Podcast appearances and mentions of jason frazier

  • 63PODCASTS
  • 200EPISODES
  • 44mAVG DURATION
  • 1MONTHLY NEW EPISODE
  • May 5, 2025LATEST

POPULARITY

20172018201920202021202220232024


Best podcasts about jason frazier

Latest podcast episodes about jason frazier

Larry Richert and John Shumway
A Detailed Forecast With The National Weather Service

Larry Richert and John Shumway

Play Episode Listen Later May 5, 2025 2:53


Jason Frazier, meteorologist with the National Weather service, calls in to detail the potential for some thunderstorms later today and throughout the week!

Larry Richert and John Shumway
The History Behind Cinco De Mayo

Larry Richert and John Shumway

Play Episode Listen Later May 5, 2025 25:05


Jason Frazier, meteorologist with the National Weather service.

The Culture Matters Podcast
Season 73, Episode 869: Guest: Jason Frazier: A Tribute to Kevin DeLory

The Culture Matters Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 18, 2025 31:55


"The tyrant dies and his rule is over. The martyr dies and his rule begins." - Søren KierkegaardAs we continue to celebrate the life of our friend, Kevin DeLory, we have our friend and Kevin's, Jason Frazier, a strategy coach with 20/20 Vision for Success Coaching, to share some stories and insights brought on through a relationship with Kevin.  From the values of love, honor, and respect through leadership skills and unwavering determination, Kevin truly had an impact on all those that he came into contact with.  We hope you enjoy this episode of The Culture Matters Podcast as we remember our friend, Kevin DeLory.

Agent Marketer Podcast - Real Estate Marketing for the Modern Agent
Winning Business Happens Before The Funnel (And Application) | Ep. 13

Agent Marketer Podcast - Real Estate Marketing for the Modern Agent

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 15, 2025 30:29


Send us a textIn this episode of The MLO Project, Jason Frazier and Michael McAllister break down a major shift in the mortgage game—winning business happens long before the application.They dive into the concept of the pre-funnel ecosystem and why loan officers must start showing up before buyers are ready. From breaking down consumer barriers to building trust and authority through platforms like YouTube, this conversation is packed with actionable insights to help you connect earlier, convert better, and dominate your market.It's not about chasing leads—it's about building relationships.Stick around for details on an upcoming webinar where they'll go even deeper on these strategies.Hit play and learn how to meet the modern consumer where they actually are—before the funnel even begins.Links:Register for the Elite WebinarJoin our HighLevel Facebook GroupTMP is presented by: Empower LOConnect with us at mloproject@empowerlo.comJoin us in the hive Powered by NAMBKey Takeaways:The consumer journey is no longer linear; marketing must adapt.Creating a pre-funnel ecosystem is essential for engagement.Understanding consumer barriers can improve marketing strategies.Social media platforms are crucial for building community.YouTube is a powerful tool for reaching potential clients.Building trust is key to successful client relationships.Loan officers must nurture leads before they are ready to buy.Chapters:00:00 Introduction and Acknowledgments02:51 The Importance of Consumer Journey05:46 Creating a Pre-Funnel Ecosystem08:50 Understanding Consumer Barriers12:08 Leveraging Social Media for Engagement14:59 Building Trust and Authority18:03 The Role of YouTube in Marketing20:55 Final Thoughts and Webinar Promotion

The Big Noise of BEEP Ball Podcast
Jason Frazier or Whatever You Want to Call Him at the Time!

The Big Noise of BEEP Ball Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 3, 2025 43:32


Beep Baseball Tonight podcast gets the exclusive with MindsEye CEO and lead host of the beep baseball world series to chat: field relocation, Viva Las Vegas Beep Baseball Invitational, and nothing about the Saint Louis Archers lol.Beep Baseball Tonight podcast gets the exclusive with MindsEye CEO and lead host of the beep baseball world series to chat: field relocation, Viva Las Vegas Beep Baseball Invitational, and nothing about the Saint Louis Archers lol.

The Real Estate Sessions
Real Estate Sessions Rewind - March 6, 2018 Episode 131 - Chelsea Peitz - Author, Speaker, Coach

The Real Estate Sessions

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 14, 2025 34:59 Transcription Available


Navigating Real Estate with Authenticity: Insights from Chelsea PeitzChelsea Peitz emphasizes the transformative power of video communication in today's digital landscape, highlighting that consumers are increasingly expecting to see people on video to establish connections. With a background in clinical psychology, Chelsea shares her journey from aspiring therapist to a leading voice in real estate marketing and personal branding. She reflects on the evolution of social media and how platforms like Snapchat have influenced real-time communication, paving the way for a more authentic online presence. Throughout the conversation, she encourages new agents to define their unique value propositions and embrace personal branding as a cornerstone of their success. Chelsea's insights on the importance of sharing one's story resonate deeply, as she advocates for genuine connections in an increasingly digital world.Chelsea Peitz offers profound insights into the evolving landscape of real estate marketing, highlighting how video and social media have become indispensable tools for agents. The dialogue centers around the idea that consumer behavior is being conditioned for immediate engagement and visual stimulation, similar to the convenience provided by platforms like Amazon. Chelsea predicts that in the near future, not having a video presence will be met with skepticism, paralleling contemporary reactions to individuals without social media accounts. This perspective underscores the significance of adapting to digital communication channels in order to meet client expectations and foster deeper connections.Throughout the conversation, Chelsea shares her unique journey from her early aspirations in clinical psychology to becoming a prominent figure in real estate marketing. Her experiences navigating economic downturns shaped her understanding of the industry's challenges, driving her to embrace digital marketing strategies. By focusing on personal branding, Chelsea emphasizes the importance of identifying and articulating a unique value proposition that resonates with potential clients. She encourages agents to share their stories and experiences, fostering a sense of authenticity that can differentiate them in a competitive market.Moreover, the episode sheds light on Chelsea's involvement in the Snap Pack, a community of supportive peers that has significantly influenced her professional growth. The collaboration within this group exemplifies the power of networking and mentorship in the digital age. As Chelsea looks ahead to launching her educational programs with Jason Frazier, she aims to provide agents with comprehensive resources that cover various aspects of digital marketing. By instilling confidence and offering practical tools, Chelsea is determined to empower real estate professionals to thrive in today's fast-paced, visually-driven marketplace. This episode is a treasure trove of insights for anyone looking to leverage video and social media effectively in their real estate business.Takeaways: Chelsea Peitz emphasizes the importance of using video to communicate effectively in today's digital landscape. Consumer behavior is evolving, and people are increasingly expecting to see videos about others online. The shift from traditional marketing to digital platforms is essential for real estate professionals. Personal branding is crucial for success; understanding your unique value proposition helps attract the right clients. The rise of social media has changed how we connect and communicate in the business world. Chelsea encourages individuals to embrace vulnerability and authenticity when building their online presence. Links referenced in this episode:

The Culture Matters Podcast
Season 59, Episode 700: Guest: Jason Frazier: Selling a Story

The Culture Matters Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 24, 2024 59:20


"No matter what you do, your job is to tell your story." - Gary VaynerchukMortgage professional and strategy coach with 20/20 Vision for Success Coaching Jason Frazier is back on the show for another go around with The Culture Man.  Jason and Jay are unpacking what happens when loan officers want to convey market information to clients, demand only mattering when it leads to action, and making sure that the content you're putting out there resonates with people.  We're covering a lot of ground today, so make sure you're nice and limber before embarking on this journey with Jason Frazier.

The MindShare Podcast
Episode 300 Special: Mastering Magnetic Marketing – Industry Trends and Success Strategies for Realtors and Mortgage Pros - with Special Guest – Chief Growth Officer – Jason Frazier

The MindShare Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 13, 2024 89:38


He is a 15-year veteran in the mortgage industry, holding key leadership positions, including Executive C-Level positions for notable retail and wholesale lenders, and a former Retail IMB co-owner. He is the Chief Growth Officer, Executive Growth Coach at 20/20 Vision For Success Coaching & Consulting, and Broker CMO's founder. Recognized as an award-winning mortgage marketer and a highly sought-after speaker, he has earned accolades such as Top Mortgage Professional by Yahoo Finance & USA Today, NMP's Top 50 Most Connected Mortgage Professionals, HousingWire Vanguard, and more. His expertise has been showcased at major events like Gary Vaynerchuk's Agent 2021, Inman Connect, NAMB National, Mortgage Mastermind, and AIME Fuse, among others, solidifying his status as a thought leader in the mortgage industry.Joining me on this episode of The MindShare Podcast to talk about our ' Episode 300 Special: Mastering Magnetic Marketing – Industry Trends and Success Strategies for Realtors and Mortgage Pros ' - is Special Guest – Chief Growth Officer – Jason Frazier 6:54 *since you were the one who pushed me to start this podcast, can you share with us, what motivated you to do so, and did you ever imagine it would reach 300 episodes?13:18 *is voice marketing still as hot now, as it was 6yrs ago when we started on all of this?17:28 *what role do you think podcasts play in marketing and education for sales professionals today, especially compared to when we first started… and a lot of people have tried to start a podcast, or have started one, and then just don't continue, why do you think that is?22:21 *how have you seen marketing strategies evolve over the last few years, particularly for mortgage professionals… are there unique challenges they face compared to realtors or other salespeople… what's hot right now… what's trending when it comes to marketing and communication for any brand?29:02 *should we be trying to keep up with the trends when it comes to marketing?35:02 *beyond the “trends”, what channels do you see as the tried tested and true when it comes to … building mindshare?40:28 *what are some of the most common mistakes you see people making in their marketing efforts today, and how can they course-correct?41:43 *what about online lead gen… big lawsuit involving NAR and fake leads, what's your thoughts on this?53:04 *do you think online lead gen has seen its day?1:02:38 *what's your take on the whole bright shiny object of AI right now?1:07:02 *how do you see AI and automation influencing sales and marketing in your space, and what advice would you give to someone feeling overwhelmed by it all?1:11:56 *what do you suggest anyone do if they want to leverage AI for their life and/or business?1:20:16 *what do you suggest as a daily actions… non-negotiables for anyone who wants to build and maintain more relationships with more people?Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The MindShare PodCast with our special guest - Chief Growth Officer – Jason Frazier, as we talked about ' Episode 300 Special: Mastering Magnetic Marketing – Industry Trends and Success Strategies for Realtors and Mortgage Pros.Get your FREE gift on my homepage at www.mindshare101.com just for tuning in!I'd also be really grateful if you could take a quick second to go www.ratethispodcast.com/mindshare101 to rate the show for me.And we haven't connected yet, send me a message!Facebook: facebook.com/mindshare101 Instagram: instagram.com/davidgreenspan101Youtube: youtube.com/@DavidGreenspanLinkedin: linkedin.com/in/mindshare101

The Brian Covey Show
The R's of Content Marketing Success: Building Your Brand + Winning in Today's Market w/ Jason Frazier

The Brian Covey Show

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 26, 2024 49:38


Follow along and subscribe/rate/review at https://www.briancovey.com/podcast/Are you leveraging your brand and content strategy to gain a competitive edge in today's market? On this episode of Finding Your Competitive Edge, Brian Covey sits down with marketing expert Jason Frazier to discuss how you can do just that. Together, they dive deep into the interconnected world of marketing, content strategy, and brand building, sharing invaluable insights on how these elements can drive your business forward.Jason, a recognized industry leader, shares key insights on staying ahead of trends and using content to establish authority in your field. The conversation highlights practical, actionable tips for professionals—especially loan officers—looking to capture more market share and build a lasting legacy in these unique times.

The Big Noise of BEEP Ball Podcast
Final Thoughts on World Series with Jason and Richie

The Big Noise of BEEP Ball Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 14, 2024 28:01


Chad writes the final chapter to 2024 World Series with Jason Frazier and Richie Flores.

The Big Noise of BEEP Ball Podcast
Breaking News: Big Noise of Beepball is now Beep Baseball Tonight Podcast

The Big Noise of BEEP Ball Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 14, 2024 33:14


The Big Noise has made it big time and cannot host regularly so Chad Dillon will be taking the reigns and doing something with those reigns. He begins by talking world series with Jason Frazier and the new elected President of NBBA formally known as Big Noise of Beepball.

Total Information AM
BeepBall World Series for blind coming to region; volunteers needed

Total Information AM

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 2, 2024 7:21


Jason Frazier, CEO & President of MindsEye Radio, explains the Beep Ball concept with Megan Lynch and promotes the Beep Ball World Series coming to the region. MindsEye and Lighthouse for the Blind- St. Louis are searching for at least 140 volunteers to support the upcoming National Beep Baseball Association (NBBA) World Series taking place at Slyman Bros SLYSA Complex in St. Charles, MO.     Credit: © SARAH PHIPPS/THE OKLAHOMAN / USA TODAY NETWORK

The Culture Matters Podcast
Season 35, Episode 416: Guest: Jason Frazier: No Bull, Just Value

The Culture Matters Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 28, 2024 92:17


“Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.” - Peter DruckerMortgage professional and strategy coach with 20/20 Vision for Success Coaching Jason Frazier is our guest on the show today and we are ecstatic to have him here!  Jason and Jay dig into events that will change your life and how they can be handled, always keeping your eyes on your goals and adjusting them as you go, and what kind of value home ownership truly has.  We're unpacking a lot today, so we hope you're ready for a great episode of The Culture Matters Podcast.  

Community Voices
Jason Frazier shares how MindsEye Radio helps to amplify the voices of the visually impaired

Community Voices

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 28, 2024 16:40


Jason Frazier is the CEO and president of MindsEye Radio. He spoke to Community Voices about MindsEye's mission to create an inclusive community by translating vision into audio for those who are blind or visually impaired.

Empowering People More Podcast with Eddy Perez
Season 6, Episode 58: Guest: Jason Frazier: Legacies

Empowering People More Podcast with Eddy Perez

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 26, 2024 52:43


Jason Frazier is a real estate & finance professional, as well as marketing and technology.00:00 Intro10:25 Opening opportune doors.20:10 Make an impact & leave a legacy.30:01 Don't talk about it. Be about it.40:10 Only you can save yourself.50:10 Making good points.BrokerCMO.com

how i met your mortgage
“how i met your mortgage” Season 6 Episode 31 - Special Guest: Jason Frazier

how i met your mortgage

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 13, 2023 36:15


Special Guest: Jason Frazier#howimetyourmortgage​ #justthetipscoaching​ #justthetips​ #salescoachingdenver​ #salescoaching​ #realestate​ #mortgage​ #sales​ #salestips​ #businesstips​ #tunein​ #podcast​ #videocast​ #applepodcast​ #spotifypodcast

Closer Look with Rose Scott
Cop City Vote Coalition's petition referendum, lawsuit; Atlanta's updated curfew penalties; Former football player discusses body positivity, new book

Closer Look with Rose Scott

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 21, 2023 49:54


Kurt Kastorf, the legal advisor for Cop City Vote Coalition, discusses a referendum to cancel the lease for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center and the lawsuit targeting a City of Atlanta clerk's rejection of the wording in a petition. (Note: Shortly after broadcast, the city clerk's office announced the petition has been approved. In a statement, coalition organizers say they are waiting for an official copy of the final petition before deciding on moving forward with the lawsuit.)The Atlanta City Council recently voted to change the penalties for parents or guardians of children who violate the city's curfew. Plus, the latest on another attempt to put Jason Frazier on the Fulton Board of Elections. WABE politics reporter Rahul Bali discusses the latest.Plus, a visit to the doctor changed Martinus Evans' life forever. More than a decade ago, the former football player was advised to “lose weight or die.” Evans talks with Rose about his holistic approach to health and wellness, body positivity and his new book, “SLOW AF RUN CLUB: The Ultimate Guide for Anyone Who Wants to Run.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Who's Counting with Cleta Mitchell
Jason Frazier: A Citizen Voter Roll Cleanup Expert in Fulton County, Georgia: Describing the Mess He's Trying to Clean Up… Try 12,000 Duplicates in the Fulton County Voter Rolls! And more…. What a hero!

