brain wrapped around everything I'm doing for a very complex project, takes me a day or three to say, Okay, now I'm ready to start this next thing and really devote myself to it. Otherwise, it's more juggling right now, having had all those kids, probably has prepared me to juggle. So I'm used to having short attention span theater going on in my head at all times, because I have to jump back and forth between things. But it is. It's a challenge, and it's a skill that you develop over time where you're like, Okay, I can put this one away here and work on this one here for a little while. Like today, yeah, I knew I was going to talk to you, Michael. So I actually had lined up another podcast that a friend of mine wanted to do with me. I said, Let's do them on the same day. This way I'm not interrupting my workflow so much, right? Makes sense? You know, try to gang those all together and the other little fiddly bits I need to do for administration on a day. Then I'm like, Okay, this is not a day off. It's just a day off from that kind of work. It's a day I'm focusing on this aspect of what I do.   Speaker 1 ** 44:39 But that's a actually brings up an interesting point. Do you ever take a day off or do what do you do when you're when you deciding that you don't want to do gaming for a while?   Matt Forbeck ** 44:49 Yeah, I actually kind of terrible. But you know, you know, my wife will often drag me off to places and say we're going to go do this when. Yes, we have a family cabin up north in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that we go to. Although, you know, my habit there is, I'll work. I'll start work in the morning on a laptop or iPad until my battery runs out, and then I shut it down, put on a charger, and then I go out and swim with everybody for the rest of the day. So it depends if I'm on a deadline or not, and I'm almost always on a deadline, but there are times I could take weekends off there. One of the great things of being a freelancer, though, and especially being a stay at home father, which is part of what I was doing, is that when things come up during the middle of the week, I could say, oh, sure, I can be flexible, right? The trouble is that I have to pay for that time on my weekends, a lot of the time, so I don't really get a lot of weekends off. On the other hand, I'm not I'm not committed to having to work every day of the week either, right? I need to go do doctor appointments, or we want to run off to Great America and do a theme park or whatever. I can do that anytime I want to. It's just I have to make up the time at other points during the week. Does your wife work? She does. She was a school social worker for many years, and now as a recruiter at a local technical college here called Black Hawk tech. And she's amazing, right? She's fantastic. She has always liked working. The only time she stopped working was for about a year and a half after the quads were born, I guess, two years. And that was the only time I ever took a job working with anybody else, because we needed the health insurance, so I we always got it through her. And then when she said, Well, I'm gonna stay home with the kids, which made tons of sense, I went and took a job with a video game company up in Madison, Wisconsin called Human Head Studios for about 18 months, 20 months. And then the moment she told me she was thinking about going back to work, I'm like, Oh, good, I can we can Cobra for 18 months and pay for our own health insurance, and I'm giving notice this week, and, you know, we'll work. I left on good terms that everybody. I still talk to them and whatever, but I very much like being my own boss and not worrying about what other people are going to tell me to do. I work with a lot of clients, which means I have a lot of people telling me what to do. But you know, if it turns out bad, I can walk I can walk away. If it turns out good, hopefully we get to do things together, like the the gig I've been working out with Marvel, I guess, has been going on for like, four years now, with pretty continuous work with them, and I'm enjoying every bit of it. They're great people to work with.   Speaker 1 ** 47:19 Now, you were the president of Pinnacle entertainment for a little while. Tell me about that.   Matt Forbeck ** 47:24 I was, that was a small gaming company I started up with a guy named Shane Hensley, who was another tabletop game designer. Our big game was something called Dead Lands, which was a Western zombie cowboy kind of thing. Oh gosh, Western horror. So. And it was pretty much a, you know, nobody was doing Western horror back in those days. So we thought, Oh, this is safe. And to give you an example of parallel development, we were six months into development, and another company, White Wolf, which had done a game called Vampire the Masquerade, announced that they were doing Werewolf the Wild West. And we're like, you gotta be kidding me, right? Fortunately, we still released our game three months before there, so everybody thought we were copying them, rather than the other way around. But the fact is, we were. We both just came up with the idea independently. Right? When you work in creative fields, often, if somebody wants to show you something, you say, I'd like to look at you have to sign a waiver first that says, If I do something like this, you can't sue me. And it's not because people are trying to rip you off. It's because they may actually be working on something similar, right already. Because we're all, you know, swimming in the same cultural pool. We're all, you know, eating the same cultural soup. We're watching or watching movies, playing games, doing whatever, reading books. And so it's not unusual that some of us will come up with similar ideas   Speaker 1 ** 48:45 well, and it's not surprising that from time to time, two different people are going to come up with somewhat similar concepts. So that's not a big surprise, exactly, but   Matt Forbeck ** 48:56 you don't want people getting litigious over it, like no, you don't be accused of ripping anybody off, right? You just want to be as upfront with people. With people. And I don't think I've ever actually seen somebody, at least in gaming, in tabletop games, rip somebody off like that. Just say, Oh, that's a great idea. We're stealing that it's easier to pay somebody to just say, Yes, that's a great idea. We'll buy that from you, right? As opposed to trying to do something unseemly and criminal?   Speaker 1 ** 49:24 Yeah, there's, there's something to be said for having real honor in the whole process.   Matt Forbeck ** 49:30 Yeah, I agree, and I think that especially if you're trying to have a long term career in any field that follows you, if you get a reputation for being somebody who plays dirty, nobody wants to play with you in the future, and I've always found it to be best to be as straightforward with people and honest, especially professionally, just to make sure that they trust you. Before my quadruplets were born, you could have set your clock by me as a freelancer, I never missed a deadline ever, and since then, I've probably it's a. Rare earth thing to make a deadline, because, you know, family stuff happens, and you know, there's just no controlling it. But whenever something does happen, I just call people up and say, hey, look, it's going to be another week or two. This is what's going on. And because I have a good reputation for completing the job and finishing quality work, they don't mind. They're like, Oh, okay, I know you're going to get this to me. You're not just trying to dodge me. So they're willing to wait a couple weeks if they need to, to get to get what they need. And I'm very grateful to them for that. And I'm the worst thing somebody can do is what do, what I call turtling down, which is when it's like, Oh no, I'm late. And then, you know, they cut off all communication. They don't talk to anybody. They just kind of try to disappear as much as they can. And we all, all adults, understand that things happen in your life. It's okay. We can cut you some slack every now and then, but if you just try to vanish, that's not even possible.   Speaker 1 ** 50:54 No, there's a lot to be there's a lot to be said for trust and and it's so important, I think in most anything that we do, and I have found in so many ways, that there's nothing better than really earning someone's trust, and they earning your trust. And it's something I talk about in my books, like when live with a guide dog, live like a guide dog, which is my newest book, it talks a lot about trust, because when you're working with a guide dog, you're really building a team, and each member of the team has a specific job to do, and as the leader of the team, it's my job to also learn how to communicate with the other member of the team. But the reality is, it still comes down to ultimately, trust, because I and I do believe that dogs do love unconditionally, but they don't trust unconditionally. But the difference between dogs and people is that people that dogs are much more open to trust, for the most part, unless they've just been totally traumatized by something, but they're more open to trust. And there's a lesson to be learned there. No, I   Matt Forbeck ** 52:03 absolutely agree with that. I think, I think most people in general are trustworthy, but as you say, a lot of them have trauma in their past that makes it difficult for them to open themselves up to that. So that's actually a pretty wonderful way to think about things. I like that,   Speaker 1 ** 52:17 yeah, well, I think that trust is is so important. And I know when I worked in professional sales, it was all about trust. In fact, whenever I interviewed people for jobs, I always asked them what they were going to sell, and only one person ever answered me the way. I really hoped that everybody would answer when I said, So, tell me what you're going to be selling. He said, The only thing I have to really sell is myself and my word, and nothing else. It really matters. Everything else is stuff. What you have is stuff. It's me selling myself and my word, and you have to, and I would expect you to back me up. And my response was, as long as you're being trustworthy, then you're going to get my backing all the way. And he was my most successful salesperson for a lot of reasons, because he got it.   Matt Forbeck ** 53:08 Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, I mean, I've worked with people sourcing different things too, for sales, and if you can rely on somebody to, especially when things go wrong, to come through for you. And to be honest with you about, you know, there's really that's a hard thing to find. If you can't depend on your sources for what you're building, then you can't depend on anything. Everything else falls apart.   Speaker 1 ** 53:29 It does. You've got to start at the beginning. And if people can't earn your trust, and you earn theirs, there's a problem somewhere, and it's just not going to work.   Matt Forbeck ** 53:39 Yeah, I just generally think people are decent and want to help. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've had issues. Car breaks down the road in Wisconsin. Here, if somebody's car goes in the ditch, everybody stops and just hauls them out. It's what you do when the quads were born, my stepmother came up with a sign up sheet, a booklet that she actually had spiral bound, that people could sign up every three three hours to help come over and feed and bathe, diaper, whatever the kids and we had 30 to 35 volunteers coming in every week. Wow, to help us out with that was amazing, right? They just each pick slots, feeding slots, and come in and help us out. I had to take the 2am feeding, and my wife had to take the 5am feeding by ourselves. But the rest of the week we had lots and lots of help, and we were those kids became the surrogate grandchildren for, you know, 30 to 35 women and couples really, around the entire area, and it was fantastic. Probably couldn't have survived   Speaker 1 ** 54:38 without it. And the other part about it is that all those volunteers loved it, because you all appreciated each other, and it was always all about helping and assisting.   Matt Forbeck ** 54:48 No, we appreciate them greatly. But you know every most of them, like 99% of them, whatever were women, 95 women who are ready for grandchildren and didn't have them. Had grandchildren, and they weren't in the area, right? And they had that, that love they wanted to share, and they just loved the opportunity to do it. It was, I'm choking up here talking about such a great time for us in   Speaker 1 ** 55:11 that way. Now I'm assuming today, nobody has to do diaper duty with the quads, right?   Matt Forbeck ** 55:16 Not until they have their own kids. Just checking, just checking, thankfully, think we're that is long in our past,   Speaker 1 ** 55:23 is it? Is it coming fairly soon for anybody in the future?   Matt Forbeck ** 55:27 Oh, I don't know. That's really entirely up to them. We would love to have grandchildren, but you know, it all comes in its own time. They're not doing no well. I, one of my sons is married, so it's possible, right? And one of my other sons has a long term girlfriend, so that's possible, but, you know, who knows? Hopefully they're they have them when they're ready. I always say, if you have kids and you want them, that's great. If you have, if you don't have kids and you don't want them, that's great. It's when you cross the two things that,   Speaker 1 ** 55:57 yeah, trouble, yeah, that's that is, that is a problem. But you really like working with yourself. You love the entre