Who's Counting with Cleta Mitchell

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 22, 2023 41:40


Cleta interviews Jason Frazier, a citizen volunteer, and self-described ‘data geek' who has taken it upon himself to examine the voter rolls in his home county of Fulton County, GA. […]

Who's Counting with Cleta Mitchell
Jason Frazier: A Citizen Voter Roll Cleanup Expert in Fulton County, Georgia: Describing the Mess He's Trying to Clean Up… Try 12,000 Duplicates in the Fulton County Voter Rolls! And more…. What a hero!

Who's Counting with Cleta Mitchell

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 22, 2023


Cleta interviews Jason Frazier, a citizen volunteer, and self-described ‘data geek' who has taken it upon himself to examine the voter rolls in his home county of Fulton County, GA. […]

Growing Belleville thru Community Chats
Helping the Blind with Mindseye

Growing Belleville thru Community Chats

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 22, 2023 29:39


In this Episode we sit down with Jason Frazier of Mindseye and discuss: - How Mindseye helps the blind on a daily basis -How great of an organization they are - How you can help by just reading the newspaper, magazine or other aspects - How they got started - How Jason got started with Mindseye - The impact they have had - Much More

Growing Belleville thru Community Chats
Helping the Blind with Mindseye

Growing Belleville thru Community Chats

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 22, 2023 29:39


In this Episode we sit down with Jason Frazier of Mindseye and discuss: - How Mindseye helps the blind on a daily basis -How great of an organization they are - How you can help by just reading the newspaper, magazine or other aspects - How they got started - How Jason got started with Mindseye - The impact they have had - Much More

The Big Noise of BEEP Ball Podcast
MindsEyeRadio and The Big Noise of Beepball

The Big Noise of BEEP Ball Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 8, 2023 28:31


Jason Frazier of Minds Eye Radio joins the podcast to announce our partnership and our addition to the Minds Eye Radio family. We also learn a cool twist to the upcoming 8-team tournament in Saint Louis this summer. Find out who is going to win the East and West divisions in July. We also learn how the Indy Thunder elevator pitch beep baseball. For information on beep baseball visit: www.nbba.org

Real Estate Marketing Dude
Making Your Brand Pop in Slower Times with Jason Frazier

Real Estate Marketing Dude

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 4, 2023 32:21


It's hard to deny that we are in a recession, but how can you put your brand and business in a position to still succeed? Can you even succeed in a recession?Three Things You'll Learn in This EpisodeHow can your site convert clients?How to generate more referrals.What being authentic looks like in the marketing world.ResourceCheck Out LeadpopsReal Estate Marketing DudeThe Listing Advocate (Earn more listings!)REMD on YouTubeREMD on InstagramTranscript:So how do you track new business, you constantly don't have to chase it. Hi, I'm Mike Cuevas to real estate marketing. And this podcast is all about building a strong personal brand people have come to know, like trust and most importantly, refer. But remember, it is not their job to remember what you do for a living. It's your job to remind them. Let's get started.What's up ladies and gentlemen, welcome to their episode of the real estate marketing, dude, podcast. Books we're chatting about.Today is a very important topic, I get this question quite a lot, but maybe not as much as our guest. And people always asked me like, kind of, what should I do with like, what do I do when I have a site? First they asked me is do I need a site? And I say, yes, absolutely. If you want to have any type of an online presence, you need something, because people will go visit your site before they ever call you because they want to see what you're all about. They want to see if they can relate to you and they're whatnot. But beyond just having a glorified online business card, which a lot of people do in this market, how do you actually have a site that converts? What do you do with it? How do you massage it? How do you work it out, like, if I want a six pack, I'm gonna do less situps. And I'm going to eat healthier, probably stop drinking beer and doing all the above? Well, if you want your site to, you know, start spitting you out business, you need to add to it as well, no differently. Like I have this podcast, you're listening to this podcast right now, because we're getting about 40 to 45,000 listens a month. Thank you to you guys. And a result of this content that goes on my website drives people back to our website. And some of you might schedule a demo with a marketing dude this week, because of this podcast. That's what content creation is. But I create content to consistently add value to our audience. And to keep people coming in this is marketing the same way that we teach you how to market your business on the show, and as a client and whatnot. So what we're gonna chat about today is that subject, what can you do? What can you do? What can you push? What what do you do with a website? Let's just sit there. You just look at it. Do you talk to it? How do you massage your website? Make it work for you? Right? So I couldn't think of a better guest. I want to introduce our guests today. My friend Mr. Jason Fraser with lead pops, Jason wants to say hello to everybody. Hey, what's up, everyone, I'm excited to be here. Thank you. Thank you, my friend for having me on. I appreciate it. watched everyone a little bit. We are your frickin marketing whiz. He's like the mark. He's like a genius at a lot of his marketing ways. And he might be too modest to tell you that. But once you tell him a little bit about your background, cuz you do a lot in the mortgage space and whatnot. But tell us a little quick. And then we'll get into thisshow. And I want to ask you a bunch of questions on how you're making websites work for people that create clients. Yep, absolutely. Yeah. So my name is Jason Fraser. I go but just by Fraser and I've been in the industry since oh nine. I was born into the housing industry. My family owned a mortgage company and also had a family members who were real estate agents as well. So the housing industry is in my blood, but I didn't get into it till oh nine. Prior to that I worked for Peter Thiel, who some of you may know as the founder of PayPal. So I come I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. So I came from Silicon Valley, technology startups venture capital world, that's kind of where I lived and then decided to join the family business in oh nine. And I've been a part of that I've held several executive roles. Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Strategy Officer,CTO, I've run sales teams are in Consumer Direct Marketing, I've coached or I am a coach, and I have coached both on the real estate side and the mortgage side. And right now I am the EVP of growth for lead pumps.Cool, man, so he has a lot of experience. Right now you guys are doing a bigthing and in showing people on how to deal with their sites I want to start with with this and get your first opinion. We're start at the very basics. Do we need to have a website in our business? Do a mortgage brokers or lenders or real estate agents? If you're an independent contractor or small business, do you need a website? Yes, you absolutely do. And it's it's funny look. And hopefully, if you have a lot, I mean, it sounds like you got a good amount of listeners per month. And so I probably don't have to let people know this. But if you are one of the Yeah, buts like, oh, yeah, but I'm doing this and yeah, but I'm doing this and yeah, but yeah, you need a website, right? I mean, you're you're absolutely insane. If you don't feel that you need a website right now, I'm not saying you need our one of ours that we do, because honestly, we're not a website company. But but we provide that but because it's important, but you absolutely need a website. It's it the we're going we're not backtracking from an online world, right. You need to your online property and websites, how you do it. And, and so, you know, I know we're gonna talk about a lot of different things. But this is what I want every listener to write down right now because it's going to be the foundation of everything I talked about because look, there's alwaysis a reason to say, hey, but I could do this, I could do that. But here, just because you're getting business does not mean that you're losing business. So I'm going to say that again, just because you're getting business does not mean you're losing business, right? And so when you don't have an offer, when you don't have a website, you're absolutely missing out on opportunities. There's no debate in that at all. Look, if websites didn't matter, you wouldn't how many times you go to website in a given day? Right? Case Closed? Let's let's, let's stop playing around with that websites are important. But wait, I, I have a pageon my broker's website.Why isn't that suffice? Well, well, actually, there's two things for that. One is, you can have that. But what I will say and I said this, even during recruiting calls and whatnot to other loan officers, is that you're not the lenders brand. The lenders brand is you so you're the face of everyone you're talking to. If I'm talking to real estate professionals, you're the face of a kW and exp real what wherever your compass whoever brokerage and look, even though they may have a big bite, and people have heard that name before the consumers and dealing with them, their consumers dealing with you, right, and if you're a mortgage professional, guess what agents consumers, they're dealing with you and right and, and I can tell you 100% And the mortgage space, there's only one main mortgage brand, and that's rocket. But when people referring people, they don't say hey, I'm referring movement mortgage, I'm referring loan depot, they're not referring the company that referring you. And and here's the plain truth, even if you love the company, chances are you're not going to work there forever. So you never want to tie everything to your brokerage or your your lender, yes, have that directory page, use it and get an actual we have a solution to help lenders because lenders are definitely not leveraging those those pages. But you need to have your own property where you could tell your own story that can be moved with you otherwise, because guess what, what happens if forget, let's say you don't leave them What if they go out of business and look in this market, we're seeing a lot of people kind of go belly up. And then what happens then if all you've been using is something that you don't control. And if you don't control the way people can get to you, then you don't have a business?Absolutely, you're the brand. No one's hiring the bank. That's why the worst thing you could do as an independent contractor is make your broker more money or more brand. The best thing you could do as an independent contractor is make your broker more money or more brand. You can't really go wrong either way. Exactly. But you are the brand, guys. So thank you for reinforcing that message. Alright, so yes, spokespeople are gonna go to your site to check you out first, especially if you don't know them, you know, maybe not so much in the relationship game. Oh, I trust my god, trust by God, great. But let's be honest, even the people that trust you still go to your website? You just don't know it yet. Because they're just sort of like, dude, do I really trust Mike? I mean, last time I saw him, he was pretty drunk. Am I gonna trust him with his house? Like, sometimes you need that little more professional? Not that I got wrong. But you know what I mean? Yeah. But people know you personally don't always know you don't always see you in the same light professionally. And it's more of an authority type thing. So walk me through it, though. Where do most of us go wrong? Because it we both agree on this guy's you need to say, yep, stop playing the game. If you don't have a site, you don't have a brand. If you don't have a brand, you don't have a business, and you're just another salesperson chasing the challenge, just a matter of time till shift takes you out. And that's what's happening right now across the industry. So let's go through and talk about how many people that have a brand during the shift.Are weathering the storm a little bit better? I mean, have you ever noticed like everyone who has a site has a lot of content on it? You see, I'm pretty active consistently on social media, their marketing consistently? Like, sure business might be down a little bit, but they're not starving. Is that a coincidence? Is that what is that? No, I mean, absolutely not. And look, there's what I always say, because as a coach, in fact, I just had this as a call a few days ago, is that it's never just one thing. It's a combination of things that you do from a marketing perspective, right? So let me put it this way. If you signed up with lead pops today and got our website and funnels, that would do absolutely nothing for you. Right, I'm gonna say that again. It will do absolutely nothing for you, right? You got to drive traffic to it, you got to use it, you got to put it in your marketing strategy, you got to have a plan for it. You got to do all these different things. And so what I would say for those that are weathering the storm and they say well, I know this guy knew that his website doesn't look nice or whatever and we'll get into that of what matters on the website and what doesn't but the but the point is is that the people that I see it hands down the people that I see that have weathered the storm that are doing deals in markets where someone else some someone's telling me oh, there's no deals that have there's no purchase business. Oh, really? Oh, then how come you know how come Doug's got 12 loans in his pipeline, right like and six of those are under contract and in a market that you told me is doesn't have any inventory and not deals because of marketing, right? And that takes all fourMost people think of marketing they're think, Oh, I gotta be on social media marketing is flyers. Marketing is Billboards, radio marketing is talking to freaking people at the supermarket is doing anything and everything to have conversations with people. That's what increased conversations equals opportunities. Right. So like, that's what people need to understand is the people that are actually doing okay right now is because it's, it's a consistent long term effect, right? Like they're trading on stuff that they did 90 days ago, 120 days ago, two months ago, two years ago, right? Those are the people that are okay, right now I have, I have a friend that just got his loan officer license like six months ago, and here and then we're in a pretty damn competitive market. And he's doing deals that I know other people have been in this business for two years that are are dying. And it's like, what's the difference? Oh, maybe because he's on social media everyday doing videos, how he's talking, he's going out there, he's doing anything and everything to create to create a sphere of influence, right. So that's what people are doing. And yes, driving traffic back to his website, so that you could capture that information.The only recession proof or shift proof business model is your personal brand, you guys, you can't like not feed the beast, because when you don't, and you rely on lead sources or other things you don't control, like a lot of the people. And I don't know how you might see this more in the mortgage space. But I know a lot of people who are relying on Zillow leads or realtor.com leads once that market shifts and the consumer mentality shifts, well, you can no longer rely on that source of just independent business, because it just you know, the numbers just don't work anymore. So you can never rely on stuff you can't control. And it's only a matter. It's a house of cards waiting for when you do that. And I like how you said that it's a cumulative cumulative that I say that correctly approach to marketing, it's direct mail, it's flyers, it's the picture you have, it's the consistent of videos you're doing. And it's a it's an overall communication strategy. Marketing is not advertising, is it? No, advertising is a form of marketing. But can you explain the difference so that people see that? Because you can't you do a little bit of both, right. ButI think people often confuse that. Yeah, cuz so I mean, to put it simply, right, it's because in look, we could get into the full stack of marketing, but advertising is AP, is that, right? Like, it's putting your replays on a billboard, it's doing something at a supermarket, it's, it's running ads, right? That is advert to putting something in a magazine or a paper or whatever that is advertising. That's a part of marketing. But like I said, marketing is you having conversations marketing is, is an extension of sales. In fact, I always like break down those barriers, sales is marketing, marketing and sales, right? Anytime you're having a conversation, guess what you're selling yourself, you're selling your services, you're selling your products, that is marketing, right? Like it's putting any type of positive and positive spin or diagnosing of like a challenge and solution to someone so that you can bring them in and help them right. So that's the difference. Really, when it comes down to marketing and advertising. They're not one in the same. Advertising is a piece of marketing. But marketing is not a piece of advertising, right? And it's one of those things, it's just one comes before the other and if you're just doing advertising and nothing else, you're gonna have a hard time. It's very tough. Very tough, because you're just, it's hard. It's almost impossible nowadays. Alright, so what am I what should I be doing now? You know, like, what, what should I be doing right now? I'm all I create content. Okay, so get really loud gets super loud. What do you tell all your peeps? Yeah, I mean, for, you know, kind of going back to one of the original questions as far as like, you know, what you should be doing is, is, is when it's your website, and what, when what you think is important or what not? It like, it's not like, Guess what, consumers don't care, right? They don't care about your as much as people like, look, Simon Sinek has done a great job at like, doing the why and having those talks and everyone feels good and wants to hug each other afterward. But guess what? The consumer cares about three things write themselves in the morning noon, and after supper, right? I think Dell Carnegie said that. That's the consumer doesn't care about your why that they don't buy why you do things, right. They don't know you yet. So they don't give a crap about you and why you do things until they know you and like you, then they will learn about you and your why and all that other stuff. But instead, people make all these websites to make it all pretty and nice and do all these things when the consumer doesn't care about that. And look, I have the data because we have 2500 plus customers of websites that I look at the heat maps to see where people are paying their pay attention to and all they care about is above the fold, meaning your hero section which is like your image, video, whatever, you got to have a strong headline, sub headline, a call to action and tell them where they need to go. That's what lead pops. We don't focus on making very pretty websites even though we do we focus on conversion, because that's all that matters. Do you want a nice looking website? Or do you want a nice looking website that converts? Right, I think and if you said if you don't then get out of the business because you're going to you're going to starve right unless you have someone else to speak and a lot of money for you andAnd so when it comes to that guy's like people actually on the mortgage side, you know, for your all your mortgage listenersget choked up about this. But when the is that you send people to your Apply Online link, we call that apply or die. It's, it's the worst thing you could do you put someone that doesn't know you, like you, or even trust you into an instant buying decision of something that's going to be their biggest financial transaction in their life.So like, give me your it's like, an ask for like, the social security number and like, like, yeah,why not? Right? Yeah, let's just let's just do that. Like, look, guys, like, that's, that's not how we do it, you know, we evolve, things change. And so. So that's, that's the what you guys got to figure out. And that's what we focus on. We focus on conversion, we focus on you know, soft, yes. Ladders and stuff to get people saying yes, yes, yes. And then you hit him. And then eventually you it's just it's funnel marketing, very simplistic. And then, you know, to your, you know, to your question about content. Look, right now, I'll tell you right now, who's going to win in this market, the people with the largest databases with the highest amount of trust, right you want if you want to create a never ending, and look this, this is future proof, right? It doesn't matter and a down market, up market, middle market, it doesn't matter where you are, Phil, if you want to have a never ending pipeline, you need to talk to people and put people in your database. And here's one fundamental rule of marketing that everyone needs to understand. And look, you could anyone could argue with me, debate me challenge me on it, but I will throw right back at him the proof that I'm right, and that is whoever spends the most amount to acquire customer wins. Right?And if you see that with like, like, look at look at how many, you mentioned Zillow earlier, right? There's a reason why an agency you actually helped this happen and mortgage providers mortgage lenders to, but that no one gets more real estate traffic than Zillow. Right? And there's a reason for that, right? Because they spent the money they did what they did they did the you know, the the frog and kind of a slow boil pot. Right, you know, it didn't know that it was getting boiled, but it did. And then on the mortgage side, same with like rocket right. Even though they've been they've been knocked down, you know, by UW M. That it's, it's they spent money on marketing, right? Zillow spent a lot of money on marketing, rockets, biggest expense is marketing. But there's a reason for that. So you got to understand that you got to put yourself out there, you got to be marketing every single day because you got to be filling that database, and then understand this very fundamental rule when it comes to lead generation. Everybody's a lead, but not everyone's a prospect. Right? And you got to you got to differentiate to everyone, like just talk to someone, they raise their hand and automatically they're a prospect before you qualify and renew anything to do it. Right. This is sells one on one. Right? So you just got to understand that you're having conversations with everyone, because you want everyone you can in your database. Because the more conversations you have, the more deals you're going to do. Yep, books 10 to 15% of the people on your Facebook feed. Following you connect with on Instagram you run across in the grocery store you see at your kids soccer games, and baseball games, they're moving this year. Most of them don't know it yet. But all 100% of them have referral for you. In a referral dominated business, like don't overthink this stuff. But if you're not thought of firstyou that gets passed up, that's just an opportunity. So like 80% of people I don't do you know, the number for the mortgage space. I know in the real estate agents 80% of people over it's like 80, for some like that hire the first person they meet with, you know, what that is in the lending space is similar? It? I don't know, I don't know what it is in the mortgage space. I've never really i But to me, I kind of take that as like, because I look at look at it this way. A consumer is a consumer regardless of product, right? So I would imagine those percentages are roughly going to be the same because I will say this and you may you'll probably notice on the real estate side, at large and and in the mortgage space, the retention of that once you do a deal with the consumer, the retention is about 23% or 22% of that customer and I think in the real estate, it's in the teens last time I saw that you do a good job doesn't mean that they're coming back, right? Yeah, well, that's because people stopped talking to him in the real estate space, like 80% of people forgot their agents name like the agents name, they don't even know the first name anymore after six months, because we don't stay in touch with them. And if you're having a problem with that, guys, I'm going to take a shameless plug real quick you need to get to referral sweet.com All right referral suite.com Because all we do is farm your database and make it really simple. I just need one to two hours a month from you and that's about it. And people stop forgetting you exist but back to the show.Yes, that's it's crazy that we don't stay in front of them but we don't look at past business as future transactions because we're too short sighted. You don't spike the football on loan number one you spike the football and referral number four from the person you sold loan when were one four years ago. That's when you spike the football in these types of relationship based businesses guys, don't be so short sighted.it.Alright, so what do you do now? Give me some advice. What are we going to do with the market? How do I get loud? What do I how do I get more and more conversations? What kind of activities specifically should I be doing?Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. And to me, I think it's like I mentioned the beginning, it's a combination of things that you need to have a an omni channel, attack writer strategy, and that's social media. And that doesn't mean you have to be on everything doesn't mean you have to be on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, whatever, every channel is different. For first and foremost, it's understand where your audience is, right? That's, that's first and look, I could even go even back more and say, hey, you need to have a CRM and all that other stuff. But look, that the fact that it's 2023, and we're still having the conversation and trying to convince, I'm still trying to convince people on social media, which is stupid, but I've also got to the point, I don't know if it's my age, or just because I've been in this industry long enough. But like, I stopped trying to convince, as soon as I get into any type of conversation, I'm like, is this not for me?Okay, good, fantastic. There's no nothing for me to talk about, because we're already going to lose. And so either you're gonna lose today, you're gonna lose down the road, but you will lose, right? And, and soyou need to be you need to be putting yourself out there right in and look, I could get into the stupid stuff of like, hey, you need to be telling stories. And, and obviously, you know, we're on this podcast to be doing video, right? The fact that we're still having conversations about the importance of video is freaking ridiculous to me, too. But that's what you need to be doing and understanding where one understand your audience. Who are you trying to reach? Where are they at? And then what problem you're solving for them and under and going deep. And I have this issue with loan officers all the time, is that there's reasons people are buying and selling, right? It's not simply because they want to move, there's a reason why they want to move. Understand that because the more the more specific right and personalise your messaging is, is going to be 10x to 20x more effective than what your competition is doing. Right. In fact, I'd say it's even more and it's because our competition looks for the least path of resistance, they look for the easy way out, they look for shortcuts, they look for hacks, they want to do anything but work when it comes to marketing and putting stuff out there, right? Or they'll buy leads because they think that's deals on a platter. It isn't right and so and I've done this both on the real estate side and the mortgage side, andso you should be putting content out there you absolutely should be using hyperlocal marketing strategies and your business because people care about where they live. You should also be using email marketing, right? Like that kind of went out of style was starting to go out of style not too long ago, but now it's it's made a pretty big comeback. And I'll tell you this email is your only one to one connection that you're going to have because guess what you do not you This is why you don't build a mansion on rented land, right? Like you don't control Facebook, you don't control Instagram, every time I hear someone complain about the Facebook algorithm or the you know, the Instagram algorithms like what do you think they were going to do? Do you think they were just going to be free and fun and fair for their entire life, they're a business they need to make money so just get over it so that but but if you have an online property, you have that one to one connection via email, that's how you stay in front of it. That's how you control you track your traffic because if you don't do that, then you could get slapped by Google with an algorithms change and if you're running ads, those I remember running like Zillow long form in the beginning when I was doing Consumer Direct, right oh, it was really nice getting those 12 to $14 leads but guess what, when two years went by and those were 60 the ad right and then you're looking at a three to 4% conversion rate maybe a six to nine month nurture right like that's real money we're talking about except but guess what, you just completely went into their basket you are completely dependent on them so you had no you know, no choice but the pay to play none of these companies are evil right we make them evil because of what of the of their practices but what we gave them the power to do it so what are we complaining complaining about beat them right compete don't just stop doing it. I I have people I hate and it's crazy to me like I get it on the real estate side. Not really but I do.On the mortgage side. If you are paying any type of money to Zillow, you are insane, you are insane and your main bread and membrane will shout out to Cypress Hill. They're for dinosaurs like me, but Cypress Hill, but But it's insane because on a lender, they're they they are a lender. Zillow is a mortgage lender. And then when everyone comes back, man, it's like well, this and that. And I'm like me ask you this. You're at loan depot, right? Yeah. Malone depot, would you pay movement? Would you pay movement mortgage for leads? Oh, absolutely not. What's the difference? Extra zero. And so that that's what I'm saying, Guys, you got to control your traffic. You got to control your sources of income. You got to control where the consumer is going to find you. Because that's the only way you're going to stay relevant long term and not be dependent on someone else for your success. Because that's never a winning formula.He hit it on the head.So many people aren't using email, we're video emailing consistently, every month, we're going to 40% open rate. And the videos have nothing to do with real estate or lending or anything. They're like talking about a restaurant, their community, their local. And it's just reminders, you don't need to, like when we're just there's different types of databases andthe warm database are like all the list of people who all have the potential to refer or do business with you. And staying in touch with that audience. And those people the 200 to 300 400 people you invite to your wedding or funeral with an unlimited budget on both are the ones that you just nurture and you're not nurturing, like, just staying in touch with people, if you don't own your own data, you're in the data collection business, just like I am, like, I listened to my stats, I want to build my email list because the larger my list or my database grows, the more opportunity I have to sell more people our services. So we don't in the industry don't nurture any of the relationships we have. And then they get pissed when you log on the Facebook Like fuck, they just bought a house and they forgot I was in the business. Dude, you gotta like farm these people, you farm them with content, it's very simple. And you have to nurture and keep in touch with people because it's a giant popularity contest. Nobody wants to go interview a bunch of lenders or realtors, like, that's like the last thing I want to do. Can you imagine like, going on a speed dating round with a bunch of mortgage brokers like I'd rather watch fucking paint dry. And same thing with realtors, they just want to know they could trust the first person they meet with will start becoming the first person they meet with you do that by getting really loud, you're adding value to other people's lives connecting with people. You don't have to pitch them or sell your freakin interest rates or, or go see a house and every conversation you have. But you do need to remind them what you do for a living. And that's very simple to do.Well, that dude, very well said, Any closing thoughtsyou have here for people? Yeah, and you know, I'll put my coaching hat on here for a second is Look, I told you what to write down in the beginning, which was you know, just because you're making you're doing business doesn't mean you're losing business. And I'll tell you this is you gotta write, it's kind of like a Venn diagram, you gotta write two circles. One is what you want to hear and what you need to hear, right? And be very honest with yourself and what you want to be told and what you need to be told, right, and then the intersection of those two, that's where the gold is, right? Because that's something that you're going to lean into and do. And if you don't find that, then you got an issue, and you got it. And you gotta kind of audit yourself on what you're doing. But you know, to a lot of the stuff that we talked about, about, you know, being you know, one is the nurture processes, you should be spending as much money, if not more on your retention, and your post close as you do trying to acquire that customer, right, you spend more money on the people you do know, as opposed to the people you don't know. And we don't do that at all. Because it's not sexy. It's not instant gratification. It's not instant ROI. So we you know, we forget about it, we leave it to some you know, crappy CRM post drip about winterizing your pipes, pumpkin pie recipes, you know, fall back, spring forward, all that other nonsense that turn back the clock and turn back to you know, we're, that's not going to keep you top of mind. Right. And that's why that community piece is so relevant is because as as a sales professional, especially in a community, is that is that you all you care about is attention and awareness of who you are. That's all you should care about. Right? It doesn't have to be about your house, or being a mortgage professional or any of that other stuff. Right? Yes, tell them what you do make sure that that's part of your content strategy. But if someone just does did it, if you just sold someone's house, right, they don't care about the rest of the houses you're selling or any of that other stuff, right? You got a segment that database and talk to him about stuff that they're going to care about, right? Because one of the things that we have going for us more than any other sales profession, is that we that we help people achieve dreams create stickiness, create generational wealth, right fame, you know, really create happy situations that go to the emotion and heart. So there's automatic stickiness there. So the only reason that we screw that up is because we screw that up. Right? So that you know, so that's what's super important to all you guys know, you know, for all you guys to know. And then this is the last thing that I'll leave you with, is that you got to understand that your marketing starts before that consumer consumer even knows who you are, right? That is when your marketing starts. Because you never know when they're saying and before you could tell me that you sold something over list and over the last two years. Congrats, I'm sure that was very hard. But like, you know, doing stuff over list, you know, sell stuff in 10 days, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, before they're to close the credit clinicals before you can tell me any of that. I have to know who you are. If I don't know who you are, then you're not relevant. Right? And don't let the last two are 2020 and 2021. Don't let that unicorn yours fool you into thinking you have something that you don't and look Don't Don't get me wrong. I say all of this out of passion and love for this industry. I mentioned my story in the beginning. I'm here for life. And so I want all of the true professionals to win.But here's the thing gotta understand is don't let those things for you. Right? You got to understand that the markets are going. And we could be in a market like this. If you look at historical data, and look, everyone wants to be rosy. Everyone wants the interest rates to be what they are, and inventory and all that stuff. If you look at swings, this could be a five to 10 year swing of being this being the normalized market. So guess what? Guess what? Get dressed, put, roll up your sleeves, put in the work and do what needs to be done. But marketing is going to be the most important thing that you do for your business from now on going forward. Why don't you tell them where they can find you guys? They want to learn more. Yeah, if you guys want to, you guys could always look I'm all over social media. So you know Frazier real I'm the real cmo on all social media channels. And then you can also check us out at lead pops.com. Appreciate it folks. If you're going to struggle with what to create Why don't you join the next content creator challenge you can visit www dot real estate content creator challenge will give you 30 days of content was from video email to memes to creating short form real to long form videos, you're actually going to take action do them, learn how to do them. It's not as hard as you think it is. But that's why we do these challenges. And it's only $49 to go ahead and visit WWW dot real estate content creator challenge.com and join this month's challenge which starts on March 14. Dude, appreciate you coming on to the show. We had a great time. Folks. Listen, this is like feel like we speak the same language man keep it up and folks just take action. Get Loud, start creating a whole lot of content. It's how you start marketing its content marketing, make sure everyone when they think of real estate or lending thinks of your name. When that term comes up, and as long as that happens, you will always attract business despite market conditions. So you guys next week, thank you for watching another episode of the real estate marketing dude podcast. If you need help with video or finding out what your brand is, visit our website at WWW dot real estate marketing dude.com We make branding and video content creation simple and do everything for you. So if you have any additional questions, visit the site, download the training and then schedule time to speak with a dude and get you rolling in your local marketplace. Thanks for watching another episode of the podcast. We'll see you next time.Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Get Better Everyday Podcast
Get Better Everyday Podcast (Episode 27 - Working for Peter Thiel, Learning from Gary Vee, and Applying New Technology to a Family Business with Special Guest Jason Frazier)