In December 2001, William Bell stormed into the Mt Wellington-Panmure Returned Services Association premises and brutally attacked four innocent people. Club president Bill Absolum, club member Wayne Johnson and cleaner Mary Hobson died. Susan Couch survived - just. Bell left the mother-of-one for dead with broken arms and severe head injuries that caused a stroke. She lost about 80 per cent of her blood and ambulance officers later said she came as close to dying as she could get. Bell was on parole at the time of the murders and already had 102 convictions. He was convicted of attempted murder, aggravated robbery and three counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum non-parole period of 30 years. He is not eligible for parole December 2031. His getaway driver was a Darnell Tupe. He was convicted of manslaughter and aggravated robbery and sntenced to 12 years' with a seven-year minimum non-parole period. He is currently at large in the community after being released on parole. In this month’s episode of Herald podcast A Moment In Crime senior journalist Anna Leask revisists the triple murder - explaining what led to Bell’s violent and callous offending and how the tragedy would never have happened if authorities had not missed a crucial opportunity to recall him to prison. chance to recall him to prison Leask also tells the stories of the victims and surivor - why they were at the RSA that awful day and what they meant to their family and friends. A Moment in Crime is available on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released monthly. The series is written and hosted by senior crime and justice reporter Anna Leask. Leask has been with NZME since 2005 and has worked as a specialist journalist focussing on family and gender-based violence, child abuse, sexual violence, homicides, mental health and youth crime. If you have a crime or case you would like to hear more about, email anna.leask@nzme.co.nz. Since 2019, A Moment in Crime has produced almost 70 episodes, and has been downloaded over 2 million times, with listeners in over 180 countries. Past cases covered include the Bain Family murders, Lauren Dickason, James Wallace, the Heavenly Creatures case, and Grace Millane. It was nominated for Best True Crime Podcast at the 2024 Radio and Podcast Awards.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

E.Z. Shakes stopped by Indigo Sounds to talk about their latest evolution — from dark country beginnings to textured Americana-psych. Frontman Zach Seibert shares the origins of the band's sound, their collaborative songwriting process, and recording to tape at legendary Southern studios. With each member bringing decades of Columbia music history, E.Z. Shakes continue to shape something familiar yet new — analog at heart, deeply human in spirit. Catch up on their story, their studio secrets, and what's next for the band and hear them perform two new songs live in studio. E.Z. Shakes will perform live at Art Bar in Columbia on Saturday, June 7 during the James Wallace Love Fest, a benefit show running from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. Featuring eight bands, the event supports local musician James Wallace with medical and living expenses as he battles cancer. Get full access to Indigo Sounds Newsletter at scenesc.substack.com/subscribe

What happens when we treat our rivers like sewers, ignore regulation, and allow polluters to profit from destruction? In this milestone 40th episode of The Wilder Podcast, we sit down with James Wallace, CEO of River Action, for one of our most eye-opening conversations yet. Beyond the outrage, this conversation is a masterclass in what needs to change, how it can change, and what each of us can do to be part of the solution.Your HostsTom Constable: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-constable/Chloe Constable: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloe-constable-24155821b/Website: https://www.grangeproject.co.ukPodcast Journey Page: https://www.grangeproject.co.uk/wilder-podcastGrange Project Contact & Social MediaEmail: hello@grangeproject.co.ukInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/grange.project/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/grangeprojectYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrangeProjectLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-constable/Fencing Company Tom Mentioned: https://www.wilcrickgroup.co.uk/Our Guest: James Wallace is the CEO of River Action, an environmental NGO committed to ending river pollution in the UK. A former archaeologist, campaigner, and founder of multiple environmental organisations, James has worked on conservation projects from the UK to Madagascar, and now leads legal and policy challenges to clean up Britain's rivers.

Catch up on a recent sermon by special guest speaker Reverend James Wallace, local Vicar from Saint Cuthbert's, Fulwood.

This week on Transmissions, a return guest, the great comedian, writer, actor, and podcaster Joe Pera. Joe first appeared here on Transmissions in 2020 alongside his friend and collaborator James Wallace aka Skyway Man, and we've wanted to have him back ever since. This talk is a blast, covering everything from the beauty of Phoenix's Sky Harbor airport to representations of Catholicism in science fiction to Joe's experience seeing the late Mitch Hedberg live. Pera's TV show, Joe Pera Talks With You, ran for three seasons on Adult Swim between 2018-2021. Quiet and restrained but deeply funny, the show's gentle slice of life stories and meditative pace made it an utterly unique project. Joe's latest work includes the 2023 stand up special Slow and Steady and Drifting Off With Joe Pera, a podcast designed specifically to help lull listeners to sleep. In addition to standard episodes covering topics like pre-bedtime drinks, wind, New York City ghosts, and soup, there are extended 8-hour versions of episodes as well, allowing for maximum slumbertime engagement. Close your eyes and settle in: here's an episode of Transmissions you might be able to doze off to.  You can read a full transcript of this conversation at Aquarium Drunkard, where you'll find 20 years worth of playlists, recommendations, reviews, interviews, podcasts, essays, and more. With your support, here's to another decade. Subscribe at Aquarium Drunkard. Stream a playlist of bumper music featured on Transmissions, as well as selections from our guests.Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Visit the Talkhouse for more interviews, fascinating reads, and podcasts.

Daniel Ludwig was the richest man in the world and no one knew his name. I've read almost 400 biographies of history's greatest founders and this book is one of my all time favorites. Daniel Ludwig started his company at 19 and was working on it well into his 90s. He built a massive conglomerate of over 200 companies operating in more than 50 countries. Spending the time to learn how he did this is a great investment. This episode will tell you what I learned from rereading The Invisible Billionaire: Daniel Ludwig by Jerry Shields. ----Ramp gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save more. ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book----EPISODE OUTLINE 1.  Obsessed with privacy, Ludwig pays a major public relations firm fat fees to keep his name out of the papers.2.  An associate speaks of his unlimited ingenuity in dreaming up new ways of doing things.3. Ludwig's most notable characteristic, besides his imagination and pertinacity, is a lifelong penchant for keeping his mouth shut.4. I'm in this business because I like it. I have no other hobbies.5. Pertinacity: Holding strongly to an opinion, purpose, or course of action, stubbornly or annoyingly persistent.6.  Risk Game: Self Portrait of an Entrepreneur by Francis Greenburger (Founders #243)7. At his peak, he owned more than 200 companies in 50 countries.8. War makes the demand for Ludwig's products and services skyrocket.9.  Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. (Founders #290)10. He did not mellow as he grew richer and older.11. Some years later, the captain of a Ludwig ship made the extravagant mistake of mailing in a report of several pages held together by a paper clip. He received a sharp rebuke for his prodigality: "We do not pay to send ironmongery by air mail!"12. Ludwig's tightfistedness, however, persisted after the Depression, putting him in sharp contrast to such free spenders as Onassis and Niarchos. It also was largely responsible for many of his innovations in the shipbuilding industry.13. Onassis: An Extravagant Life by Frank Brady. (Founders #211)14. Ludwig's ridding his ships of any feature that did not contribute to profits pleased his own obsessive sense of economy and kept him a step ahead of the competition. When someone asked why he didn't put a grand piano aboard his ships, as Stavros Niarchos did, Ludwig snapped, "You can't carry oil in a grand piano."15. Stay in the game long enough to get lucky.16. The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.  The Pmarca Blog Archive Ebook by Marc Andreessen (Founders #50)17. The yacht was as much a business craft as any of his tankers and probably earned him more money than any of them.18. Like the Rockefeller organization, Ludwig had mastered the practice of keeping his money by transferring it from one pocket, one company to another, while appearing to spend it.19. He had learned something by now. Opportunities exist on the frontiers where most men dare not venture, and it is often the case that the farther the frontier, the greater the opportunity.20. The way to escape competition is to either do something no one else is doing or do it where no one else is doing it.21. Much of Ludwig's success was due to his willingness to venture where more timid entrepreneurs dared not go. ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Here a little bit about a lot with our good friend James Wallace from Digital Simple. In this we cover marketing, personal branding, AI and much more. Enjoy

James Wallace was once the most revered philanthropist in the New Zealand arts community. His world started crumbling when a young man accused him of sexual assault. After a six-year legal battle - and more victims came forward - Wallace was convicted of multiple crimes and out of ways to keep his identity secret. This is the story of a disgraced knight's rise and fall, his crimes and punishment - and his survivors.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dozens of firefighters raced to extinguish a massive blaze in Baltimore Thursday; freezing temps and high winds multiplied the hazards. We ask chief James Wallace how he keeps his department safe, and get winter weather safety tips for everyone. Request a smoke alarm and placement assistance for your home.Do you have a question or comment about a show or a story idea to pitch? Contact On the Record at: Senior Supervising Producer, Maureen Harvie she/her/hers mharvie@wypr.org 410-235-1903 Senior Producer, Melissa Gerr she/her/hers mgerr@wypr.org 410-235-1157 Producer Sam Bermas-Dawes he/him/his sbdawes@wypr.org 410-235-1472

Hosts Dennis Strazulo and Tami Larson sit down backstage with a divergent group of talent at Sound Summit 2024, the annual music festival atop majestic Mt. Tamalpais across the Bay from San Francisco.Fresh off her releasing her debut album, Wine on Venus, and her appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, rising Nashville star and Gibson Guitar endorsed phenom, Grace Bowers (Grace Bowers & The Hodge Podge), chats about how she was influenced by BB King and her humble rise to prominence -  from playing in her bedroom to appearing with Dolly Parton and Tyler Childers -  and explains why she is not a prodigy!  Demonstrating she has a mind and soul beyond her 18 years of age, Grace expresses what drives her -  a profound hope and passion that her music makes people feel something - whether it makes them dance or feel an emotion. Super-soulful, Lech Wierzynski, leader of The California Honeydrops, who like Grace Bowers, returned to his Bay Area roots performing at Sound Summit - the band's first stop on their national tour promoting its new album, Keep on Diggin' -  discusses the band's improvisational influences, the role of Spotify in the new music industry landscape, and the impact of the mentors who shaped his trumpet skills, and provides a peek into his iPod sourcing the playlist for the band's touring road trips, introducing listeners to an array of obscure, delightful music to add to their own playlists. Multi-talented James Wallace - aka, Skyway Man, delves into the eclectic inspirations of his music, originally sourced from his random discovery of mysterious letters in an abandoned motorcycle shop in North Carolina, filled with esoteric and UFO-related content, touching on the brotherhood of aliens and ascension to a fourth dimension. Wallace shares how his  passion for storytelling through song remains unwavering, providing a glimpse into the mind of Skyway Man and an example of the resilience and creativity that drives artists to keep sharing their gifts with the world.CreditsSweet Little AngelPerformed by B.B. KingWritten byB.B. King and Jules TaubThe Seer | Audiotree LivePerformed by SkywaymanWritten by James WallaceDownload & stream Skyway Man on Audiotree Live -- https://smarturl.it/AT-Skyway-Manhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBlbDYe_cSMSend My Baby BackPerformed by Freddy HughesWritten by Ernie Marbay and Lonnie Hewitthttps://youtu.be/hVc_97EEIpM?si=D2E4CJds6LkxCHeX Keep On RollinPerformed by King GeorgeWritten by George HollidaySugaree - Cat Tracks - Irwin CO Performed by Lech Wierzynski and FriendsWritten byJerry Garcia and Robert Hunterhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqS6936Kl7EGrace Bowers Jamming with Tyler ChildersLive from Eastside Bowl in Nashvillehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZnPFhFU01YDon't Feel Bad About Being AlivePerformed by Skyway ManWritten by James WallaceSkyway Man performing "Don't Feel Bad About Being Alivehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxnb2kFo-I0