Get Better Everyday Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 20, 2023 39:07


In today's episode of the podcast, Matt is joined by EVP of Growth at leadpops, Jason Frazier. Jason was born and raised in California and headfirst into the Mortgage Industry. An engineer by trade, Jason found a love for technology at an early age. He worked for Peter Thiel, learned a lot from Gary Vee, and applied his skills to his family's business. How did he do this? Tune-in to find out - Welcome back to the Get Better Everyday Podcast! Want to help the show? Sharing this episode with a friend or on social media is the number 1 way to help us grow. Leaving 5-star reviews on Spotify and Apple Podcasts are also great ways to give back. Visit mattgouge.com to learn more! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/matt-gouge/message

Loan Officer Wealth
Generate Quality Leads & More Business Through Educational Content | An Episode With Jason Frazier

Loan Officer Wealth

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 30, 2022 27:49


Jason Frazier is on The Loan Officer Wealth Podcast this week! During this exciting conversation you will learn more about Jason's tips and tricks on marketing for mortgage professionals! The Loan Officer Wealth Podcast | EP. 41   Jason Frazier explains why making videos is so crucial in today's market and where marketing is heading in the future for mortgage professionals and loan officers!   The importance of making EDUCATIONAL CONTENT on your social media and making area specific videos about your niche market to increase traffic and leads from Youtube.   Jason also explains what his best source for quality lead generation is, the difference between a lead and a real prospect and why making this distinction is so important.   Make sure you share this message and you subscribe to the podcast and leave us a 5-star review!  

The Support Automation Show
Improving Marketing in the World of Support Automation with Jason Frazier, EVP of Marketing at Victorian Finance, Mortgage Coach, Marketer, and Podcast Producer at Next Level Loan Officers, and Founder of Mortgage X

The Support Automation Show

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 8, 2022 41:29


Jason Frazier, EVP of Marketing at Victorian Finance, Mortgage Coach, Marketer, and Podcast Producer at Next Level Loan Officers, and Founder of Mortgage X, joins the next episode of The Support Automation Show. Jason Frazier is an award-winning marketer, disruptive strategist, and technologist with more than twenty years of C-Level expertise. Today, he shares his expertise on how organizations can automate their marketing.