One-liner comedian James Wallace joins Mark for a joke heavy episode where they deep dive into four of his gags that don't quite work... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Cynric Temple-Camp is one of New Zealand's top pathologists - and he has just published his third book about his work. The Final Diagnosis is a collection of stranger-than-fiction stories of death, disease and murder - as well as Temple-Camp sharing new perspectives on high-profile cases, including the disappearance of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope and the trial of Mark Lundy. A Moment In Crime host Anna Leask spoke with Temple-Camp about the book, his career and why he is sure beyond reasonable doubt that Lundy is guilty.  Episodes of A Moment In Crime - written and hosted by Leask - usually focus on old cases, cold cases or recent cases of national and international significance involving Kiwi offenders or victims. But this episode comes from the other side of the cordon - from a person often charged with determining how and why a person died and, who is responsible. To read more about Temple-Camp, the Lundy case and other crimes covered by Leask for the Herald, click here. Episodes of A Moment In Crime are usually released monthly and, so far, Leask has covered more than 55 cases including the murders of Grace Millane, Scott Guy, Austin Hemmings, Carmen Thomas, Karen Aim; the deaths of the Kahui Twins, the Edgeware Rd murders, the Bain family murders, the Christchurch House of Horrors and the massacres at Raurimu and Aramoana. Last year, a three-part special covered the case of rich lister and philanthropist James Wallace who was convicted of sexually assaulting three men and was jailed and had his knighthood stripped from him as a result. A Moment In Crime has topped the overall and true crime charts on numerous occasions, and has listeners in more than 80 countries. The podcast was a finalist at the 2024 NZ Radio & Podcast Awards and won a silver award in the true crime category at the inaugural New Zealand Podcast Awards in 2021. If you have a crime or case you'd like to hear more about, email anna.leask@nzme.co.nzSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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3/27/24 6am CT Hour - Fr. James Wallace/ Ashley Noronha   John, Glen and Sarah give an update on the Francis Scott Key Bridge recovery, Supreme Court abortion pill case, Krispy Kreme and McDonalds. Fr. James Wallace breaks down some of he characters that are involved with the traditional Stations of the Cross and we might relate to them in the story of the Passion of Christ. Ashley reports on the Pope's Weekly General Audience and what happens in Rome during Holy Week.

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The new chief of the Baltimore City Fire Department joins Midday. Chief James Wallace was nominated to the position by Mayor Brandon Scott in July and confirmed by the City Council in October. He began his career with the department 33 years ago, and rose through the ranks as a paramedic, a firefighter, Battalion Chief and Deputy Chief. Since 2020, he served in the Scott administration as the head of the Office of Emergency Management. Baltimore sees many fires, with one of the highest per capita fire rates in the country. Chief Wallace is in charge of fighting those fires facing shortages of both equipment and personnel, budget over runs, and the challenge of high 911 call volumes that is causing delays in response timesEmail us at midday@wypr.org, tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

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On this episode of the podcast we explore Wallace's youth, early inspirations from bands like Pink Floyd, discovering gospel music, moving to Nashville, TN where he spent well over a decade honing in on his craft and the deadly dedication it takes to be an artist, getting his first break with YK Records and in recent years relocating to California. Wallace just released his most highly anticipated album entitled "Flight of the Long Distance Healer" back in November and his since then gained some successful momentum. Wallace doesn't plan to stop there even if the road moving forward is daunting and bare with little to future insight for himself and musicians/artists everywhere. He's a veteran and soldier of the arts and will continue on!

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Mark Butcher, James Wallace and Yas Rana react to England's latest defeat at the 2023 World Cup as well as Pakistan's almighty run chase against New Zealand, one that keeps the final week of group stage action very interesting. Find out more about our video partners, SEEEN: https://seeen.com You can follow Wisden Cricket on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok: https://www.facebook.com/WisdenCric https://www.instagram.com/wisden_cricket/ https://twitter.com/WisdenCricket https://www.tiktok.com/@wisdencricket The latest issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly is available now at https://wisden.com/shop/wisden-cricket-monthly-issue-72 The digital version of the magazine is also available for just £2 a month at https://pocketmags.com/wisden-cricket-monthly-magazine#5c1cd17fa0b05 #Cricket #CricketWorldCup #CWC23 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Ooh...let's go...boom...boom...boom...Another one bites the dust!"--by Queen bassist John DeaconCoach Ronnie Thompson and quarterback Todd Dodge were football legends at Port Arthur Thomas Jefferson High School. Under Thompson's coaching genius, and Dodge's quarterbacking excellence, the #1-ranked Yellow Jackets rode the "Another One Bites the Dust" steamroller to a showdown with Odessa Permian in the 1980 State Finals.Thompson, known for his innovative offensive philosophy, is a 1962 graduate of Thomas Jefferson, and played on their 1960 district championship team along with college and NFL coaching great Jimmy Johnson. In addition to coaching at Thomas Jefferson, he had Southeast Texas coaching stints at Vidor, Lamar University, and Port Arthur Memorial. He also coached at the University of Texas and Texas A&M as offensive coordinator, as well as many years coaching high school in the Garland area.Dodge, along with receiver Brent Duhon, went on the secure All American honors for the Yellow Jackets, while setting numerous state and national records. In 1980, he was named The Most Outstanding Football Player in Texas. He went on to quarterback the Texas Longhorns. Afterwards, Dodge became one of Texas' most decorated high school head football coaches, winning seven state titles--all in Texas' highest classification. He won four titles at Southlake Carroll, where the Dragons went 79-1 over a five-year span. He subsequently won three state titles at Austin Westlake, before retiring at the close of 2021. Hear these respected football greats talk with Buck and Brad about:Coach Thompson's years as a student athlete at Port Arthur Jefferson;Coach Thompson's return to Southeast Texas in 1975 to lead Vidor out of its 43-game losing streak, and turn the Pirates into winners;Coach Thompson's return to TJ in 1978, and his relationship with then-sophomore quarterback phenom Todd Dodge;The Yellow Jackets' evolution from their 1-9 team of 1978, to the "Another One Bites the Dust" State Finalist powerhouse of 1980;Todd Dodge's consulting work with Port Neches-Groves ISD's head coaching search, that culminated in the hiring of Jeff Joseph;Todd Dodge's induction into the Museum of the Gulf Coast Hall of Honor;Remembrances of players, opponents, games, rivalries, and more!The podcast brings up a wide range of names from Southeast Texas, including Brent Duhon, Jimmy Johnson, Clarence "Buckshot" Underwood, Don Holloway, Robert Smothers, Ken Watson, Lonnie Linscomb, Randy Brevell, (Todd's mom and dad), Richard Rice, Colleen Rice, Bobby Rice, Bruce Miller, Donnie Schexnider, Rick Wyble, Steve Durso, Mike Owens, Hank Clark, Steve DeRouen, Norman Gaspard, George Hawkins, Emerick Jagneaux, Bill Mehan, Ron Stump, Willie Williams, Charles Wilson, Frank Eidom, Larry Mayer, Gary Hammond, Kenny Harrison, Roman Leviege, Gary Jefferson, Anthony Dupuy, James Wallace, Shea Walker, Tug Lewis, Troy Terrell, Arnold Landry, Greg Brugman, Hayward Laurent, Clay Southerland, Jeff Joseph, Dr. Mike Gonzales, Lew Ford, Dr. Jesse Delee, William Seale...and more! Other names included in the podcast are O. J. Simpson, Otis Wylie, Kenny Stabler, Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Mark Rypien, Riley Dodge, Gary Joseph, Tony Salazar,...and more!!Are you ready? Hey are your ready for this?Are you standing on the edge of your seat?Out on the gridiron, the Jackets fly,Swarmin' to the sound of the beat, yeah!boom...boom...boom...Another one bites the dust!Right here, on Down Trails of Victory podcast!