The Big 550 KTRS
The Big Sports Show Jason Frazier Beepball 6-23

The Big 550 KTRS

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 24, 2022 14:06


The Big Sports Show Jason Frazier Beepball 6-23 by

how i met your mortgage
“how i met your mortgage” Season 5 Episode 20 - Special Guest: Jason Frazier

how i met your mortgage

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 9, 2022 36:03


Special Guest Jason Frazier#howimetyourmortgage​ #justthetipscoaching​ #justthetips​ #salescoachingdenver​ #salescoaching​ #realestate​ #mortgage​ #sales​ #salestips​ #businesstips​ #tunein​ #podcast​ #videocast​ #applepodcast​ #spotifypodcast

Next Level Loan Officers
This isn't your daddy's mortgage industry w/Jason Frazier

Next Level Loan Officers

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 27, 2022 23:56


On this episode Frazier joins Sean Z and Kellen to talk about all the opportunities for business that loan officers have in the current market. Frazier also talks about his new role inside next level, how the community was built for this market, and why this isn't your daddy's mortgage industry any more. 1:45 Frazier's nnouncement7:30 The power is in the group13:45 This is different16:15 Committing to the process19:40 Power 90Quotes:“Next level is a like a real-time dynamic playbook for LOs that gets updated every day.”“The power of our community is due to the collective expertise of our members.”“I love times like these because of the opportunities that a market like this provides.”“This isn't your daddy's mortgage industry anymore.”“Business is always done in every market, the difference is who is doing the business.”Key Takeaways:Learning from an active mortgage pro will make all the difference in how you can approach your business. If you take what you learn and execute, you will be able to get business than you wouldn't normally get.These times are different and you need to be different in kind. Actions that matter is not just a saying, it is the foundation for success if you execute. Don't waste the opportunity to learn from those that know how to win in any market. Links:Next Level Loan Officers - www.BecomeNL.comLoan Officer Events - loanofficerevents.comNext Level Coaching Call - https://nl.nextlevello.com/schedule-consultationebk1Ea8h Social Media:Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/NextLevelLoanOfficers/YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwSyHzkvBri1YWJSH7df1CQLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/next-level-loan-officers/about/Text the word: nextlevel to 36260 to download our app

Screaming in the Cloud
Keeping Life on the Internet Friction Free with Jason Frazier

Screaming in the Cloud

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 16, 2022 37:12


About JasonJason Frazier is a Software Engineering Manager at Ekata, a Mastercard Company. Jason's team is responsible for developing and maintaining Ekata's product APIs. Previously, as a developer, Jason led the investigation and migration of Ekata's Identity Graph from AWS Elasticache to Redis Enterprise Redis on Flash, which brought an average savings of $300,000/yr.Links: Ekata: https://ekata.com/ Email: jason.frazier@ekata.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonfrazier56 TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig is the solution for securing DevOps. They have a blog post that went up recently about how an insecure AWS Lambda function could be used as a pivot point to get access into your environment. They've also gone deep in-depth with a bunch of other approaches to how DevOps and security are inextricably linked. To learn more, visit sysdig.com and tell them I sent you. That's S-Y-S-D-I-G dot com. My thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: Today's episode is brought to you in part by our friends at MinIO the high-performance Kubernetes native object store that's built for the multi-cloud, creating a consistent data storage layer for your public cloud instances, your private cloud instances, and even your edge instances, depending upon what the heck you're defining those as, which depends probably on where you work. It's getting that unified is one of the greatest challenges facing developers and architects today. It requires S3 compatibility, enterprise-grade security and resiliency, the speed to run any workload, and the footprint to run anywhere, and that's exactly what MinIO offers. With superb read speeds in excess of 360 gigs and 100 megabyte binary that doesn't eat all the data you've gotten on the system, it's exactly what you've been looking for. Check it out today at min.io/download, and see for yourself. That's min.io/download, and be sure to tell them that I sent you.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This one is a bit fun because it's a promoted episode sponsored by our friends at Redis, but my guest does not work at Redis, nor has he ever. Jason Frazier is a Software Engineering Manager at Ekata, a Mastercard company, which I feel, like, that should have some sort of, like, music backstopping into it just because, you know, large companies always have that magic sheen on it. Jason, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.Jason: Yeah. Thanks for inviting me. Happy to be here.Corey: So, other than the obvious assumption, based upon the fact that Redis is kind enough to be sponsoring this episode, I'm going to assume that you're a Redis customer at this point. But I'm sure we'll get there. Before we do, what is Ekata? What do you folks do?Jason: So, the whole idea behind Ekata is—I mean, if you go to our website, our mission statement is, “We want to be the global leader in online identity verification.” What that really means is, in more increasingly digital world, when anyone can put anything they want into any text field they want, especially when purchasing anything online—Corey: You really think people do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?Jason: I know. It's shocking to think that someone could lie about who they are online. But that's sort of what we're trying to solve specifically in the payment space. Like, I want to buy a new pair of shoes online, and I enter in some information. Am I really the person that I say I am when I'm trying to buy those shoes? To prevent fraudulent transactions. That's really one of the basis that our company goes on is trying to reduce fraud globally.Corey: That's fascinating just from the perspective of you take a look at cloud vendors at the space that I tend to hang out with, and a lot of their identity verification of, is this person who they claim to be, in fact, is put back onto the payment providers. Take Oracle Cloud, which I periodically beat up but also really enjoy aspects of their platform on, where you get to their always free tier, you have to provide a credit card. Now, they'll never charge you anything until you affirmatively upgrade the account, but—“So, what do you do need my card for?” “Ah, identity and fraud verification.” So, it feels like the way that everyone else handles this is, “Ah, we'll make it the payment networks' problem.” Well, you're now owned by Mastercard, so I sort of assume you are what the payment networks, in turn, use to solve that problem.Jason: Yeah, so basically, one of our flagship products and things that we return is sort of like a score, from 0 to 400, on how confident we are that this person is who they are. And it's really about helping merchants help determine whether they should either approve, or deny, or forward on a transaction to, like, a manual review agent. As well as there's also another use case that's even more popular, which is just, like, account creation. As you can imagine, there's lots of bots on everyone's [laugh] favorite app or website and things like that, or customers offer a promotion, like, “Sign up and get $10.”Well, I could probably get $10,000 if I make a thousand random accounts, and then I'll sign up with them. But, like, make sure that those accounts are legitimate accounts, that'll prevent, like, that sort of promo abuse and things like that. So, it's also not just transactions. It's also, like, account openings and stuff, make sure that you actually have real people on your platform.Corey: The thing that always annoyed me was the way that companies decide, oh, we're going to go ahead and solve that problem with a CAPTCHA on it. It's, “No, no, I don't want to solve machine learning puzzles for Google for free in order to sign up for something. I am the customer here; you're getting it wrong somewhere.” So, I assume, given the fact that I buy an awful lot of stuff online, but I don't recall ever seeing anything branded with Ekata that you do this behind the scenes; it is not something that requires human interaction, by which I mean, friction.Jason: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. It's behind the scenes. That's exactly what I was about to segue to is friction, is trying to provide a frictionless experience for users. In the US, it's not as common, but when you go into Europe or anything like that, it's fairly common to get confirmations on transactions and things like that.You may have to, I don't know text—or get a code text or enter that online to basically say, like, “Yes, I actually received this.” But, like, helping—and the reason companies do that is for that, like, extra bit of security and assurance that that's actually legitimate. And obviously, companies would like to prefer not to have to do that because, I don't know, if I'm trying to buy something, this website makes me do something extra, the site doesn't make me do anything extra, I'm probably going to go with that one because it's just more convenient for me because there's less friction there.Corey: You're obviously limited in how much you can say about this, just because it's here's a list of all the things we care about means that great, you've given me a roadmap, too, of things to wind up looking at. But you have an example or two of the sort of the data that you wind up analyzing to figure out the likelihood that I'm a human versus a robot.Jason: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's fairly common across most payment forms. So, things like you enter in your first name, your last name, your address, your phone number, your email address. Those are all identity elements that we look at. We have two data stores: We have our Identity Graph and our Identity Network.The Identity Graph is what you would probably think of it, if you think of a web of a person and their identity, like, you have a name that's linked to a telephone, and that name is also linked to an address. But that address used to have previous people living there, so on and so forth. So, the various what we just call identity elements are the various things we look at. It's fairly common on any payment form, I'm sure, like, if you buy something on Amazon versus eBay or whatever, you're probably going to be asked, what's your name? What's your address? What's your email address? What's your telephone?Corey: It's one of the most obnoxious parts of buying things online from websites I haven't been to before. It's one of the genius ideas behind Apple Pay and the other centralized payment systems. Oh, yeah. They already know who you are. Just click the button, it's done.Jason: Yeah, even something as small as that. I mean, it gets a little bit easier with, like, form autocompletes and stuff like, oh, just type J and it'll just autocomplete everything for me. That's not the worst of the world, but it is still some amount of annoyance and friction. [laugh].Corey: So, as I look through all this, it seems like one of the key things you're trying to do since it's in line with someone waiting while something is spinning in their browser, that this needs to be quick. It also strikes me that this is likely not something that you're going to hit the same people trying to identify all the time—if so, that is its own sign of fraud—so it doesn't really seem like something can be heavily cached. Yet you're using Redis, which tells me that your conception of how you're using it might be different than the mental space that I put Redis into what I'm thinking about where this ridiculous architecture diagram is the Redis part going to go?Jason: Yeah, I mean, like, whenever anyone says Redis, thinks of Redis, I mean, even before we went down this path, you always think of, oh, I need a cache, I'll just stuff in Redis. Just use Redis as a cache here and there. I don't know, some small—I don't know, a few tens, hundreds gigabytes, maybe—cache, spin that up, and you're good. But we actually use Redis as our primary data store for our Identity Graph, specifically for the speed that we can get. Because if you're trying to look for a person, like, let's say you're buying something for your brother, how do we know if that's true or not? Because you have this name, you're trying to send it to a different address, like, how does that make sense? But how do we get from Corey to an address? Like, oh, maybe used to live with your brother?Corey: It's funny, you pick that as your example; my brother just moved to Dublin, so it's the whole problem of how do I get this from me to someone, different country, different names, et cetera? And yeah, how do you wind up mapping that to figure out the likelihood that it is either credit card fraud, or somebody actually trying to be, you know, a decent brother for once in my life?Jason: [laugh]. So, I mean, how it works is how you imagine you start at some entry point, which would probably be your name, start there and say, “Can we match this to this person's address that you believe you're sending to?” And we can say, “Oh, you have a person-person relationship, like he's your brother.” So, it maps to him, which we can then get his address and say, “Oh, here's that address. That matches what you're trying to send it to. Hey, this makes sense because you have a legitimate reason to be sending something there. You're not just sending it to some random address out in the middle of nowhere, for no reason.”Corey: Or the drop-shipping scams, or brushing scams, or one of—that's the thing is every time you think you've seen it all, all you have to do is look at fraud. That's where the real innovation seems to be happening, [laugh] no matter how you slice it.Jason: Yeah, it's quite an interesting space. I always like to say it's one of those things where if you had the human element in it, it's not super easy, but it's like, generally easy to tell, like, okay, that makes sense, or, oh, no, that's just complete garbage. But trying to do it at scale very fast in, like, a general case becomes an actual substantially harder problem. [laugh]. It's one of those things that people can probably do fairly well—I mean, that's why we still have manual reviews and things like that—but trying to do it automatically or just with computers is much more difficult. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, “Hee hee, I scammed a company out of 20 bucks is not the problem you're trying to avoid for.” It's the, “Okay, I just did that ten million times and now we have a different problem.”Jason: Yeah, exactly. I mean, one of the biggest losses for a lot of companies is, like, fraudulent transactions and chargebacks. Usually, in the case on, like, e-commerce companies—or even especially like nowadays where, as you can imagine, more people are moving to a more online world and doing shopping online and things like that, so as more people move to online shopping, some companies are always going to get some amount of chargebacks on fraudulent transactions. But when it happens at scale, that's when you start seeing many losses because not only are you issuing a chargeback, you probably sent out some products, that you're now out some physical product as well. So, it's almost kind of like a double-whammy. [laugh].Corey: So, as I look through all this, I tended to always view Redis in terms of, more or less, a key-value store. Is that still accurate? Is that how you wind up working with it? Or has it evolved significantly past them to the point where you can now do relational queries against it?Jason: Yeah, so we do use Redis as a key-value store because, like, Redis is just a traditional key-value store, very fast lookups. When we first started building out Identity Graph, as you can imagine, you're trying to model people to telephones to addresses; your first thought is, “Hey, this sounds a whole lot like a graph.” That's sort of what we did quite a few years ago is, let's just put it in some graph database. But as time went on and as it became much more important to have lower and lower latency, we really started thinking about, like, we don't really need all the nice and shiny things that, like, a graph database or some sort of graph technology really offers you. All we really need to do is I need to get from point A to point B, and that's it.Corey: Yeah, [unintelligible 00:10:35] graph database, what's the first thing I need to do? Well, spend six weeks in school trying to figure out exactly what the hell of graph database is because they're challenging to wrap your head around at the best of times. Then it just always seemed overpowered for a lot of—I don't want to say simple use cases; what you're doing is not simple, but it doesn't seem to be leveraging the higher-order advantages that graph database tends to offer.Jason: Yeah, it added a lot of complexity in the system, and [laugh] me and one of our senior principal engineers who's been here for a long time, we always have a joke: If you search our GitHub repository for… we'll say kindly-worded commit messages, you can see a very large correlation of those types of commit messages to all the commits to try and use a graph database from multiple years ago. It was not fun to work with, just added too much complexity, and we just didn't need all that shiny stuff. So, that's how we really just took a step back. Like, we really need to do it this way. We ended up effectively flattening the entire graph into an adjacency list.So, a key is basically some UUID to an entity. So, Corey, you'd have some UUID associated with you and the value would be whatever your information would be, as well as other UUIDs to links to the other entities. So, from that first retrieval, I can now unpack it, and, “Oh, now I have a whole bunch of other UUIDs I can then query on to get that information, which will then have more IDs associated with it,” is more or less sort of how we do our graph traversal and query this in our graph queries.Corey: One of the fun things about doing this sort of interview dance on the podcast as long as I have is you start to pick up what people are saying by virtue of what they don't say. Earlier, you wound up mentioning that we often use Redis for things like tens, or hundreds of gigabytes, which sort of leaves in my mind the strong implication that you're talking about something significantly larger than that. Can you disclose the scale of data we're talking about her?Jason: Yeah. So, we use Redis as our primary data store for our Identity Graph, and also for—soon to be for our Identity Network, which is our other database. But specifically for our Identity Graph, scale we're talking about, we do have some compression added on there, but if you say uncompressed, it's about 12 terabytes of data that's compressed, with replication into about four.Corey: That's a relatively decent compression factor, given that I imagine we're not talking about huge datasets.Jason: Yeah, so this is actually basically driven directly by cost: If you need to store less data, then you need less memory, therefore, you need to pay for less.Corey: So, our users once again have shored up my longtime argument that when it comes to cloud, cost and architecture are in fact the same thing. Please, continue by all means.Jason: I would be lying if I said that we didn't do weekly slash monthly reviews of costs. Where are we spending costs in AWS? How can we improve costs? How can we cut down on costs? How can you store less—Corey: You are singing my song.Jason: It is a [laugh] it is a constant discussion. But yeah, so we use Zstandard compression, which was developed at Facebook, and it's a dictionary-based compression. And the reason we went for this is—I mean like if I say I want to compress, like, a Word document down, like, you can get very, very, very high level of compression. It exists. It's not that interesting, everyone does it all the time.But with this we're talking about—so in that, basically, four or so terabytes of compressed data that we have, it's something around four to four-and-a-half billion keys and values, and so in that we're talking about each key-value only really having anywhere between 50 and 100 bytes. So, we're not compressing very large pieces of information. We're compressing very small 50 to 100 byte JSON values that we have give UUID keys and JSON strings stored as values. So, we're compressing these 50 to 100 byte JSON strings with around 70, 80% compression. I mean, that's using Zstandard with a custom dictionary, which probably gave us the biggest cost savings of all, if you can [unintelligible 00:14:32] your dataset size by 60, 70%, that's huge. [laugh].Corey: Did you start off doing this on top of Redis, or was this an evolution that eventually got you there?Jason: It was an evolution over time. We were formally Whitepages. I mean, Whitepages started back in the late-90s. It really just started off as a—we just—Corey: You were a very early adopter of Redis [laugh]. Yeah, at that point, like, “We got a time machine and started using it before it existed.” Always a fun story. Recruiters seem to want that all the time.Jason: Yeah. So, when we first started, I mean, we didn't have that much data. It was basically just one provider that gave us some amount of data, so it was kind of just a—we just need to start something quick, get something going. And so, I mean, we just did what most people do just do the simplest thing: Just stuff it all in a Postgres database and call it good. Yeah, it was slow, but hey, it was back a long time ago, people were kind of okay with a little bit—Corey: The world moved a bit slower back then.Jason: Everything was a bit slower, no one really minded too much, the scale wasn't that large. But business requirements always change over time and they evolve, and so to meet those ever-evolving business requirements, we move from Postgres, and where a lot of the fun commit messages that I mentioned earlier can be found is when we started working with Cassandra and Titan. That was before my time before I had started, but from what I understand, that was a very fun time. But then from there, that's when we really kind of just took a step back and just said, like, “There's so much stuff that we just don't need here. Let's really think about this, and let's try to optimize a bit more.”Like, we know our use case, why not optimize for our use case? And that's how we ended up with the flattened graph storage stuffing into Redis. Because everyone thought of Redis as a cache, but everyone also knows that—why is it a cache? Because it's fast. [laugh]. We need something that's very fast.Corey: I still conceptualize it as an in-memory data store, just because when I turned on disk persistence model back in 2011, give or take, it suddenly started slamming the entire data store to a halt for about three seconds every time it did it. It was, “What's this piece of crap here?” And it was, “Oh, yeah. Turns out there was a regression on Zen, which is what AWS is used as a hypervisor back then.” And, “Oh, yeah.”So, fork became an expensive call, it took forever to wind up running. So oh, the obvious lesson we take from this is, oh, yeah, Redis is not designed to be used with disk persistence. Wrong lesson to take from the behavior, but did cement, in my mind at least, the idea that this is something that we tend to use only as an in-memory store. It's clear that the technology has evolved, and in fact, I'm super glad that Redis threw you my direction to talk to you about this stuff because until talking to you, I was still—I got to admit—sort of in the position of thinking of it still as an in-memory data store because the fact that Redis says otherwise because they're envisioning it being something else, well okay, marketers going to market. You're a customer; it's a lot harder for me to talk smack about your approach to this thing, when I see you doing it for, let's be serious here, what is a very important use case. If identity verification starts failing open and everyone claims to be who they say they are, that's something is visible from orbit when it comes to the macroeconomic effect.Jason: Yeah, exactly. It's actually funny because before we move to primarily just using Redis, before going to fully Redis, we did still use Redis. But we used ElastiCache, we had it loaded into ElastiCache, but we also had it loaded into DynamoDB as sort of a, I don't want this to fail because we weren't comfortable with actually using Redis as a primary database. So, we used to use ElastiCache with a fallback to DynamoDB, just in that off chance, which, you know, sometimes it happens, sometimes it didn't. But that's when we basically just went searching for new technologies, and that's actually how we landed on Redis on Flash, which is a kind of breaks the whole idea of Redis as an in-memory database to where it's Redis, but it's not just an in-memory database, you also have flashback storage.Corey: So, you'll forgive me if I combine my day job with this side project of mine, where I fixed the horrifying AWS bills for large companies. My bias, as a result, is to look at infrastructure environments primarily through the lens of AWS bill. And oh, great, go ahead and use an enterprise offering that someone else runs because, sure, it might cost more money, but it's not showing up on the AWS bill, therefore, my job is done. Yeah, it turns out that doesn't actually work or the answer to every AWS billing problem is to migrate to Azure to GCP. Turns out that doesn't actually solve the problem that you would expect.But you're obviously an enterprise customer of Redis. Does that data live in your AWS account? Is it something using as their managed service and throwing over the wall so it shows up as data transfer on your side? How is that implemented? I know they've got a few different models.Jason: There's a couple of aspects onto how we're actually bill. I mean, so like, when you have ElastiCache, you're just billed for your, I don't know, whatever nodes using, cache dot, like, r5 or whatever they are… [unintelligible 00:19:12]Corey: I wish most people were using things that modern. But please, continue.Jason: But yeah, so you basically just build for whatever last cache nodes you have, you have your hourly rate, I don't know, maybe you might reserve them. But with Redis Enterprise, the way that we're billed is there's two aspects. One is, well, the contract that we signed that basically allows us to use their technology [unintelligible 00:19:31] with a managed service, a managed solution. So, there's some amount that we pay them directly within some contract, as well as the actual nodes themselves that exist in the cluster. And so basically the way that this is set up, is we effectively have a sub-account within our AWS account that Redis Labs has—or not Redis Labs; Redis Enterprise—has access to, which they deploy directly into, and effectively using VPC peering; that's how we allow our applications to talk directly to it.So, we're built directly—or so the actual nodes of the cluster, which are i3.8x, I believe, on they basically just run EC2 instances. All of those instances, those exist on our bill. Like, we get billed for them; we pay for them. It's just basically some sub-account that they have access to that they can deploy into. So, we get billed for the instances of the cluster as well as whatever we pay for our enterprise contract. So, there's sort of two aspects to the actual billing of it.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats V-U-L-T-R.com slash screaming.Corey: So, it's easy to sit here as an engineer—and believe me, having been one for most of my career, I fall subject to this bias all the time—where it's, “Oh, you're going to charge me a management fee to run this thing? Oh, that's ridiculous. I can do it myself instead,” because, at least when I was learning in my dorm room, it was always a “Well, my time is free, but money is hard to come by.” And shaking off that perspective as my career continued to evolve was always a bit of a challenge for me. Do you ever find yourself or your team drifting toward the direction of, “Well, what we're paying for Redis Enterprise for? We could just run it ourselves with the open-source version and save whatever it is that they're charging on top of that?”Jason: Before we landed on Redis on Flash, we had that same thought, like, “Why don't we just run our own Redis?” And the decision to that is, well, managing such a large cluster that's so important to the function of our business, like, you effectively would have needed to hire someone full time to just sit there and stare at the cluster the whole time just to operate it, maintain it, make sure things are running smoothly. And it's something that we made a decision that, no, we're going to go with a managed solution. It's not easy to manage and maintain clusters of that size, especially when they're so important to business continuity. [laugh]. From our eyes, it was just not worth the investment for us to try and manage it ourselves and go with the fully managed solution.Corey: But even when we talk about it, it's one of those well—it's—everyone talks about, like, the wrong side of it first, the oh, it's easier if things are down if we wind up being able to say, “Oh, we have a ticket open,” rather than, “I'm on the support forum and waiting for people to get back to me.” Like, there's a defensibility perspective. We all just sort of, like sidestep past the real truth of it of, yeah, the people who are best in the world running and building these things are right now working on the problem when there is one.Jason: Yeah, they're the best in the world at trying to solve what's going on. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, because that is what we're paying them to do. Oh, right. People don't always volunteer for for-profit entities. I keep forgetting that part of it.Jason: Yeah, I mean, we've had some very, very fun production outages that just randomly happened because to our knowledge, we would just like—I would, like… “I have no idea what's going on.” And, you know, working with their support team, their DevOps team, honestly, it was a good, like, one-week troubleshooting. When we were validating the technology, we accidentally halted the database for seemingly no reason, and we couldn't possibly figure out what's going on. We kept talking to—we were talking to their DevOps team. They're saying, “Oh, we see all these writes going on for some reason.” We're like, “We're not sending any writes. Why is there writes?”And that was the whole back and forth for almost a week, trying to figure out what the heck was going on, and it happened to be, like, a very subtle case, in terms of, like, the how the keys and values are actually stored between RAM and flash and how it might swap in and out of flash. And like, all the way down to that level where I want to say we probably talked to their DevOps team at least two to three times, like, “Could you just explain this to me?” Like, “Sure,” like, “Why does this happen? I didn't know this was a thing.” So, on and so forth. Like, there's definitely some things that are fairly difficult to try and debug, which definitely helps having that enterprise-level solution.Corey: Well, that's the most valuable thing in any sort of operational experience where, okay, I can read the documentation and all the other things, and it tells me how it works. Great. The real value of whether I trust something in production is whether or not I know how it breaks where it's—Jason: Yeah.Corey: —okay—because the one thing you want to hear when you're calling someone up is, “Oh, yeah. We've seen this before. This is what you do to fix it.” The worst thing in the world is, “Oh, that's interesting. We've never seen that before.” Because then oh, dear Lord, we're off in the mists of trying to figure out what's going on here, while production is down.Jason: Yeah kind of like, “What is this database do, like, in terms of what do we do?” Like, I mean, this is what we store our Identity Graph in. This has the graph of people's information. If we're trying to do identity verification for transactions or anything, for any of our products, I mean, we need to be able to query this database. It needs to be up.We have a certain requirement in terms of uptime, where we want it at least, like, four nines of uptime. So, we also want a solution that, hey, even if it wants to break, don't break that bad. [laugh]. There's a difference between, “Oh, a node failed and okay, like, we're good in 10, 20 seconds,” versus, “Oh, node failed. You lost data. You need to start reloading your dataset, or you can't query this anymore.” [laugh]. There's a very large difference between those two.Corey: A little bit, yeah. That's also a great story to drive things across. Like, “Really? What is this going to cost us if we pay for the enterprise version? Great. Is it going to be more than some extortionately large number because if we're down for three hours in the course of a year, that's we owe our customers back for not being able to deliver, so it seems to me this is kind of a no-brainer for things like that.”Jason: Yeah, exactly. And, like, that's part of the reason—I mean, a lot of the things we do at Ekata, we usually go with enterprise-level for a lot of things we do. And it's really for that support factor in helping reduce any potential downtime for what we have because, well, if we don't consider ourselves comfortable or expert-level in that subject, I mean, then yeah, if it goes down, that's terrible for our customers. I mean, it's needed for literally every single query that comes through us.Corey: I did want to ask you, but you keep talking about, “The database” and, “The cluster.” That seems like you have a single database or a single cluster that winds up being responsible for all of this. That feels like the blast radius of that thing going down must be enormous. Have you done any research into breaking that out into smaller databases? What is it that's driven you toward this architectural pattern?Jason: Yeah, so for right now, so we have actually three regions were deployed into. We have a copy of it in us-west in AWS, we have one an eu-central-1, and we also have one, an ap-southeast-1. So, we have a complete copy of this database in three separate regions, as well as we're spread across all the available availability zones for that region. So, we try and be as multi-AZ as we can within a specific region. So, we have thought about breaking it down, but having high availability, having multiple replication factors, having also, you know, it stored in multiple data centers, provides us at least a good level of comfortability.Specifically, in our US cluster, we actually have two. We literally also—with a lot of the cost savings that we got, we actually have two. We have one that literally sits idle 24/7 that we just call our backup and our standby where it's ready to go at a moment's notice. Thankfully, we haven't had to use it since I want to say its creation about a year-and-a-half ago, but it sits there in that doomsday scenario: “Oh, my gosh, this cluster literally cannot function anymore. Something crazy catastrophic happened,” and we can basically hot swap back into another production-ready cluster as needed, if needed.Because the really important thing is that if we broke it up into two separate databases if one of them goes down, that could still fail your entire query. Because what if that's the database that held your address? We can still query you, but we're going to try and get your address and well, there, your traversal just died because you can no longer get that. So, even trying to break it up doesn't really help us too much. We can still fail the entire traversal query.Corey: Yeah, which makes an awful lot of sense. Again, to be clear, you've obviously put thought into this goes way beyond the me hearing something in passing and saying, “Hey, you considered this thing?” Let's be very clear here. That is the sign of a terrible junior consultant. “Well, it sounds like what you built sucked. Did you consider building something that didn't suck?” “Oh, thanks, Professor. Really appreciate your pointing that out.” It's one of those useful things.Jason: It's like, “Oh, wow, we've been doing this for, I don't know, many, many years.” It's like, “Oh, wow, yeah. I haven't thought about that one yet.” [laugh].Corey: So, it sounds like you're relatively happy with how Redis has worked out for you as the primary data store. If you were doing it all again from scratch, would you make the same technology selection there or would you go in a different direction?Jason: Yeah, I think I'd make the same decision. I mean, we've been using Redis on Flash for at this point three, maybe coming up to four years at this point. There's a reason we keep renewing our contract and just keep continuing with them is because, to us, it just fits our use case so well, and we very much choose to continue going with this direction in this technology.Corey: What would you have them change as far as feature enhancements and new options being enabled there? Because remember, asking them right now in front of an audience like this puts them in a situation where they cannot possibly refuse. Please, how would you improve Redis from where it is now?Jason: I like how you think. That's [laugh] a [fair way to 00:28:42] to describe it. There's a couple of things for optimizations that can always be done. And, like, specifically with, like, Redis on Flash, there's some issue we had with storing as binary keys that to my knowledge hasn't necessarily been completed yet that basically prevents us from storing as binary, which has some amount of benefit because well, binary keys require less memory to store. When you're talking about 4 billion keys, even if you're just saving 20 bytes of key, like you're talking about potentially hundreds of gigabytes of savings once you—Corey: It adds up with the [crosstalk 00:29:13].Jason: Yeah, it adds up pretty quick. [laugh]. So, that's probably one of the big things that we've been in contact with them about fixing that hasn't gotten there yet. The other thing is, like, there's a couple of, like, random… gotchas that we had to learn along the way. It does add a little bit of complexity in our loading process.Effectively, when you first write a value into the database it'll write to RAM, but then once it gets flushed to flash, the database effectively asks itself, “Does this value already exist in flash?” Because once it's first written, it's just written to RAM, it isn't written to backing flash. And if it says, “No it's not,” the database then does a write to write it into Flash and then evict it out of RAM. That sounds pretty innocent, but if it already exists in flash when you read it, it says, “Hey, I need to evict this does it already exist in Flash?” “Yep.” “Okay, just chuck it away. It already exists, we're good.”It sounds pretty nice, but this is where we accidentally halted our database is once we started putting a huge amount of load on the cluster, our general throughput on peak day is somewhere in the order of 160 to 200,000 Redis operations per second. So, you're starting to think of, hey, you might be evicting 100,000 values per second into Flash, you're talking about added 100,000 operate or write operations per second into your cluster, and that accidentally halted our database. So, the way we actually go around this is once we write our data store, we actually basically read the whole thing once because if you read every single key, you pretty much guarantee to cycle everything into Flash, so it doesn't have to do any of those writes. For right now, there is no option to basically say that, if I write—for our use case, we do very little writes except for upfront, so it'd be super nice for our use case, if we can say, “Hey, our write operations, no, I want you to actually do a full write-through to flash.” Because, you know, that would effectively cut our entire database prep in half. We no longer had to do that read to cycle everything through. Those are probably the two big things, and one of the biggest gotchas that we ran into [laugh] that maybe it isn't, so known.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where can they find you? And I will also theorize wildly, that if you're like basically every other company out there right now, you're probably hiring on your team, too.Jason: Yeah, I very much am hiring; I'm actually hiring quite a lot right now. [laugh]. So, they can reach me, my email is simply jason.frazier@ekata.com. I unfortunately, don't have a Twitter handle. Or you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty sure most people have LinkedIn nowadays.But yeah, and also feel free to reach out if you're also interested in learning more or opportunities, like I said, I'm hiring quite extensively. I'm specifically the team that builds our actual product APIs that we offer to customers, so a lot of the sort of latency optimizations that we do usually are kind of through my team, in coordination with all the other teams, since we need to build a new API with this requirement. How do we get that requirement? [laugh]. Like, let's go start exploring.Corey: Excellent. I will, of course, throw a link to that in the [show notes 00:32:10] as well. I want to thank you for spending the time to speak with me today. I really do appreciate it.Jason: Yeah. I appreciate you having me on. It's been a good chat.Corey: Likewise. I'm sure we will cross paths in the future, especially as we stumble through the wide world of, you know, data stores in AWS, and this ecosystem keeps getting bigger, but somehow feels smaller all the time.Jason: Yeah, exactly. You know, we'll still be where we are hopefully, approving all of your transactions as they go through, make sure that you don't run into any friction.Corey: Thank you once again, for speaking to me, I really appreciate it.Jason: No problem. Thanks again for having me.Corey: Jason Frazier, Software Engineering Manager at Ekata. This has been a promoted episode brought to us by our friends at Redis. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, insulting comment telling me that Enterprise Redis is ridiculous because you could build it yourself on a Raspberry Pi in only eight short months.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Next Level Loan Officers
Becoming a Mortgage Difference Maker w/Jason Frazier