On this day in 1860, James Wallace Black took a photo of Boston from a hot air balloon 1,200 feet in the air.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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A Moment In Crime - The Patron - looks back at the life and crimes of disgraced knight and serial sex attacker James Hay Wallace. Behind his money, philanthropy and resplendence, Wallace was a serial sex offender who lured men to his mansion on the premise of discussing funding proposals or helping with projects or careers and abused them when they least expected it.  Wallace's case took years to resolve with multiple trial dates - one delayed, one aborted and the case then moved to the High Court at Auckland. After he was sentenced he continued to fight to clear his name, mounting various appeals to keep his identity suppressed and himself out of prison. A Moment In Crime - The Patron tells the story of Wallace's life, crimes, court case and the impact it had on the victims and wider community across three episodes. This episode looks at the victims experiences of the abuse and court, and the aftermath for the arts community.  Part One and Part Two are also live if you have yet to listen to those.  Thanks to the NZ Herald senior journalist Sam Hurley for his contributions to this episode.  For more on the case visit nzherald.co.nz or click: Sir James Wallace named as former rich-lister convicted of indecently assaulting three men and attempting to pervert the course of justice 'I do not forgive you': Victims of prominent businessman speak out as influential figure jailed Sir James Wallace unmasked: The inside story of a rich-lister, arts philanthropist and criminal James Wallace: Disgraced arts patron continues to deny offending, refused parole SEXUAL HARM - DO YOU NEED HELP? If you've ever experienced sexual assault or abuse and need to talk to someone, contact Safe to Talk confidentially, any time 24/7: Call 0800 044 334 Text 4334 Email support@safetotalk.nz Alternatively contact your local police station click here for a list. If you have been sexually assaulted, remember it's not your fault.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Samson Mow @Excellion and James Wallace @ijameswallace discuss the Liquid sidechain, capital markets, and financial inclusion in the age of Bitcoin and the emerging worldwide peer-to-peer digital network. Connect with Guests: Samson Mow: https://twitter.com/Excellion James Wallace: https://twitter.com/ijameswallace Sam Callahan: https://twitter.com/samcallah Connect with: Jan3: https://twitter.com/JAN3com Digtl: https://digtl.coTimestamps: 00:00:00 “Swan Signal” Intro 00:01:54 Introducing Samson and James 00:02:37 What is the “Liquid Network?” 00:07:00 How the Liquid Network Operates with the Bitcoin Network 00:10:36 Building at “Digtl” 00:15:22 Providing access to financial markets for everyone 00:21:55 How does the “Liquid Network” Help Bitcoin Adoption? 00:31:20 Joining the Nasdaq, and Why Companies Would Choose to Tokenize on the Liquid Network 00:40:42 El Salvador Bonds 00:44:52 Why Should People Use “Liquid?” 00:52:36 How “Digtl” are Helping Create a “More Fair and Honest” Capital Market 01:00:45 How to Connect with Samson and James 01:02:18 “Swan Signal” OutroConnect with Swan Bitcoin: 

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What I learned from having dinner with Charlie Munger and rereading The Tao of Charlie Munger.This episode is brought to you by: Tiny: Tiny is the easiest way to sell your business. Tiny provides quick and straightforward exits for Founders.  ----Follow one of my favorite podcasts Invest Like The Best ![5:45] The blueprint he gave me was simple: Forget what you know about buying fair businesses at wonderful prices; instead, buy wonderful businesses at fair prices.[8:48] He has never forgotten the importance of having friends in high places.[9:04] Most people systematically undervalue their time. — Peter Thiel[11:08] Franklin & Washington: The Founding Partnership by Edward Larson. Founders #251)[12:23] Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Changed America by Les Standiford. (Founders #284)[15:02] Charlie took the excess capital out of Blue Chip Stamp and invested it in profitable businesses.[12:56] Charlie started seeing the advantages of investing in better businesses that didn't have big capital requirements and did have lots of free cash that could be reinvested in expanding operations or buying new businesses.[17:38] Go for great.[21:33] In everything I've done it really pays to go after the best people in the world. —Steve Jobs[27:15] If you're in a good business just know that it's human nature to mess it up. Don't mess it up. Just stay there and let time do its work.[27:34] One truly great business will make your unborn grandchildren wealthy.[28:08] All I Want To Know Is Where I'm Going To Die So I'll Never Go There: Buffett & Munger – A Study in Simplicity and Uncommon, Common Sense by Peter Bevelin. (Founders #286)[34:39] I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span.[34:54] Charlie Munger on how he made $400 or $500 million by reading Barron's for 50 years.[35:11] One of the reasons Charlie and Warren have never worried about anyone mimicking their investment style is because no other institution or individual has the discipline are the patience to wait as long as they can. [35:47] Wisdom is prevention.[36:50] Only play games where you have an edge. — A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market by Ed Thorp. (Founders #222)[38:31] Wise people step on big and growing troubles early.[44:51] I am continually amazed at the number of people who are presented with an opportunity and pass. There's your basic dividing line between the people who shoot up in their careers like a rocket ship, and those who don't — right there. — Marc Andreessen's Blog Archive (Founders #50)[46:28] The most inspiring biography I've read so far: Born of This Land: My Life Story by Chung Ju-yung. (Founders #117)[47:11] Invest Like The Best #204 Sam Hinkie Find Your People[42:42] Rober Caro's Books:The Power BrokerThe Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IMeans of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IIMaster of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IIIThe Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV[48:46] We just got after it and we stayed after it. — Sam Walton: Made In America by Sam Walton. (Founders #234)[52:39] Some brand names own a piece of consumer's minds and they do not have any direct competition.[55:30] We are individual opportunity driven.[57:08] Size and market domination can create their own kind of durable competitive advantage.[56:15] Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney. (Founders #178)[1:01:57] Extreme specialization is the way to succeed. Most people are way better off specializing than trying to understand the world.[1:04:44] Wise people want to avoid other people who are just total rat poison and there are a lot of them.[1:05:35] Charlie and I have seen so much of the ordinary in business that we can truly appreciate a virtuoso performance.[1:09:00] Am I Being Too Subtle?: Straight Talk From a Business Rebel by Sam Zell. (Founders #269)[1:10:15] Charlie looks at nearly everything through the lens of history. You aren't changing human nature. Things will just keep repeating forever.[1:13:13] There should be more willingness to take the blows of life as they fall. That's what manhood is, taking life as it falls. Not whining all the time and trying to fix it by whining.[1:14:40] Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. (Founders #290)[1:17:00] Arnold Schwarzenegger autobiographies and episodes:Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story by Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Founders #141)Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder by Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Founders #193)----Subscribe to listen to Founders Premium — Subscribers can ask me questions directly and listen to Ask Me Anything (AMA) episodes.----Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book----I use Readwise to organize and remember everything I read. You can try Readwise for 60 days for free here.  ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

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What I learned from rereading Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's by Ray Kroc.This episode is brought to you by: Tiny: Tiny is the easiest way to sell your business. Tiny provides quick and straightforward exits for Founders.  ----Follow one of my favorite podcasts Invest Like The Best ![2:00] I have always believed that each man makes his own happiness and is responsible for his own problems.[4:00] I was fascinated by the simplicity and effectiveness of the system they described that night.Each step in producing the limited menu was stripped down to its essence and accomplished with a minimum of effort.[5:00] When I flew back to Chicago that fateful day in 1954, I had a freshly signed contract with the McDonald brothers in my briefcase. I was a battle-scarred veteran of the business wars, but I was still eager to go into action. I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns. But I was convinced that the best was ahead of me.[6:00] It's not what you do it's how you do it:Ralph Lauren: The Man Behind the Mystique by Jeffrey Trachtenberg. (Founders #288)Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. (Founders #290)The Invisible Billionaire: Daniel Ludwig by Jerry Shields. (Founders #292)[8:00] I never considered my dreams wasted energy. They were invariably linked to some form of action.[10:00] For me, work was play.[13:00] I vowed that this was going to be my only job. I was going to make my living at it and to hell with moonlighting of any kind. I intended to devote every ounce of my energy to selling, and that's exactly what I did.[14:00] Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's Life by Michael Schumacher. (Founders #242)[20:00] This was the first phase of grinding it out—building my personal monument to capitalism. I paid tribute, in the feudal sense, for many years before I was able to rise with McDonald's on the foundation I had laid.[21:00] Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details to perfect.[26:00] I was putting every cent I had and all I could borrow into this project.[28:00] Perfection is very difficult to achieve and perfection was what I wanted in McDonald's. Everything else was secondary.[29:00] If my competitor was drowning, I'd put a hose in his mouth.[44:00] Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller by Ron Chernow. (Founders #248)John D: The Founding Father of the Rockefellers by David Freeman Hawke. (Founders #254)[47:00] The advertising campaign we put together was a smash hit. It turned Californians into our parking lots as though blindfolds had been removed from their eyes.[48:00] Authority should go with the job.----Subscribe to listen to Founders Premium — Subscribers can ask me questions directly and listen to Ask Me Anything (AMA) episodes.----Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book----I use Readwise to organize and remember everything I read. You can try Readwise for 60 days for free here.  ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