Next Level Loan Officers

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 29, 2021 24:06


On this final episode of 2021, Jason Frazier joins Kellen Vaughn to talk about the mindset of a mortgage difference maker. The guys also discuss the recent Next Level Mastermind in Dallas along with the ONE thing that Loan Officers should start doing today that will reap rewards tomorrow.  3:30 Consumer First Mindset 5:40 Be a difference maker 11:50 Building blueprints 16:50 Number one opportunity Quotes: “You can help everyone!” “It is time to break down the barriers of thinking that sales is different than marketing.” “The consumer journey is no longer linear.” “This work isn't easy. If you're in this business for legacy, it is going to be hard work.” “Once you understand where your expertise is and where you can help the most people, you triple down on that blueprint.” “The greatest opportunity for loan officers right now is Youtube.” Key Takeaways: A loan officer getting to the consumer first is beneficial for everyone, including the agent.  Build a strong referral network so you can help as many people as possible, even if you are helping them to go somewhere else.  Sales, marketing, being an advisor, and education is all the SAME. The more you understand about your ideal customer, the easier your marketing is and the better your conversions will be.  Don't market to consumers that you don't have expertise in helping. Stop doing content that consumers don't care about.   Links: Next Level Loan Officers - www.BecomeNL.com Loan Officer Events - loanofficerevents.com Next Level Coaching Call - https://nl.nextlevello.com/schedule-consultationebk1Ea8h   Social Media: Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/NextLevelLoanOfficers/ YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwSyHzkvBri1YWJSH7df1CQ LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/next-level-loan-officers/about/  Text the word: nextlevel to 36260 to download our app 

HWS_Podcast
Jason Frazier the CEO/President of MindsEye.

HWS_Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 16, 2021 75:20


In this episode of HWS, I'll be conversing with Jason Frazier the CEO/President of MindsEye. Come listen to Jason tell his amazing story and how his company is providing an amazing service to the visually impaired community. Trust me, you don't want to miss this one. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Empowering People More Podcast with Eddy Perez
Season 2, Episode 17: Guest: Jason Frazier: The Future

Empowering People More Podcast with Eddy Perez

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 15, 2021 15:09


We welcome the one and only Jason Frazier to the guest seat today on Empowering People More with Eddy Perez.Jason has been the Chief Strategy Officer and EVP of Marketing for EPM and has made waves in any surfer's paradise when it comes to the future and what it entails.Jason certainly has the X factor! See what we did there!Tune in!

Eulerity Presents The Darwinian Times: Survival Of The Nimblest

What makes a great leader? It's the way they inspire, advise, and rally for others. We asked top industry leaders two questions. First, what is the culture of your company? Second, what is the culture of franchising as a whole? Our third and final episode features Samir Daoud, CFE, Franchise Director, Gold Star Chili and Tom & Chee, Jason Frazier, President and Chief Operating Officer, Skyhawks Sports Academy, Tyler Demuth, Director of Franchise Growth, Teriyaki Madness, and Salomon Mishaan, Founder, President & CEO, Oxxo Care Cleaners.

New Releases
Fintech Friday Episode #26 with Jason Frazier

New Releases

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 4, 2021 30:23


The MindShare Podcast
Your X Factor in Marketing for the Real Estate Industry with Special Guest, Chief Strategy Officer & EVP of Marketing for EPM – Jason Frazier

The MindShare Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 29, 2021 67:05


He is a strategist, a highly sought-after public speaker, and an award-winning marketer with more than 20 years of C-Level experience. He currently serves as the Chief Strategy Officer & EVP of Marketing for EPM. He is also a marketing coach for Next Level Loan Officers, podcast producer/host, serves as an advisor to PitchHub, and Lender Price, along with serving on the Board of Governors for NAHREP.This week on the show I am joined by Chief Strategy Officer & EVP of Marketing for EPM – Jason Frazier as we talk "Your X Factor in Marketing for the Real Estate Industry".This Episode is sponsored by KiTS Keep-in-Touch Systems and Equity Prime Mortgage.Equity Prime Mortgage, also knows as EPM is a great mortgage lender based out of Atlanta Georgia, where their mission is simply - Empowering People More. And in fact we at #MindShare101 have just signed an exclusive partnership with EPM to offer MindShare X on behalf of their group, for the real estate industry across the United States of America. And my good friend Jason Frazier is at the helm helping the entire EPM crew build a whole lot of mindshare, Make sure you follow them on Instagram at EPMPLUS.KiTS is always with us. KiTS offers a fully loaded cross channel marketing suite including Loop CRM, Websites, the most personalized Newsletters in Real Estate, Follow up tools, curated social content, WOW Calendars and so much more. All to help you manage your business, build MindShare and drive even more sales. You can learn more on my site mindshare101.com by clicking on Marketing.This show is a Founding Member of the Industry Syndicate Media Network.Please subscribe, rate the show, and leave a review. You can also get more #MindShare on Facebook @MindShare101 and Instagram @davidgreenspan101. Check out YouTube #MindShare101, and https://mindshare101.com/While on my site, be sure to download your FREE copy of The Ultimate Marketing Bundle for Realtors. It's 31 pages of marketing tips and tricks, and includes a 90 day content calendar!AND if you want to be part of our Private MindShare Community where we meet every month live to share ideas, tips, tricks, and to motivate each other, where our MindShare Masters get access to our private VIP Q&A with our Special PodCast Guests each week, and where you get daily marketing & sales tips delivered right to you, plus the opportunity to motivate, learn, and network with a whole bunch of people just like you, just click here to join - https://mindshare101.com/plans/group-coaching/ If you would like to be a guest on the show, or know someone that should be a guest on the show, or if you would like to Sponsor the show, send us a message to info@mindshare101.com

Loans On Demand Podcast
14: Jason Frazier — Why You Have to Innovate Your Marketing Approach

Loans On Demand Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 25, 2021 40:10


How do you stand out as a loan officer in a commoditized industry? As Jason Frazier, Chief Strategy Officer at EPM and a second-generation mortgage professional will tell you, it all comes down to marketing.    “The only way to stand out is by being 10 times better in something,” Jason says. “You're not going to be 10 times better at service. You're not going to be 10 times better at rate. You're not going to be 10 times better at experience. What you can be is 10 times better in your marketing, period.”   Jason, who's also worked in venture capital technology startups, for hedge funds and as a coach and consultant, sees the loan industry as one that's been slow to embrace the fundamentals of customer experience, marketing and technology. There's merit to the way things have traditionally been done, he reasons. But now, it's time to innovate. On this episode of the Loans on Demand Podcast, Luke and Jason talk about bringing a disruptor's mindset to your career as a loan officer.    What You'll Learn: How Jason has used the ACT framework to help both loan officers and agents close millions of deals since 2018 The importance of finding a coaching group Why you need to get rid of “cost mindset” in order to be successful And much more!   Favorite Quote: “The consumer doesn't want a mortgage. Nobody wakes up and thinks, ‘I want to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, I want to give you access to my bank account, I want to get all this paperwork and go through all that stuff.' Nobody wants that. So why are we selling that? Sell what they want. Sell the dream, which is homeownership.” — Jason Frazier   Connect with Jason: LinkedIn Instagram Personal website   How to Get Involved: LinkedIn Facebook ParagonDMG.com

Next Level Loan Officers
A Mission of Relevancy and Opportunity w/Jason Frazier

Next Level Loan Officers

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 21, 2021 27:53


On this episode, Frazier joins Sean Zalmanoff to talk about being on a mission of relevancy for the mortgage industry. Frazier and Sean also discuss AIME's recent event, marketing strategies, being a tech-enhanced loan officer,  and the massive opportunities that loan officers have in front of them. 1:15 Intro to Frazier2:30 The mission of relevancy5:15 AIME and Fuse recap12:00 Power 9013:40 Marketing strategies21:00 Using tech wisely25:00 This is your timeQuotes:“We want this business to endure and not be taken over by the headset jockeys.”“Advisors in this industry understand that one size fits all does not exist in our industry.”“AIME is about leveling up the entire mortgage broker community.”“The opportunity lies with LOs who can bridge the gap efficiently between the offline and online COVID world.”“The more that you're omnipresent, the better opportunity you have at conversion.”“This next decade is going to be won by the experts.”“Now is the best time ever to be in the mortgage industry because there is so much opportunity.”Key Takeaways:Technology needs to be a tool to enhance the modern LO, not replace them. The LOs need to have a focus on being relevant to the modern consumer or risk being forgotten. Mortgage events that don't include everyday professionals will eventually fade into obscurity.2020 was a unicorn event and you cannot base your business strategy on how you did business. The consumer journey is not linear and you have to adjust your messaging to be where they are. Awareness is always your first marketing step. Links:Next Level Loan Officers - www.BecomeNL.comLoan Officer Events - loanofficerevents.comNext Level Coaching Call - https://nl.nextlevello.com/schedule-consultationebk1Ea8h Social Media:Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/NextLevelLoanOfficers/YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwSyHzkvBri1YWJSH7df1CQLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/next-level-loan-officers/about/Text the word: nextlevel to 36260 to download our app

The Bullring
If You Want Someone to Paint a Picture

The Bullring

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 6, 2021 55:54


Alan Dietz and Zach Evans catch up with NASCAR Camping World Truck Series winner Tate Fogleman, Blizzard Series winner Casey Smith, SMART Modified Tour winner Brandon Ward, PASS Super Late Model winner Trevor Sunburn and Tri-City winner Jason Frazier in this episode of "The Bullring" presented by Five Star Race Car Bodies.

Tooele Happy Hour
Jason Frazier

Tooele Happy Hour

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 10, 2021 84:59


First let me apologize for the sound. Messed up a setting somewhere and it went to crap. Jason is running for Tooele City Counsel, He is a returning guest on the program. Jason is an Electrical Engineer for KSL, a pro 2A activist, and a father and life long resident of Tooele.

New Releases
Episode 3 - Jason Frazier

New Releases

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 19, 2021 26:59


jason frazier ginger bell
how i met your mortgage
“how i met your mortgage” Season 4 Episode 19 - Special Guest Jason Frazier

how i met your mortgage

Play Episode Listen Later May 26, 2021 32:40


Special guest: Jason Frazier#howimetyourmortgage​ #justthetipscoaching​ #justthetips​ #salescoachingdenver​ #salescoaching​ #realestate​ #mortgage​ #sales​ #salestips​ #businesstips​ #tunein​ #podcast​ #videocast​ #applepodcast​ #spotifypodcast

Laugh, Lend and Eat
Vision Summit 2021

Laugh, Lend and Eat

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 20, 2021 67:42


One of the wildest episodes we've recorded to date. Fobby talks with the founder and president of 20/20 Vision for Success Coaching, Christine Beckwith. The discussion is focused on the upcoming Vision Summit being held in Tampa, Fl. They are joined by Barry Habib, Jay Doran, Joe Panebianco, and Jason Frazier. This episode gives our listeners a taste of what's to come at the Vision Summit for sure!

Tooele Happy Hour
Tooele County 2A Movement wit Jason

Tooele Happy Hour

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 18, 2021 59:27


Jason Frazier joins tonight to talk about the counties 2A movement and the barriers that stand in the way. Tooele County 2A Sanctuary | Facebook Jason Frazier | Facebook

The Culture Matters Podcast
Season 4, Episode 37: Guest: Jason Frazier: Have a Different Mindset

The Culture Matters Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 20, 2020 153:35


In this episode, Jay interviews guest, Jason Frazier in a must-listen-to episode about having the right mindset to change the world as a marketer. If you are interested in influence, having the right voice and especially having the right mindset, then this episode is for you. In two and a half hours Jason and Jay have a highly impactful conversation about what Jason Frazier does BEST in the opinions here at Culture Matters.Have a listen!

The Case Against ... with Gary Meece
Episode 24: "I'VE HEARD FROM A LOT OF PEOPLE THAT HE HAS BEEN POSSESSED" Blood on Black: The Case Against the West Memphis 3, Volume I .