What I learned from rereading The Invisible Billionaire: Daniel Ludwig by Jerry Shields. This episode is brought to you by: Tiny: Tiny is the easiest way to sell your business. Tiny provides quick and straightforward exits for Founders.  ----Follow one of my favorite podcasts Invest Like The Best !----[2:00] Obsessed with privacy, Ludwig pays a major public relations firm fat fees to keep his name out of the papers.[4:00]  An associate speaks of his unlimited ingenuity in dreaming up new ways of doing things.[5:00] Ludwig's most notable characteristic, besides his imagination and pertinacity, is a lifelong penchant for keeping his mouth shut.[5:00] I'm in this business because I like it. I have no other hobbies.[6:00] Holding strongly to an opinion, purpose, or course of action, stubbornly or annoyingly persistent.[8:00] Risk Game: Self Portrait of an Entrepreneur by Francis Greenburger (Founders #243)[10:00] At his peak, he owned more than 200 companies in 50 countries.[23:00] War makes the demand for Ludwig's products and services skyrocket.[25:00] Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. (Founders #290)[28:00] He did not mellow as he grew richer and older.[28:00] Some years later, the captain of a Ludwig ship made the extravagant mistake of mailing in a report of several pages held together by a paper clip. He received a sharp rebuke for his prodigality: "We do not pay to send ironmongery by air mail!"[29:00] Ludwig's tightfistedness, however, persisted after the Depression, putting him in sharp contrast to such free spenders as Onassis and Niarchos. It also was largely responsible for many of his innovations in the shipbuilding industry.[29:00] Onassis: An Extravagant Life by Frank Brady. (Founders #211)[30:00] Ludwig's ridding his ships of any feature that did not contribute to profits pleased his own obsessive sense of economy and kept him a step ahead of the competition. When someone asked why he didn't put a grand piano aboard his ships, as Stavros Niarchos did, Ludwig snapped, "You can't carry oil in a grand piano."[31:00] Stay in the game long enough to get lucky.[32:00] The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.  The Pmarca Blog Archive Ebook by Marc Andreessen (Founders #50)[37:00] The yacht was as much a business craft as any of his tankers and probably earned him more money than any of them.[40:00] Like the Rockefeller organization, Ludwig had mastered the practice of keeping his money by transferring it from one pocket, one company to another, while appearing to spend it.[42:00] He had learned something by now. Opportunities exist on the frontiers where most men dare not venture, and it is often the case that the farther the frontier, the greater the opportunity.[43:00] The way to escape competition is to either do something no one else is doing or do it where no one else is doing it.[43:00] Much of Ludwig's success was due to his willingness to venture where more timid entrepreneurs dared not go.----Subscribe to listen to Founders Premium — Subscribers can ask me questions directly and listen to Ask Me Anything (AMA) episodes. ----Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book----I use Readwise to organize and remember everything I read. You can try Readwise for 60 days for free here.  ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

What I learned from reading The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company by David Packard.This episode is brought to you by: Tiny: Tiny is the easiest way to sell your business. Quick and straightforward exits for Founders.  ----Follow one of my favorite podcasts Invest Like The Best ![2:01] Do our products offer something unique?[3:00] Customer satisfaction second to none is the only acceptable goal.[4:00] What I learned from rereading Jeff Bezos' Shareholder Letters for the 3rd time (Founders #282)[5:00] In Silicon Valley, the ultimate career standard was set by David Packard: start a company in a garage, grow it into the leading innovator in its field, then take it public, then take it into the Fortune 500 (or better yet, the Fortune 50), then become the spokesman for the industry, then go to Washington, and then become an historic global figure. Only Packard had accomplished all of this; he had set the bar, and the Valley had honored his achievement by making him the unofficial "mayor" of Silicon Valley.—The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company by Michael Malone [6:00] Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson. (Founders #214)[9:00] Gates read the encyclopedia from beginning to end when he was only seven or eight years old. — Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. (Founders #290)[10:00] My father wouldn't let me quit.[11:00] Given equally good players and good teamwork, the team with the strongest will to win will prevail.[13:00] Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel. (Founders #278)[17:00] That was a very important lesson for me —that personal communication was often necessary to back up written instructions.[21:00] Insisting On The Impossible: The Life Of Edwin Land by Victor McElheny [28:00] More businesses die from indigestion than starvation.[33:00] I found, after much trial and error, that applying steady, gentle pressure from the worked best.[38:00] Bill and I knew we didn't want to be a “me too” company merely copying products already on the market.[38:00] Netbooks accounted for 20% of the laptop market. But Apple never seriously considered making one. “Netbooks aren't better than anything,” Steve Jobs said at the time. “They're just cheap laptops.” Jony proposed that the tablets in his lab could be Apple's answer to the netbook.—— Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney. (Founders #178)[46:00] Gains in quality come from meticulous attention to detail, and every step in the manufacturing process must be done as carefully as possible, not as quickly as possible.[47:00] Exponential growth is based on the principle that the state of change is proportional to the level of effort expended.----Subscribe to listen to Founders Premium — Subscribers can ask me questions directly and listen to Ask Me Anything (AMA) episodes. ----Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book----I use Readwise to organize and remember everything I read. You can try Readwise for 60 days for free here.  ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

What I learned from rereading Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson.This episode is brought to you by: Tiny: Tiny is the easiest way to sell your business. Quick and straightforward exits for Founders.----Follow one of my favorite podcasts Invest Like The Best and listen to episode 292 The Business of Gaming with Mitch Lasky and 293 David Senra Passion and Pain !----[4:00] Gates read the encyclopedia from beginning to end when he was only seven or eight years old.[4:00]  Gates had an obsessive personality and a compulsive need to be the best.[5:00] Everything Bill did, he did to the max. What he did always went well, well beyond everyone else.[6:00] You want to maneuver yourself into doing something in which you have an intense interest. —  Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger.[7:00] Gates devoured everything he could get his hands on concerning computers and how to communicate with them, often teaching himself as he went.[9:00] A young man with no money and tons of enthusiasm. — The Dream of Solomeo: My Life and the Idea of Humanistic Capitalism by Brunello Cucinelli. (Founders #289)[10:00] He consumed biographies to understand how the great figures of history thought.[11:00] The idea that some people were super successful was interesting. What did they know? What did they do? What drove those kinds of successes?[12:00] Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft by Paul Allen. (Founders #44)[13:00] “I'm going to make my first million by the time I'm 25.” It was not said as a boast, or even a prediction. He talked about the future as if his success was predestined.[15:00] Gates and Allen were convinced the computer industry was about to reach critical mass, and when it exploded it would usher in a technological revolution of astounding magnitude. They were on the threshold of one of those moments when history held its breath... and jumped, as it had done with the development of the car and the airplane. They could either lead the revolution or be swept along by it.[17:00] Bill had a monomaniacal quality. He would focus on something and really stick with it. He had a determination to master whatever it was he was doing. Bill was deciding where he was going to put his energy and to hell with what anyone else thought.[18:00] Don't do anything that someone else can do. — Edwin Land[21:00] You've got to remember that in those days, the idea that you could own a computer, your own computer, was about as wild as the idea today of owning your own nuclear submarine. It was beyond comprehension.[23:00] There would be no unnecessary overhead or extravagant spending habits with Microsoft.[25:00] “Pertec kept telling me I was being unreasonable and they could deal with this guy [Gates]. It was like Roosevelt telling Churchill that he could deal with Stalin.[27:00] Four years in and Microsoft had only 11 employees.[28:00] Gates sustained Microsoft through tireless salesmanship. For several years he alone made the cold calls and haggled, cajoled, browbeat, and harangued the hardware makers of the emerging personal computer industry, convincing them to buy Microsoft's services and products. He was the best kind of salesman there is: he knew the product, and he believed in it. Moreover, he approached every client with the zealotry of a true believer.[29:00] When we got up to 30 employees, it was still just me, a secretary, and 28 programmers. I wrote all the checks, answered the mail, took the phone calls.[31:00] This might be Bill's most important decision ever: IBM had talked to Gates about a fixed price for an unlimited number of copies of the software Microsoft licensed to IBM. The longer Gates thought about this proposal the more he became convinced it was bad business. Gates had decided to insist on a royalty arrangement with IBM.[34:00] You have to be uncompromised in your level of commitment to whatever you are doing, or it can disappear as fast as it appeared. Look around, just about any person or entity achieving at a high level has the same focus. The morning after Tiger Woods rallied to beat Phil Mickelson at the Ford Championship in 2005, he was in the gym by 6:30 to work out. No lights. No cameras. No glitz or glamour. Uncompromised. — Driven From Within by Michael Jordan and Mark Vancil. (Founders #213)[36:00] Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace by James Wallace. (Founders #174)[42:00] You can drive great people by making the speed of decision making really slow. Why would great people stay in an organization where they can't get things done? They look around after a while, and they're, like, "Look, I love the mission, but I can't get my job done because our speed of decision making is too slow."—Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos (Founders #155)[43:00] Alexander the Great: The Brief Life and Towering Exploits of History's Greatest Conqueror--As Told By His Original Biographers by Arrian, Plutarch, and Quintus Curtius Rufus. (Founders #232)[44:00] Gates was intolerant of distractions.----Subscribe to listen to Founders Premium — Subscribers can ask me questions directly and listen to Ask Me Anything (AMA) episodes. ----Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book----I use Readwise to organize and remember everything I read. You can try Readwise for 60 days for free here.  ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

What I learned from rereading Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Changed America by Les Standiford.This episode is brought to you by: Tiny: Tiny is the easiest way to sell your business. Quick and straightforward exits for Founders.—Follow one of my favorite podcasts Invest Like The Best  and check out these great episodes: #137 Bill Gurley: All Things Business and Investing#88 Sam Hinkie: Data, Decisions, and Basketball#204 Sam Hinkie: Find Your People—Subscribe to listen to Founders Premium — Subscribers can ask me questions directly which I will answer in Ask Me Anything (AMA) episodes —[0:01] Frick had been the man Carnegie trusted above all others to manage the affairs of Carnegie Steel.[2:00] Carnegie had delegated the job of holding the line on wages and other demands to Frick—a Patton to Carnegie's FDR.[3:00] The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie by Andrew Carnegie.  (Founders #283)[5:00] Here's a starter pack of essentials  for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making. —Jeff Bezos's Shareholder Letters (Founders #282)[7:00] In less than half a century the United States had been transformed―from a largely agrarian and underdeveloped federation of competing interests, to a relatively cohesive economic juggernaut. The age of the Founding Fathers was over. The Age of the Titans had begun.[12:00] By 1863 Carnegie was earning more than $45,000 a year from this and all his other investments, compared with a mere $2,400 from his railroad salary. Yet he understood that it was the contacts he made and the information he derived from his association with the railroad that made everything else possible.[13:00] More control. Less costs. More profit.[15:00] Technology is just a better way to do something: As a result of the process for transforming iron to steel that bore his name (Bessemer), a quantity of steel that might formerly have taken as long as two weeks to produce could now be made in fifteen minutes.[17:00] Carnegie starts his company during a financial panic. The best time to expand is when no one else dares to take the risk.[20:00] Already the best but still wants to do better: Even his key employees were not spared Carnegie's heavy-handed management style. To almost every positive report Carnegie's response was "Good, but let us do better."[21:00] Cut the prices, scoop the market, watch the costs, and the profits will take care of themselves.[21:00] Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson (Founders #140)[22:00] He could make steel more efficiently than any of them.[24:00] Henry Clay Frick: The Life of the Perfect Capitalist by Quentin Skrabec Jr. (Founders #75)[24:00] Like Rockefeller, Henry Clay Frick used a lot of borrowed money to get his start in the coke business. There was a line in one of Rockefeller's biographies where it said “he was the greatest borrower I've ever seen.”[26:00] Frick knew his business down to the ground.[26:00] LIke Carnegie, Frick expands his business during an economic panic. Frick, who would later recall this as one of the most grueling times in his life, proved as undaunted in the face of adversity as Carnegie had been.[34:00] Carneige was accustomed to obedience from his subordinates, but if he expected unquestioned subservience from Henry Frick, he had gravely miscalculated.[36:00] Frick was no puppet, but rather a man willing to take considerable risks in defense of his principles.[37:00] Frick had ambition, a singleness of purpose, and a lack of self—doubt that even Carneige envied.[38:00] Carnegie would repeat the mantra time and again: profits and prices were cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled, and in Carnegie's view, any savings achieved in the costs of goods were permanent.[39:00] On this issue the two men were of one mind. Frick had made his way in coke by the same reckoning that Carnegie had in rail and steel: if you knew your costs down to the penny, you were always on firm ground.[39:00] Frick had always understood how essential new technologies were in driving costs down. Cost control became nearly an obsession.[47:00] [Frick was shot] Only after he was finished with his day's work did Frick permit himself to be carried from the office to an ambulance.[49:00] You must not allow anything to discourage you in the least. Even if things do not go well for some time to come, or even if they should get much worse. Just keep at it, doing the best you can. Do not allow the fact that you are not getting along as well as you would like to lead you to put yourself in a compromising position.[1:03:00] Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World by Jill Jonnes. (Founders #83)[1:04:00] J.P. Morgan understood the folly of a long-term battle with the Carnegie Company, a firm that controlled its own sources of raw materials, transport, and manufacture, and that was far more deeply capitalized than his or any other of the upstarts. They might stay in the game for a while, and they might put a dent in Carnegie's armor, but in the end, Carnegie would run them into the ground, every one. Subscribe to listen to Founders Premium — Subscribers can ask me questions directly which I will answer in Ask Me Anything (AMA) episodes —I use Readwise to organize and remember everything I read. You can try Readwise for 60 days for free https://readwise.io/founders/—“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