The Case Against ... with Gary Meece

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 15, 2019 35:34


https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Black-Against-Memphis-Killers-ebook/dp/B06XVT2976/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=blood+on+black&qid=1559059428&s=gateway&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Where-Monsters-Go-Against-Memphis-ebook/dp/B06XVNXCJV/ref=sr_1_1?crid=XNLYB8QUIQ7F&keywords=where+the+monsters+go&qid=1559059470&s=gateway&sprefix=where+the+monsters+go%2Caps%2C167&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-West-Memphis-Killers-ebook/dp/B07C7C4DCH/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=gary+meece&qid=1559059536&s=gateway&sr=8-3 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0753HJZ1P/?ie=UTF8&keywords=gary%20meece&qid=1559059573&ref_=sr_1_6&s=gateway&sr=8-6 https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Black-Against-Memphis-Killers-ebook/dp/B06XVT2976/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=gary+meece&qid=1559059573&s=gateway&sr=8-2 "I'VE HEARD FROM A LOT OF PEOPLE THAT HE HAS BEEN POSSESSED" Stories originating from Baldwin buddy Garrett Schwarting had almost as much credibility as the “Hobbs family secret” or the later imaginings of Aaron Hutcheson. During his many interviews with investigators, the 15-year-old Schwarting was a font of information, some of it clearly misinformation, some possibly disinformation, often not only at great odds with statements from others but with himself. While attempting to help Echols and Baldwin, Schwarting tended to confirm suspicions about them. He didn't help out Misskelley either. For instance, he said that his sister's best friend, Tiffany Allen, had been going out with Jessie, “and she would come to school telling me stories like he beat her and all kind of stuff like that. She had black eyes, busted lip.” Bryn Ridge, acting on a tip that Schwarting knew Echols and Baldwin and might have information on the murders, talked to Schwarting on May 19. Schwarting told Ridge that he had not seen Baldwin in over three weeks. On May 25, Schwarting told juvenile of ficer Steve Jones that Echols was not involved in the murders. Then, on June 7, the Monday after the arrests, Schwarting ran into Jones at Barfield's, a local store. Schwarting was looking for a copy of the Commercial Appeal so he could read about the arrests. He explained that Baldwin could not have been a part of the murders. Schwarting claimed that he had gone to the Baldwin residence on May 5 on three occasions, first at 7 p.m., then at 7:30 and finally a third time. Schwarting had wanted to borrow a long white Ozzy Osbourne T-shirt that the Baldwins could not find at first. So Schwarting returned twice more, bringing along his friend, 13-year-old Kevin Lawrence, the final time. Schwarting claimed he stayed and played Nintendo at Baldwin's home until 9 or 9:30, when he went to spend the night at Kevin's. At first Schwarting's alibi for Baldwin seemed to have backing (sort of) from Kevin Lawrence. Even so, Lawrence's version raised a question about Baldwin's school attendance that day. Jones compiled his information from Schwarting in a handwritten report dated June 7 and filed on June 10. On June 11, just before Ridge held an extensive interview with Schwarting, Lawrence told police that his mother had checked him out of school on May 5 at 12:45 p.m., and that Schwarting dropped by his home. Lawrence said that around 2 p.m. they went to Jason's home to retrieve a shirt he had loaned to Jason (over four hours earlier than Schwarting had described). After Mrs. Grinnell opened the door, Jason told them that “he couldn't find the shirt or that he had to go get it from his friend,” according to Lawrence's statement, handwritten by Ridge at the boy's request. The boys returned to Kevin's house. About 20 minutes later Schwarting went back over to Jason's, returned about 15 minutes later without the shirt, and left again for Jason's about 30 minutes later. That trip took about 30 minutes. Schwarting returned again without a shirt. Schwarting stayed at Lawrence's until about 7 or 8, playing Nintendo, before going home, said Lawrence. No one else had claimed that Jason and his mother were both home at around 2 p.m. that afternoon. Jason's attendance at school was documented. Schwarting claimed he was hanging around the Baldwin home until 9:30 while Lawrence claimed Schwarting had been at his home that evening. The timeline from Lawrence provided no alibi for Baldwin. Ridge then questioned Schwarting, who claimed he had gotten out of school at the usual time on May 5 and that Kevin showed up around 5 or 5:30 and they had gone to Kevin's home in Lakeshore, arriving about 6 or 6:30. Schwarting said he called his mother to get permission to spend the night with Lawrence. He claimed he had gone to Baldwin's home three times, at roughly 30-minute intervals, starting around 6:45, the last time staying and playing Super Nintendo with Matt, little Terry and Ken while Jason looked for the shirt. He said Ken left around 7:30 to 8:30. They began playing Street Fighter around 8. Schwarting also told Ridge that, after Jason cut his uncle's lawn, Jason had gone to Wal-Mart and played Street Fighter while a youth named Don Nam watched. (Nam initially gave a statement saying he had seen Baldwin at Walmart around 6 p.m. on May 5. He retracted the statement the next day.) Schwarting —- who didn't see Baldwin cutting grass or at Wal-Mart — said Baldwin left Wal-Mart at about 7 p.m. for home. Schwarting claimed that he had run into Nam at Wal-Mart later,. Nam told him about seeing Baldwin. Schwarting said he had learned details about Jason's lawn mowing earlier on June 11 from the newspaper. Ridge asked him: “… How do you know that's the night that occurred?” Schwarting: “It said in the paper that they came up missing May 5th.” Ridge then asked him what else he did that afternoon. Schwarting first replied that he shot pool at the Lakeshore store. Ridge pointed out that just prior to the interview that Schwarting told him they went on a picnic. He claimed “we went to little picnic at Hernando Lake. …. somewhere in Tennessee, I think.” Pressed about the date, Schwarting was sure of May 5. Ridge told him: “What I'm at is that two weeks after the murders occurred you don't remember going at Jason's house, now here it's a month and a half later and you remember that is the exact date and the exact times and everything exact about.” Schwarting: “Sir … I have talked to Matthew Baldwin couple of times since then … and I know he said that I was over there that one night. Then it started to come to me slower and slower.” Ridge pointed out that his story and Kevin's story “are no where near alike.” Ridge added: “You made a statement a little while ago that Jason didn't do this and that you're going to do anything you can to get him out of it.” Schwarting also gave a handwritten statement: “The night of the murders, I stayed the night with Kevin. I went to Jason's house 3 times that night. Once at 7:00 (he said he hasn't had time to find my shirt) again at 7:30 (he said come back in 30 min.) the third time, I brought my friend Kevin. We stayed at Jason's house until 9:00 p.m. then left. When we was at Jason's the last time, we played Street Fight II on SuperNintendo. At about 8:30 Ken's mom came to pick him up.” Schwarting agreed to take a polygraph test. On June 15, Schwarting changed his story: “On Wednesday, May 5th, I was at home because my mom won't let me stay anywhere unless it's at Kevin's house. I didn't stay at Kevin's that night but the next night I did. I stayed home, watched TV, played Nintendo and went to sleep at about 10 p.m. I didn't see Jason Baldwin at all that day or I didn't talk to him.” Police noted that Schwarting's version of going to Baldwin's home on May 5 actually occurred May 6. So much for that alibi. Schwarting had a wealth of other unreliable information to share. Schwarting passed along stories that Echols allegedly told him and Murray Farris, a leader of a local Wicca coven, while they were cleaning the pool at Farris' home in mid-May. Schwarting said he didn't know Farris well. Echols apparently was just hanging out. “We were trying to trick him,” said Schwarting on June 11, “not really tricking but trying to get him to confess. Just say he did it cause me and Murray both were tired of being questioned and we wanted to find out who had done it.” Echols didn't confess but he did boast about how he had poured gasoline on a cat, stuck a bottle rocket up its rear and lit the fuse. Echols told them he once choked a small boy with a noose until he turned blue and passed out. Earlier, on May 25, Schwarting told Jones that Baldwin and Misskelley were involved in a Satanic cult, along with Jerry Nearns, but that Echols was not involved in any type of cult or Satanic worship. Schwarting claimed Baldwin had once invited him to a meeting of Satan worshippers in a building behind Lakeshore. Schwarting refused Baldwin's invitation but Schwarting told acquaintances that he was studying witchcraft. Later, on June 7, he told Jones that Echols had a demon placed inside him by a man called Lucifier, and that Echols had lived with Lucifier prior to living with his parents. Schwarting said the demon possessing Echols must kill nine people before it becomes a God, with Baldwin being the first person to be killed (Echols would have been doing a poor job of fulfilling the demon's commands). Schwarting told police that Lucifier was involved in the murders. Now, he said, Echols' former girlfriend, Deanna Holcomb, was dating Lucifier, further claiming that she was “very much involved” in Satanic worship. He claimed that “Damien broke up with Deanna and then she met Lucifier and started learning black magic.” (Deanna had renounced her involvement in black magic and said that Echols practiced black magic). Schwarting said that Echols was bisexual and that he and Baldwin often argued when Echols spent time with Domini (Schwarting was an “ex, ex, ex-boyfriend” of Echols' girlfriend). Among the weird details: Lucifier at one time had a purple streak in his blond hair. Later, Schwarting claimed that Misskelley was afraid of Lucifier, who made Misskelley turn himself in, and that Misskelley had implicated Echols and Baldwin because he knew they were suspects. Schwarting said he did not believe that Echols had committed the murders, and named two other possible suspects, Jerry Allen Nearns and Frankie Knight, both of whom were interrogated by police. Then Schwarting talked further about Nearns, who had lived at Little's Trailer Park at the same time as Schwarting. Schwarting said Nearns belonged to a cult where they were sacrificing cats and that Misskelley and Baldwin were members. Schwarting said Nearns nailed a cat to a tree with a railroad spike and would stuff cats into jars, throw them into the air and hit them with a board. On June 11, he gave a statement to Ridge that included another mention of “Lusserfur,“ though he had no details about the alleged magickal mastermind and had never seen “Lusserfur,” helpfully adding that “Damien I've heard from a lot of people that he has been possessed.” Schwarting denied his earlier assertion that Baldwin was in the cult. Jason Frazier was a 16-year-old acquaintance of Schwarting's who told police on June 11 that he had talked with Schwarting about two weeks after the murders. A mutual acquaintance, Laura Maxwell, who had dated Echols, said that Schwarting had told Frazier that Echols and Baldwin held their devil worshipping meetings “in that park” — Robin Hood. Schwarting supposedly had heard from Baldwin that Damien had killed the boys because they saw something they weren't supposed to see. Frazier told Allen and Ridge about Schwarting: “He said … I know who did it, and all of that ... He told me Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols. .... “He said … that he was studying to be a psychic …. and him and this guy was studying it, and that … Damien and uh Jason did it, but Jessie's names was involved, so uh they was practicing their witch craft and, he didn't say how the boys got there, or anything, he just said, they did it and that's where they practiced their witch, their Satan stuff.” Frazier later in the interview gave a confused account of how Schwarting told him that Baldwin had nothing to do with the killings. Frazier said Schwarting told him “it was just Damien” but “he said that Damien didn't do it.” Frazier said his cousin, Jeff Hood, 15, had overheard the earlier conversation with Schwarting. Hood gave a handwritten statement June 15: “It had to been on a Saturday it was after the murders, me & my cousin Jason Fraizer were in front of the old belvedere apartments, it was in the morning time about 11 or 12 and Garrett Swarting was on a bike & he pulled up on his bike & asked for a cigeretes & started talking about White Which Craft & said the Jason Baldwin & Damien Echols did the murders. He studied which craft & said it came to him. When he told me I didn't believe him.” If there was truth in Schwarting's stories, it was difficult to discern.

Lykken on Lending
5-13-19 Lykken on Lending Weekly Reports: Alice, Andy, Joe, Les and Rob

Lykken on Lending

Play Episode Listen Later May 16, 2019 32:14


In this special Mother's Day episode of Lykken on Lending we have 2 Hot Topic interviews for you: Marcia Davies and her daughter Emily Davies as well as Jason Frazier and his mother, Marilyn Richardson. Marcia Davies is the Chief Operating Officer and Founder of mPower at Mortgage Bankers Association. Her daughter, Emily Davies, is the Senior Customer Relationship Manager for Freddie Mac. Jason Frazier specializes in Real Estate & Mortgage Marketing, Social Media, Technology, and Branding for the modern consumer. Ms. Richardson is the President and CEO for Mason-McDuffie Mortgage Corporation and a member of the Board of Directors.  She is responsible for the operations of the Company, including the Finance, Capital Markets, Administration and Operation departments (underwriting, compliance, closing and post closing). As usual, the first half of the program will feature Joe Farr providing you a rate & market update, followed by Les Parker's Market-Logics Live, a macroeconomic perspective on the economy with a music parody.  Next is Alice Alvey of Union Home providing a regulatory & legislative update followed by Allen Pollack giving us a Tech Report of the latest technology impacting our industry. Then we wrap up the first half the program with Andy Schell, a/k/a “Profit Doctor” sharing ideas on how to improve your bottom line. Read more... In this special Mother's Day episode of Lykken on Lending we have 2 Hot Topic interviews for you: Marcia Davies and her daughter Emily Davies as well as Jason Frazier and his mother, Marilyn Richardson. Marcia Davies is the Chief Operating Officer and Founder of mPower at Mortgage Bankers Association. Her daughter, Emily Davies, is the Senior Customer Relationship Manager for Freddie Mac. Jason Frazier specializes in Real Estate & Mortgage Marketing, Social Media, Technology, and Branding for the modern consumer. Ms. Richardson is the President and CEO for Mason-McDuffie Mortgage Corporation and a member of the Board of Directors.  She is responsible for the operations of the Company, including the Finance, Capital Markets, Administration and Operation departments (underwriting, compliance, closing and post closing). As usual, the first half of the program will feature Joe Farr providing you a rate & market update, followed by Les Parker's Market-Logics Live, a macroeconomic perspective on the economy with a music parody.  Next is Alice Alvey of Union Home providing a regulatory & legislative update followed by Allen Pollack giving us a Tech Report of the latest technology impacting our industry. Then we wrap up the first half the program with Andy Schell, a/k/a “Profit Doctor” sharing ideas on how to improve your bottom line. Read more...

Lykken on Lending
5-13-19 Mother's Day: Mentorship and Becoming a Leader in the Mortgage Industry

Lykken on Lending

Play Episode Listen Later May 13, 2019 103:59


In this special Mother's Day episode of Lykken on Lending we have 2 Hot Topic interviews for you: Marcia Davies and her daughter Emily Davies as well as Jason Frazier and his mother, Marilyn Richardson. Marcia Davies is the Chief Operating Officer and Founder of mPower at Mortgage Bankers Association. Her daughter, Emily Davies, is the Senior Customer Relationship Manager for Freddie Mac. Jason Frazier specializes in Real Estate & Mortgage Marketing, Social Media, Technology, and Branding for the modern consumer. Ms. Richardson is the President and CEO for Mason-McDuffie Mortgage Corporation and a member of the Board of Directors.  She is responsible for the operations of the Company, including the Finance, Capital Markets, Administration and Operation departments (underwriting, compliance, closing and post closing). As usual, the first half of the program will feature Joe Farr providing you a rate & market update, followed by Les Parker's Market-Logics Live, a macroeconomic perspective on the economy with a music parody.  Next is Alice Alvey of Union Home providing a regulatory & legislative update followed by Allen Pollack giving us a Tech Report of the latest technology impacting our industry. Then we wrap up the first half the program with Andy Schell, a/k/a “Profit Doctor” sharing ideas on how to improve your bottom line. Read more... In this special Mother's Day episode of Lykken on Lending we have 2 Hot Topic interviews for you: Marcia Davies and her daughter Emily Davies as well as Jason Frazier and his mother, Marilyn Richardson. Marcia Davies is the Chief Operating Officer and Founder of mPower at Mortgage Bankers Association. Her daughter, Emily Davies, is the Senior Customer Relationship Manager for Freddie Mac. Jason Frazier specializes in Real Estate & Mortgage Marketing, Social Media, Technology, and Branding for the modern consumer. Ms. Richardson is the President and CEO for Mason-McDuffie Mortgage Corporation and a member of the Board of Directors.  She is responsible for the operations of the Company, including the Finance, Capital Markets, Administration and Operation departments (underwriting, compliance, closing and post closing). As usual, the first half of the program will feature Joe Farr providing you a rate & market update, followed by Les Parker's Market-Logics Live, a macroeconomic perspective on the economy with a music parody.  Next is Alice Alvey of Union Home providing a regulatory & legislative update followed by Allen Pollack giving us a Tech Report of the latest technology impacting our industry. Then we wrap up the first half the program with Andy Schell, a/k/a “Profit Doctor” sharing ideas on how to improve your bottom line. Read more...

The Case Against ... with Gary Meece
Episode 16: "I'll get you. I'm gonna kill you. You're gonna die." Ep. 16 of the Case Against

The Case Against ... with Gary Meece

Play Episode Listen Later May 13, 2019 52:04


  From "Blood on Black"   "I'LL GET YOU, I'M GONNA KILL YOU. YOU'RE GONNA DIE."   Echols was notorious around West Memphis and Marion for walking everywhere, often in a black trenchcoat. He testified that he walked around areas of West Memphis frequently, and was in the area where his victims lived “probably an average of two or three times a week” over “probably at least two years.” Echols would testify that he often had to walk through the neighborhood of the victims to make his way between Lakeshore and his parents' trailer on South Broadway. Despite having lived in the neighboring Mayfair Apartments, he testified that he had never been in Robin Hood. That claim had no credibility, since the pipe over 10 Mile Bayou offered one of the few pedes- trian shortcuts between the Echols/Hutchison trailer and Lakeshore — a route Echols testified he regularly used. When he moved to Salem, Mass., briefly, after his release from prison, the Lurker in Black quickly gained notoriety as the convicted child killer who was constantly walking around the town. Now apparently based in New York City's Harlem, he is just one amid a vast throng of black-clad hipsters trudging around the big city. Echols has described this lifelong pattern of obsessive walking in interviews. He told Justin M. Norton of www.metalsucks.net that “When I first got out, I would go and walk and walk for hours, just looking in shop windows and feeling the wind and the rain. I would be exhausted to the core and want to go lay down, but as soon as I'd get back in, I would want to go right back out.” Echols in his 2012 memoir, “Life After Death,” described, without a lot of specifics, his dissatisfaction in his relationship in 1993 with Domini and how he sought out his old girlfriend: “I thought of Deanna frequently, wondering what had happened. Through sheer coincidence (I use that word but don't believe there's any such thing) I found out Deanna's family had started attending church. The possibility of seeing her again plagued me. I couldn't get it out of my head. I constantly wondered what would happen, how she would react, what I would see in her eyes, and I had a plethora of questions I needed answers to. I couldn't understand how she had so thoroughly and completely severed our connection. I needed an explanation ... “Sunday morning found me preparing to descend into the hellish realm of fundamentalism. ... I knew I didn't belong there but I had to do it or I would get no rest. .... “Scanning the rows, I saw Deanna sitting in the dead center of the room with her family. ... I couldn't breathe. She looked at me ... and looked away. I didn't even see a flicker of recognition. What did that mean? “I had been expecting something — anything — but her eyes passed over me as if I were not even there. ... “When it was over, I walked outside and stood on the sidewalk. I was trying to figure out what this meant as I watched her family get in their car and drive away.” Echols did not give a date for this attempted encounter, but the stalking incident closed a chapter in the book that then opened on news of the May 5 killings. After his arrest, reports surfaced about Echols, or someone closely resembling him, observing children in an obsessive and secretive manner. Some reports predated the killings. On March 1, 1993, Jennifer Ball, who lived at Lakeshore, reported to police that she had been threatened by Michael “Beshears” (Beshires), 14, on several occasions. On March 1, she said, someone had threatened to kill her by shouting through her window. The police report de- scribed “Suspect B,” who was not Beshires, as a slim white male about 18 dressed in a black T-shirt, black jeans and a black jacket. Jennifer saw him make the threats, then enter the fenced-in backyard. On June 10, she gave police this hand-written statement: “The first contact I had with Damien Echols was when he was at my window (March 1 93). I had heard about him and heard that he was into devil worshipping. So was Michael & Amanda Lancaster. Well Michael had told her that he was going to blow my house up & stay away from me. Well she didn't believe him & we continued to be friends. Well he called her one day & told her to watch out that he had Mark Beshires & Damien Echols watching us all this was happening in March. About March 1 I was on three-way with Amanda Lancaster & Jack Held. It was storming that day. I kept on hearing something but I thought that it was just the rain. Well I was in the kitchen. I was look- ing out the window & somebody jumped in front of it shouting ‘you bitch, I'll get you, I'm gonna kill you. You're gonna die' I started screaming & hollering I didn't know what to do. I dropped down in the corner of the kitchen. Amanda was hollering at me ‘Jennifer what is wrong. Jennifer what is going on.' I told her that someone was at my window & it looked like Damien. She told me stay where I was & she was going to call me right back. I hung up the phone. I looked out the window to see if he (Damien) was still there. He was. He just glared at me & said ‘you're dead bitch' & ran off. I was so scared. Amanda called me back & I was crying. I told her what Damien had said. She just sat their like, ‘oh my god.' About 5 minutes later she said ‘Jennifer, Jennifer was Damien wearing pure black & a black trench coat?' I said ‘Yes. Why?' she said ‘He's walking down the street and eyeing my house.' She got really scared & started crying & then her house alarm went off. She was screaming & crying. I didn't know what to do. I had a feeling that Damien was going to be watching us & after us. When my mom, Teresa Wood- son, got home from work that day, I told her what hap- pened. She didn't know what to do. She waited for my stepdad, Don Woodson, to get home. She told him about it. He really didn't know what to do either. Me & my mom were talking & she asked me to describe Damien. I told her that he had black hair. & these eyes that looked black. He was dressed in a black shirt, black jeans & a black trench coat. She asked me if he was tall. I told her yes. She said she remembers seeing him in Wal- Mart. This was about 10 minutes after he had done passed by Amanda's house & came up to mine. She decided to call the police. Officer Reese came to our house. She asked me to describe Damien. I did she (Officer Reese) asked me if I was sure it was Damien. I told her no. I was scared that if Damien found out I told, he would definitely kill me. So the person at my window was left blank. Well about a month ago I was in Kroger. I had left my mother to go get something. While I was looking I noticed that somebody kept passing by & looking at me. When I looked up, I discovered that it was Damien. I just ran off. I didn't tell my mom because I didn't want her to worry so I let it slide by. About 3 weekends ago I went skating with Amanda Lancaster. We were having a good ol time until Damien walked in. I looked at Amanda & pointed. She just said oh my god. I told her I was going to go call my mom. She told me to just ignore him. (She had told Amy Allison when the 3 boys first got murdered that Damien & some boy named Jason had murdered them. Amy just ignored her.) Well me & Amanda were walking around the skat- ing rink. We decided to sit down & get something to drink. We were about 2 tables over from Damien, Jason Baldwin & his girlfriend Heather. I don't know her last name. Well we were all singing & having a good time. I noticed that Damien kept on staring at me. I just ignored it or at least I tried to. I looked up & noticed that him & Jason were whispering to each other & Pointing at me. Damien whispered something to Jason & Jason looked over at me & said I don't know. Then Jason whispered something to Damien & Damien looked at me. He looked me up & down & said Yep. Then Damien started saying something & Jason kept on saying ‘No man. No' Well, we finally left that table & went walking around. We went to the back of the skating rink. I noticed that Damien had followed us. Not w/his body w/ his eyes. It was really starting to freak me out! My best friend Shannon Sanders was up there. She noticed that I had been acting paranoyed. She kept on asking me what was wrong. I told her I was just tired. (Finally on Sunday I told her what was the matter). I had lost Amanda & was trying to find her. I went to the bathroom to see if she had walked in there. When I came out Damien was standing there against the wall. I bumped into him. I didn't realize who it was until I looked up. When I looked into his eyes its like I froze. I just stood there. ... I ran off. His eyes followed me all the way to the back. I didn't really say anything to Amanda because I didn't want to get her scared. We stayed at the back for about 10 minutes & decided to go back up to the front. Well some girl, I can't remember her name I really didn't know her, asked me to go buy her some candy & a coke. When I went to give it to her, I noticed she was at Damien's table. I just ran over there handed it to her & walked off. I could feel his eyes following me. Well I lat- er found out that he was asking some people who I was. Some girl that I don't know told him I was Jennifer Ball. He sat there for a minute & then said ‘Jennifer Ball, Jennifer Ball, I know her, I really really know her' & had this evil look on his face. Then he started asking around what Amanda's phone number was & where she lived. No one would tell him. While we were walking out of the blue Amanda started saying shut up shut up. I looked at her & asked her what was wrong. She said that she could hear Damien in her mind saying ‘Bitch you're gonna die, you know to much.' (Last year Amanda had P.E. w/Damien. She said he would sit there & enter her mind. It really freaked her out.) Well it was finally time for us to leave & I was glad. Damien watched us as we went out the building. Ever since then it feels like someone is watching me. Friday after everyone had found out who murdered the little boys I got a phone call. I answered the phone & someone asked who this was. I said Jennifer They said well you & your friend Amanda were the next to die by Damien. & Hung up. I was really freaked. I didn't say anything to Amanda about the phone call. I had heard that Damien was going to kill 2 more girls his girlfriend & Jason Baldwin's girlfriend. Well Jason's girlfriend is a girl named Heather whom is Amanda Lancaster's cousin. I don't know her last name. Amanda kept on saying Friday I know those two girls were me & you I knew they were. I just told her not to jump to conclusions - even though after the phone call I was certain it was us. After Amanda read that statement in the Commercial Appeal she kept on saying, ‘I have a feeling our picture is in that briefcase. I have the weirdest feeling.' I just wish somebody would find out. Then yesterday some woman that had come swimming w/my aunt told my mom that she heard Damien was going to sacrafice 2 virgins next. I told my mom about the mysterious phone call. She asked me how come I hadn't told her. I told her I thought it was a prank, but now I'm really not for sure. It's just really scary. Know I feel like every where I go I'm being followed. I haven't had any phone calls since Friday.” That was just one example of Echols' curious practice of getting his kicks by intimidating the impressionable. Her friend, Amanda Lancaster, gave police this handwritten statement on June 10, beginning with information passed on to her by Jason Baldwin's girlfriend: “Heather Clite had told me that Damean had been asking me question's about me, about where I live & my phone number. “Jennifer Harrison had said that she thought Damean had done it cause he new way to much, and he went around Horseshoe the same day the murders had happened, and had dog intestents around his neck. “At the skating rink, he watched me and stuff. He would follow me around, he would like just watch me. “He would really scare me, and someone had told me that I was next, me and Jennifer Ball were next. “I was on the phone with Jennifer Ball when Damean apparently was at her window.” Police notes from her interview stated that she thought Echols had a camera, that she felt people in a cult were watching her and that she felt that Echols knew too much about the murders. Jennifer Ball's mother, Teresa Woodson, gave a handwritten statement to police on June 10: “On March of 93 When I came home from work my daughter told me that Damin Echols was at our window in the back yard yelling he was going to kill her. When her stepfather came home from work I talked to him & we called the police. Officer Reese came and took our statement. Jennifer was also told that when her stepfather & Mom went to Calif. she better kiss me goodby for good because she would never see me again. She would come home from school and be terrified that something was going to happen to her. And friends would tell her that Amanda & her were going to be killed & sacerficed. The day he was in the back yard on my way home from work I saw Damin walking down Balfour. Amanda & Jennifer went to the skating ring May of 93 and Damin was there he followed Jennifer and Amanda to the Restroom & would just watch them. And Friday June 5 we had a phone call that Jen- nifer was told you & Amanda will be the next to die. A boy that lives two doors down would tell Jennifer I will have Damin to kill you Because he Damin is a member of a cult. And Jennifer would come home they are going to kill me and she was always afraid that people were watching her. She would get werd phone calls all hours of the night.” Also on June 10, Karen Beshires McAteer told police that, about two months before, her daughter, Jes- sica Bryant, 11, and a friend, Heather Smith, had been waiting outside to go to church at about 10 a.m. on a Sunday. The girls came into the house and told her that a man was taking their picture. McAteer gave a hand-written statement on June 11: “On a Sunday morning approximately 2 to 3 weeks before the triple murder occurred my daughter & a friend were outside playing in my front yard at 515 Belvedere. They came into the house & said there was a man watching them from a bush one house away. I immediately went to the door & when I opened it he got up from a squatting position & started to run toward Balfour Rd. I called my husband & he & I immediately started looking for the man. We looked all over the neighborhood & the Bayou behind Balfour. He just disappeared & we could not see him. The guy behind the bush was Damion Echols. I saw him clearly & there is no doubt. I was told later that at that time he was staying with a family on Balfour. My daughter said the guy had something in his hand. My daughter believed that he was taking pictures of her & her friend at that time.” She said Echols was wearing a long black trench coat. Jessica Bryant told police: “It was a Sunday and we were just, we were just running around talking to each other and this boy just came up walking down the street and he was dressed in all black and so we were just playing and we looked over there and we saw him. He was behind the bush, and so we went, and so we weren't playing any attention to him we didn't think anything was going to happen, so we continued playing and he was still there so went over and hid behind the car for a few minutes and we thought he won't come out, so he will go away and leave us alone. And we went back and he was still there and so he was looking out of the corner of his eye at us. And so we didn't know what to do, so we went inside and told my mama and he started running off and then we don't know what happened to him. ... “He had sort of long hair, and dressed in all black and he real black long over coat on, with some black shoes on. And he had something on his face, I didn't get that close to him. He was pretty good in front of me and he had something on his hair I don't know what it was but, it was something weird in his hair. It looked like rabbits feet. ... “He was just looking out of the corner of his eyes and with his hands like this against him. He was like digging in his pockets, he had his hands in his pocket, but I don't know what he was doing. ... “It looked like black stuff on his face, I don't know what it was. Its just black stuff on his face ... “He was squatting down behind the bush. ... “He was doing something in his pockets. ... “He was like getting something out of his pockets, or putting something back in.” On May 18, 1993, before the arrests, Laura Maxwell, who had dated Echols, gave a handwritten statement to police in which she described Echols' bizarre personality, including his propensity to issue death threats, stalking and his hatred of small children. “Dated Damien Summer of 1991. … After we stopped dating my best friend Ashley Smith told me about Damien talking to her … He told he used to be a knight in his past life that killed all these people and he has written some books on witchcraft. He told me that he liked to get raw steak meat and suck the blood out. This one boy told me one time Jason Baldwin busted his nose & blood was all over the ground so Damien got down on the ground & started licking the blood up. He used to say that if he was out walking or something & he got thirsty that he would just like to take a baseball ball bat & knock somebody out & take a bite out of their neck & drink their blood. I'm not sure if he ever did this, that's just what he told me. He never liked my brother ... he told my friend he was going to kill him ... he had it all planned out what was going to happen. And he told my friend & I that if we told Donnie about this that he would kill us too, if that's what he had to do. And if our parents found out & they tried to get involved that he would just kill them too. He told my friend that he used to watch my house overnight & he knew everything that happened in my house every night. He also told one of his friends that one night while I was asleep he snuck in my house & came in my room & did all this stuff to me. I'm not sure if any of thats true though. He used to always talk about how much he hated little kids & he used to always say this saying about cutting all of your fingers & toes off one by one. We still talked alot after we broke up but when school started he started going out with this other girl Deanna Holcomb. And when she broke up with him he went to her house & kept saying he was going to kill her if she didn't go back out with him.  … “Garrett told Jason Frazier that Damien & Jason (Baldwin) always have their devil-worshiping meetings in that park & those little kids were riding over there & they saw something they were supposed to of seen so Damien killed them. Garrett said he heard this from Jason Baldwin who was supposed to of been there.”   Garrett Schwarting was a mutual friend of Max- well, Baldwin and Echols. Jason Frazier was a 16-year- old acquaintance of Schwarting's. Both Schwarting and Frazier were questioned by police —- with confusing results —- about Schwarting's statements to Frazier that Echols and Baldwin had killed the boys. On June 14, 1993, Barbara Deatteart of Lakeshore told police that two white youths had tried to steal her dog in March. She identified them as Baldwin and Echols from newspaper photos. She had seen an old Pontiac drive by her home, stopping several times, so she asked the two boys inside what they wanted, and they drove off. When they returned, a blond youth got out, looked around and tried to get his hand and arm over the fence to grab her dog's chain. She ran out and yelled at them. They took off again. On Oct. 5, 1993, Mark Byers, adoptive father of Christopher Byers,  gave this statement to police: “Sometime between end of February 1993 & 1st half of March of 1993. My wife Melissa & myself went to grocery store at Flash Market on Ingram around 4:00. We were gone about 15 to 20 minutes. “When we returned home Christopher was inside. When we came in he started telling us about a man taking his picture. We asked what did he look like Chris said he was wearing a black coat & black pants & shoes black & had sort of long black hair. He said the man was driving a green car. Chris was playing under car port when man drove up. He said that he ran out into the yard because the man scared him and we asked what happened and Chris said he just took my picture then got in his car and left.” Melissa Byers, mother of Chris, repeated the information in a statement Oct. 5 and testified to the same set of facts in the Misskelley trial. In his confessions, Jessie Misskelley Jr. described how a photo of his three victims was passed around at Satanic cult meetings led by Echols. Investigators never found the photo or the brief- case in which it was kept along with weapons and drugs. In the Misskelley trial, because they had access to Misskelley's confessions mentioning the photo, the prosecution argued that the stalking indicated premeditated murder. The description of the photo, along with other evidence such as blue candle wax found on the shirt of Stevie Branch, added credence to the theory that not only were the the time and setting part of an occult scheme but the victims were hand-picked.  https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Black-Against-Memphis-Killers/dp/0692802843/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=gary+meece&qid=1557710855&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull   https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-West-Memphis-Killers-ebook/dp/B07C7C4DCH/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_2?keywords=gary+meece&qid=1557710880&s=gateway&sr=8-2-fkmrnull https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Black-Against-Memphis-Killers-ebook/dp/B06XVT2976/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_3?keywords=gary+meece&qid=1557710880&s=gateway&sr=8-3-fkmrnull https://www.amazon.com/Where-Monsters-Go-Against-Memphis-ebook/dp/B06XVNXCJV/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_4?keywords=gary+meece&qid=1557710880&s=gateway&sr=8-4-fkmrnull https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0753HJZ1P/?ie=UTF8&keywords=gary%20meece&qid=1557710880&ref_=sr_1_fkmrnull_6&s=gateway&sr=8-6-fkmrnull https://eastofwestmemphis.wordpress.com https://www.facebook.com/WestMemphis3Killers/  

The Sales Project
Marketing in 2019 | Interview with Jason Frazier

The Sales Project

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 28, 2019 37:32


Real Estate marketing for 2019 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/the-sales-project/support