What I learned from reading Paul Graham's essays.Support Founders' sponsors: Tiny: The easiest way to sell your business. Quick and straightforward exits for Founders. Capital: Banking built for Founders. Raise, hold, spend, and send—all in one place. Tegus is a search engine for business knowledge that's used by Founders, investors, and executives. Subscribe to listen to Founders Daily (my new daily podcast)[4:52] My father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it.[5:49] Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second.[7:41] To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool.[8:00] You should not worry about prestige. This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow.[10:22] You have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.[12:18] Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail.[16:46] How To Do What You Love by Paul Graham [16:34] What Doesn't Seem Like Work by Paul Graham [17:16] If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for.[17:42] Michael Jordan said what looked like hard work to others was play to him. Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby. (Founders #212) and Driven From Within by Michael Jordan and Mark Vancil. (Founders #213)[20:53] How Not to Die by Paul Graham [23:00] All that matters is to survive. The rest is just words. — Charles de Gaulle by Julian Jackson (Founders #224)[24:49] You have to assume that running a startup can be demoralizing. That is certainly true. I've been there, and that's why I've never done another startup.[27:31] If a startup succeeds, you get millions of dollars, and you don't get that kind of money just by asking for it. You have to assume it takes some amount of pain.[28:17] So I'll tell you now: bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup. The odds of getting from launch to liquidity without some kind of disaster happening are one in a thousand.So don't get demoralized. When the disaster strikes, just say to yourself, ok, this was what Paul was talking about. What did he say to do? Oh, yeah. Don't give up.[28:45] Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy by Paul Graham [30:23] If we've learned one thing from funding so many startups, it's that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders.[31:15] If you're worried about threats to the survival of your company, don't look for them in the news. Look in the mirror.[34:10] The cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill.[35:43] Relentlessly Resourceful by Paul Graham [35:43] I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.[37:20] If I were running a startup, this would be the phrase I'd tape to the mirror. "Make something people want" is the destination, but "Be relentlessly resourceful" is how you get there.[37:40] The Anatomy of Determination by Paul Graham [37:45] David's Notes: A Conversation with Paul Graham[39:50] After a while determination starts to look like talent.[42:12] Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people's lives, then the ambitious ones won't have many ambitious peers. When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water. Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they'd get from ambitious peers, whatever their age.[43:21] One of the best ways to help a society generally is to create events and institutions that bring ambitious people together. (Founders Podcast Conference?)[45:21] What Startups Are Really Like by Paul Graham [49:00] The Entire History of Silicon Valley by John Coogan[49:50] Meet You In Hell: Andrew Carnegie Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Transformed America by Les Standiford. (Founders #73)[55:08] You need persistence because everything takes longer than you expect. A lot of people (founders) were surprised by that.[57:18] Estee Lauder was a master at doing things that don't scale. Estée Lauder: A Success Storyby Estée Lauder. (Founders #217)[58:45] What makes companies fail most of the time is poor execution by the founders. A lot of times founders are worried about competition. YC has founded 1900+ companies. 1 was killed by competitors. You have the same protection against competitors that light aircraft have against crashing into other light aircraft. Do you know what the protection is? Space is large.[1:01:00] Paul on what he would do if he was strating a company today: If I were a 22 year starting a startup I would certainly apply to YC. Which is not that surprising, since it was designed to be what I wish I'd had when I did start one. But (assuming I got in) I would not get sucked into raising a huge amount on Demo Day.I would raise maybe $500k, keep the company small for the first year, work closely with users to make something amazing, and otherwise stay off SV's radar.Ideally I'd get to profitability on that initial $500k. Later I could raise more, if I felt like it. Or not. But it would be on my terms.At every point in the company's growth, I'd keep the company as small as I could. I'd always want people to be surprised how few employees we had. Fewer employees = lower costs, and less need to turn into a manager.When I say small, I mean small in employees, not revenues.[1:05:07] Against The Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson (Founders #200)[1:07:00] A Word To The Resourceful by Paul Graham [1:08:07] We found the startups that did best were the ones with the sort of founders about whom we'd say "they can take care of themselves." The startups that do best are fire-and-forget in the sense that all you have to do is give them a lead, and they'll close it, whatever type of lead it is.[1:09:00] Understanding all the implications of what someone tells you is a subset of resourcefulness. It's conversational resourcefulness.[1:11:00] Do Things That Don't Scale by Paul Graham [1:11:00] Startups take off because the founders make them take off.[1:16:00] The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this company taking over the world?" but "how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?" And the right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time.[1:16:00] Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson (Founders #140)[1:21:00] The world is complicated. It is noisy. We are not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us. —Steve Jobs[1:22:00] Any strategy that omits the effort is suspect.[1:23:00] The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going.Now that there are two components you can try to be imaginative about the second as well as the first. Founders need to work hard in two dimensions.—I use Readwise to organize and remember everything I read. You can try Readwise for 60 days for free by going to https://readwise.io/founders/—Subscribe to listen to Founders Daily—“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth

What I learned from rereading Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli--Support Founders sponsors: Tegus streamlines the investment research process so you can get up to speed and find answers to critical questions on companies faster and more efficiently. The Tegus platform surfaces the hard-to-get qualitative insights, gives instant access to critical public financial data through BamSEC, and helps you set up customized expert calls. It's all done on a single, modern SaaS platform that offers 360-degree insight into any public or private company. As a listener, you can take Tegus for a free test drive by visiting Tegus. And until 2023 every Tegus license comes with complimentary access to BamSec by Tegus.and Sam Hinkie's unique venture capital firm 87 Capital. If i was raising money and looking for a long term partner Sam is the first person I would call. If you are the kind of founder that we study on this podcast and you are looking for a long term partner go to 87capital.com--[3:11] His mind was never a captive of reality.[5:16] A complete list of every Founders episode on Steve Jobs and the founders Steve studied: Steve Jobs's Heroes[7:15] Steve Jobs and The Next Big Thing by Randall Stross (Founders #77)[9:05] Steve Job's Commencement Address[9:40] Driven and curious, even when things were tough, he was a learning machine.[10:20] He learned how to manage himself.[12:45] Anything could be figured out and since anything could be figured out anything could be built.[14:10] It was a calculation based on arrogance. — The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King by Rich Cohen (Founders #255)[18:00] We were no longer aiming for the handful of hobbyists who liked to assemble their own computers. For every one of them there were a thousand people who would want the machine to be ready to run.[17:40] He was a free thinker whose ideas would often run against the conventional wisdom of any community in which he operated.[19:55] He had no qualms about calling anyone up in search of information or help.[20:40] I've never found anybody who didn't want to help me when I've asked them for help.I've never found anyone who's said no or hung up the phone when I called. I just asked.Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask.[21:50] First you believe. Then you work on getting other people to share your belief.[24:55] All the podcasts on Edwin Land:Land's Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It by Peter C. Wensberg (Founders #263)A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War by Ronald Fierstein (Founders #134)Land's Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It by Peter C. Wensberg (Founders #133)The Instant Image: Edwin Land and the Polaroid Experienceby Mark Olshaker (Founders #132)Insisting On The Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land and Instant: The Story of Polaroid (Founders #40)[25:00] My friend Frederick's newsletter I was interviewed for[30:20] He was an extraordinary speaker and he wielded that tool to great effect.[31:00] Never underestimate the value of an ally. — Estée Lauder: A Success Story by Estée Lauder. (Founders #217)[32:50] If you go to sleep on a win you're going to wake up with a loss.[33:00] Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson (Founders #140)[34:20] Software development requires very little capital investment. It is basically intellectual capital. The main cost is the labor required to design and test it. There's no need for expensive factories. It can be replicated endlessly for practically nothing.[38:10] He cared passionately and he never dialed it in.[39:45] To Pixar And Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History by Lawrence Levy (Founders #235)[42:58] Time carries most of the weight.[43:30] People that are learning machines and then refuse to quit are incredibly hard to beat. Steve jobs was a learning machine who refused to quit.[44:17] Steve Jobs and The Next Big Thing by Randall Stross (Founders #77)[49:40] Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull[50:30] There were times when the reactions against Steve baffled Steve.I remember him sometimes saying to me: Why are they upset?What that said to me was that he didn't intend to get that outcome. It was a lack of skill as opposed to meanness. A lack of skill of dealing with other people.[55:50] Creative thinking, at its best, is chalk full of failures and dead ends.[56:40] Successful people listen. Those that don't listen don't last long. —Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby. (Founders #212) [58:40] You can't go to the library and find a book titled The Business Model for Animation. The reason you can't is because there's only been one company Disney that's ever done it well, and they were not interested in telling the world how lucrative it was.[1:01:20] The company is one of the most amazing inventions of humans.[1:02:25] The only purpose for me in building a company is so that the company can make products. One is a means to the other.[1:04:00] Personal History by Katherine Graham (Founders #152)[1:10:11] Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda[1:11:12] What am I focusing on that sets me apart from my competitors?[1:13:00] The channel? We lost $2 billion last year. Who gives a fuck about the channel?[1:15:21] Time carries most of the weight. Stay in the game as long as possible.[1:16:41] The information he'd glean would go into the learning machine that was his brain. Sometimes that's where it would sit, and nothing would happen. Sometimes he'd concoct a way to combine it with something else he'd seen, or perhaps to twist it in a way to benefit an entirely different project altogether. This was one of his great talents, the ability to synthesize separate developments and technologies into something previously unimaginable.—Get 60 days free of Readwise. It is the best app I pay for. I could not make Founders without it.----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast