Podcast appearances and mentions of jesse well

On this episode, my guests are Jesse Mann (editor-director) and Tyson Sadler (director), the brains behind the documentary The Last Tourist. Jesse is both a picture editor and director whose professional work has spanned commercial, tv and film projects. The Last Tourist is her second feature film as editor. Her first film, as both editor and director, Material Success, screened internationally and won the Audience Choice at the Canadian Film Festival and Best Film at the Canadian Film Festival (2012). Most recently, she both directed and edited the online horror mini-series “The Confinement” (2021). She is a member of the Directors Guild of Canada and an associate member of the Canadian Cinema Editors. Jesse has an B.F.A. from Ryerson University's School of Image Arts.Tyson Sadler is an explorer, traveller and award-winning filmmaker. He has directed video content and documentaries for The New York Times, Associated Press, and The Huffington Post. His films have been screened at festivals around the world including Tribeca Film Festival, South by Southwest, The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival. An early pioneer i virtual reality documentary, he has worked tirelessly to use cutting edge technology to tell stories that build empathy around causes such as climate change, forced migration, and human rights.Show Notes:The Film's InceptionIndustry PolarityRegulating TravelAddressing the Root ProblemsGreenwashing Animal and Child Welfare TourismHow the Wealth Gap Increased During COVIDWhat was Left on the Cutting Room FloorHomework:WATCH THE FILM HEREThe Last Tourist Film Website | Instagram | FacebookThe Last Tourist TrailerJesse Mann's Website | InstagramTyson Sadler's Website | InstagramTranscript:Chris: Welcome Jesse and Tyson to the End of Tourism Podcast. Jesse: Thanks Chris for having us. Tyson: Thanks for having us. Chris: Thank you so much for joining me today to talk about your documentary film, The Last Tourist. So, it was released in 2022 to great reception.And as you might imagine, many of my listeners have pointed me in its direction. And after watching the film, I found myself really grateful that people finally approached these themes in the medium of documentary filmmaking and with what seemed to be a budget to do justice to what those themes confront. And so first I'd like to ask you two how The Last Tourist got started and what the inspiration behind the film's creation was and how did you decide to write a treatment for it? Tyson: Ultimately, you know, I think the inspiration for The Last Tourist came from a combination of personal shared experience and a shared passion for travel and particularly responsible travel.You know, in early 2018, I was approached [00:01:00] by the executive producers to write a treatment, for a short film around responsible tourism in the country of Peru. And through, you know, some follow up conversations, we sort of quickly realized that we had an opportunity because, a large scale documentary, on the subject of responsible tourism just didn't exist yet. I mean, we have wonderful films out there which challenge our conversations with our relationship with climate change and our relationship with our food source like An Inconvenient Truth or like Food Inc., but we didn't at that time yet have a documentary which really challenged our perceptions of the global impact of the travel and tourism industry and so over conversations with with our team and the producers we quickly realized that we had a unique opportunity to make "An Inconvenient Truth" for the travel industry and in early 2018, we seized on that opportunity to explore the positive and negative impacts of tourism on destinations.Jesse: And I think just to add to what Tyson was saying, I think originally [00:02:00] it started off as a short project and yourself and the executive producers who brought us together kind of pushed for it to become the large scale project that had ended up being filmed in 15 different countries or 16 with 400 hours of footage.So, sometimes you don't know, especially myself as a co-writer and editor, when you come on to a project, in the initial stages, you think, "Oh, you know, this is wonderful. It sounds like a great project." I had been an avid traveler, lived in a few different countries over 20 years and I thought, yeah, this is a story that needs to be told, but I will say in no way in the beginning, did I ever think it was going to be, and I think Tyson didn't either, was it going to be such a huge project. And you comment, Chris, on the expansiveness of the subject and the different kind of facets of the tourism [00:03:00] industry we were able to look at.And really I have to say that I'm happy that we got to touch on all those points and to the chagrin of my personal sleep and Tyson's as well, but it started off small, I have to say that, and it grew into something tremendous that I think we're very proud of.Tyson: It really was a natural progression of our desire to raise awareness about responsible tourism and its consequences. We had our world premiere, honestly, I think it was about two years ago now at the Vancouver International Film Festival, two years ago. And a little over two years ago, a little over two years ago.And the film is still doing a festival run. Just last weekend, Jesse was at the the Innsbruck Film Festival and it's still been getting a wonderful response, great conversations around it. And we're streaming on platforms around the world, you know, Crave in Canada, Hulu in the U.S., Amazon Prime in other countries. I was just in French Polynesia and was able to find our film on Amazon Prime, which was really delightful [00:04:00] to see that. Jesse: Yeah, it makes us happy as filmmakers to know that the story that we spent a lot of time trying to create in a way that we thought would connect with audiences worldwide is actually getting out there. And so it's really nice to be speaking to you on your podcast as well and kind of extend that out to potentially more people who haven't seen the film or some who just want to talk more about the topics. Chris: And I wanted to ask you two, given the fact that the film was released, you know, still very much in a pandemic during the, the COVID 19 times what the reactions were given the fact that tourism had ground to a halt in that time you know, I received a lot of Mail regarding your film, like, ah, you have to check this out.You have to watch this, right? And so a lot of people really excited about the project, about the film. But then I guess I'm also curious about[00:05:00] if there was much of an industry backlash in regards to the degree of sincerity perhaps around which the film exhibited these kind of deep and sometimes dire consequences that visit themselves on places and people in the name of tourism.Tyson: Yeah. I think the reactions to the film have been in my experience, almost entirely positive. But people don't come to me with criticism, they come to me with congratulations, but I think there's a lot of individuals in the tourism industry and sponsors that have really welcomed our film, The Last Tourist, as a necessary and eye opening piece of work.It sparked a lot of interesting conversations and prompted the industry to, in many ways, I think, reevaluate some of their practices. You Jesse: If we back it up to when we were just when we were meeting with all of the different professionals that we interviewed across the different facets of the tourism industry, I mean, when you and I were writing the story, there were so [00:06:00] many different conflicting opinions on how to solve one issue that we still come across that sometimes when we meet those industry experts outside of, let's say, film audiences.Because When we were writing it, we had to kind of decide which side of the coin we were going to follow through our story with, and whether it's a topic of let's say regulation, that was a topic that Tyson and I had a lot of conversations about when we were making the film because the industry in itself is kind of very polarized in terms of regulation.There's some strong proponents within the tourism industry who want regulation. And then there's some who are very against it. And Tyson and I had a lot of conversations about that. And I think we still do when we meet certain industry professionals out there and I think that's a really important topic as well.[00:07:00] Now that you are bringing up, post covid and the pandemic where we saw kind of what happens when things are shut down. You know, we see both the positive and the negative. I mean we mentioned it in the film, but almost every single person that we interviewed in our film lost their means of income during that time. Gone.And at the same time, the world experienced kind of you know, a refuge from, you know, airplane emissions and damage to destinations. And, you know, these were calculable things like we could see that this was a definite impact. So, I think there's these kind of topics and these conversations are where we see a lot of polarity.And I think that we tried our best to focus on the people and the developing nations in our story. But, there are a lot [00:08:00] of stories that were left on the cutting room floor and so it is good to discuss them after in a podcast like this. I know that's kind of a long winded interjection, but I do believe that we do have some polarity for sure Tyson and I have come across, but just not in terms of what Tyson is talking about, in terms of not not so much with the audiences It is more a bit in the industry. Tyson: I'll share an observation. During the process of creating this film, we interviewed literally dozens of travel experts, you know from academics to tour operators across the industry.It's universally recognized that responsible tourism and sustainable tourism is a good thing. But then when we dive a little bit deeper I found a very fractured kind of industry because everybody believes that they know how to do responsible tourism, right. And everybody else, often, isn't executing responsible tourism correctly.And so, on a foundational level, sure, we all believe in responsible tourism, but I think, the approach at how we get there isn't universally accepted, throughout the industry, and I think [00:09:00] that that's, on a basic level, we kind of explore those themes in the film as well as we interview people who kind of take different approaches to how to engage responsibly with tourists and host communities.Jesse: And we had to make some hard decisions, obviously based on the research that was coming in on what side we wanted to promote in the story. But sometimes I think it's fair to say, Tyson, if you agree with me that we did try to leave it a bit more open for audiences to try to make their own decision based on what we had learned, because it's not always an easy answer for every situation.It's quite nuanced, I think. Tyson: Absolutely. Chris: And you mentioned Jesse, regulation. In terms of the people you interviewed and your research, generally speaking, what does that look like, or what might that look like in particular locales or within the industry?Jesse: Well, I think we've seen quite a bit of it post pandemic because where we thought there was going to be [00:10:00] an ease back into traveling that has not happened. All the reports are coming back in that tourism is back up in droves and a lot of the same problems, if not more are back with travel again.And so we've seen places like Machu Picchu has started regulating the amount of people that are able to visit annually. Worldwide, there's different popular tourist destinations who have decided to limit the amount of tourism and tourists that come to certain destinations.You know, I think when it comes to destinations, we just have to be really careful that it doesn't become a tax that is elitist because that happens a lot with regulation across the board. You've seen it with cigarettes, you've seen it with airfare as well. You're paying a higher price for travel. And although I do believe personally and Tyson, you [00:11:00] can speak to this as well, but because we haven't discussed this recently, but when you put a strong tariff or tax on travel, I think it is important, but I think it has to be calculated so that it's not elitist because if we only have people traveling in the world who can afford it, if it becomes so unaffordable, this is totally against the core value of travel, which is to unite all people of all different socioeconomic statuses and really connect with different cultures and people, and if it's just suddenly becomes for people who can afford a really overpriced flight, I think that will completely take away the value of the core value of travel.But I do strongly believe that, and this I think is a very controversial thing to say. I do believe that things have to be regulated and there has to be something done, especially about the amount of flights that are happening on this planet. Because, you know, for instance, I don't know the statistics for Canada, but I was looking at it the other day for[00:12:00] the UK.And I think something like 70 percent of all flights in the UK are taken by 15 percent of the population, and I don't doubt that that's very similar for a lot of the Western world without knowing all the statistics specifically, so I think that that has to be really taken into consideration when putting out regulation in terms of flights or destinations and such.Chris: Yeah, I've thought about it quite a bit as well, and the elitization of travel, and this understanding that, well, we remove subsidies, for example, for air travel or other things, that we'll just have rich people flying around the world, which is more often than not the case already. Most flights are undertaken for business travel and that's a huge thing that I think most people don't know about, but instead of getting people with corporate backed funds or just rich people flying around the world, we're obviously looking for people with strong principles and good behavior to be the ones [00:13:00] traveling.But then how do you measure that? How do you quantify that in a way that honors the kinds of worlds we want to live in? And it's not just this like, oh, it's impossible. Sure. And we could take that understanding that to quantify such a thing would be next to impossible, but then it could also open up these kind of doors of imagination where in like what kind of infrastructures would we want to put in place that were not maybe Government sanctioned or not maybe top down, but actually from the bottom up, creating these kind of international or intercultural bonds and practices between people that would allow not just for the kinds of people who locals in quote unquote "destinations" want to receive to be able to travel, but then also to create the conditions whereby that kind of, for lack of a better word, behavior or principles could be deepened in the world.I mean, it'd be extremely difficult to, [00:14:00] to manage, but How would you quantify that? How would you measure that? Jesse: Yeah, and I think that's such a, such a complicated issue and I love what you're saying though. I think it's absolutely wonderful. And I do think it's possible to move in that direction.I'm not sure I have the answer for that and maybe Tyson wants to speak to it, but I also want to say that something that I think could be part of the solution is also promoting train travel as well. And I know that that kind of that stops at domestic. But at the same time, you know, I think governments should be allocating a lot of funds to push train travel to create and develop train travel and to also subsidize train travel more because it's just a wonderful way to reduce emissions and to actually continue allowing people to travel. Tyson: Yeah. There are some countries here in Europe, Jesse, and I think Europe is just far beyond a lot of the rest of the world. Canada, I think we're still living in the dark ages, you know, when it comes to long [00:15:00] distance train travel.Jesse: That's a shame. It hasn't been made a priority. Tyson: It just doesn't exist.Chris: Well, I'm curious also for you two how your own travels in your lives might have come to bear on your production or pre production and research in the film. Maybe you could tell us a little bit of how you've seen the world over the course of your life and your travels and if that came to bear at all in the making of the film.Tyson: Personally for me, I traveled extensively, for 20 years prior to embarking on this film. I worked in the travel industry. I worked for an airline for many years. I was also a journalist and I've done work for several large publications, which allowed me to travel to very, some very remote and exotic destinations around the world.This travel really exposed me to the beauty and the wonder of the world. But also the environmental and the cultural challenges that a lot of these destinations face. You know, the experiences, with travel for both work and for pleasure, I think they served as a [00:16:00] catalyst, for me just to delve deeper into this topic.And so when I was approached about directing and writing a film on this topic, I don't think there could have been a better fit. Like it just, everything just kind of fell into place and I just felt like I was really well poised because prior to that I had traveled to 70 different countries in a number of different capacities.I had personally engaged in a number of behaviors that we are critical of in the film in terms of animal interaction, you know, interaction with other cultures. And my travel through two decades was really an eye opening and learning experience for me. And what this film really is, I think for me and in many points in the film is a reflection of my past travels and things that have been illuminated in my mind in terms of what are some important aspects that we really need to address if we want to be more conscious and responsible travelers.Jesse: And I think from my end I surely [00:17:00] had not traveled to as many destinations as Tyson. But I did indulge my wanderlust in my twenties and thirties. I lived in a few different countries, Holland, South Africa, Germany, Canada. And I think that the absolute best aspect for me personally of travel is meeting the people.I absolutely love meeting people in different cultures and seeing the differences and the similarities and learning the wisdom as much as I possibly can in such a moment of my life, when I'm in a destination, if it grants me such a gift. And I think from that, I still do have such a deep, deep gratitude to my privilege and being able to travel in and meet such people.I've made such beautiful friendships over the course of 20 years and many I still keep in touch with across the various places I've lived. And I think that when you come back, [00:18:00] perhaps from living in different cultures in different countries and you come back to your home, the place you were raised in and where you were born and where you were raised culturally, and you can note the vast differences, and it's not a negative thing, but you start to pick up on the ways in which many people can see different cultures or different countries in a way that is completely disconnected from the actual truth and and this knowledge often comes with privilege.I was privileged enough to be able to travel to these destinations to meet certain people and to dissuade certain prejudices, but not everyone can. And so part of this film, I have to say, ironically, is that if you can't travel, this film is also a wonderful film to watch because it's something that you can meet these people [00:19:00] in these destinations.You know, there's so many places that I've been to also that are so many places I have not been to that were featured in the film as well. And with documentary filmmaking and making, and especially as an editor, I really do feel like I get to know these people so well, and I don't think that's just exclusive to myself.I think audiences, hopefully, if I've done it correctly, if Tyson and I have, have made the film correctly, that these people's hearts have come through in the film. And, this is something that Tyson and I really worked hard on. And I'm sorry if I'm deviating from the question a bit, but it does connect very deeply to my love of travel is is people and also my love of editing people and so it was something we worked really hard to focus on is how do we give these people a podium. They have their voice there. They're saying their truths. How do we give them a podium [00:20:00] and as the white filmmakers who are coming into different countries, how do we take a step back and really let them preach their wisdom? And so it was a balance for us really in finding the right voices, obviously speaking to the right professionals and speaking to professionals within different cultures that you see featured in the film and really making sure that their knowledge, their voice, their direction was giving us direction on how we edited and formulated the story and stories of everyone that we met in the travels of the production as well. Chris: And on that note, I'm curious for each of you, what was the most important topic or theme that came up in the film for you personally?Tyson: For me, maybe it's an echo of Jesse's sentiments there, but really it comes down to the impact on the communities that so graciously host us when we when we do travel. Travel you know has you know has an encyclopedia [00:21:00] of challenges that come with traveling responsibly unless we address the people. And I think we address this and the the film addresses this, but we can't begin to you know to start focusing on the environment unless we first focus on the communities who are there and helping them emerge from poverty. We can't begin to focus on how we can solve the problem of poaching in the African savannah unless we first address the root causes of why it's there and how it affects the host communities and how poverty affects people's decisions to be involved in this trade. Jesse: That was something that Jane Goodall was was really adamant about speaking in the film about as well Tyson: Yeah, and so to answer your question Chris, I mean ultimately it comes down to the communities and the people, the humanity of it all. First, we need to address the human aspect and then we can address the secondary aspects of what it means to be a responsible traveler.[00:22:00] Jesse: So for me, personally, the most incredible voices in the film that when they came in, I just thought, "oh, wow," were definitely Lek from Elephant Nature Park and one of our contacts in Kenya Judy Kefergona, who ended up being one of the main speakers and narrators throughout a huge portion of our film.These two women were just heroes. Like just with Judy, with the words that she was able to express for the people working in not just only the tourism industry in Kenya, but the people of Kenya who were vulnerable to unethical tourism, and then speaking to so many different subjects that were connected to so many different stories worldwide with such eloquence and such power and such knowledge [00:23:00] and encourage really, I think. She spoke about these topics. I was just enamored, just blown away and so grateful for her coming onto our film and Lek Chailart is just a modern day hero. She is the tiniest woman with the biggest heart who when I saw her story in our film against the backdrop of these beautiful giants, these elephants that she has rescued. And essentially she's an elephant whisperer in the truest sense of the word. And it's just such a magical thing to see.Listeners won't be able to understand this. I'm getting goosebumps when I just talk about her and this was the kind of thing that when Tyson and I were looking through footage and looking through stories that we were looking for, "Oh, that's the moment, ah! the moment. I got the goosebumps. That's it. It's there. And we found it in the stories, not just these two women, everyone you see featured in the story and some that were left on the cutting room floor, unfortunately there that gave us beautiful insight that we still used in crafting the story, that just wasn't able to [00:24:00] make it into the actual film for timing constraints.But really, I would have to say that these two, it's not specifically the stories, although both of them touch on really important stories, including child welfare and animal welfare, which to me, those two stories were really close to my heart. And we felt really strongly that they needed a really important part in the film.But it was really these two women who I just felt so grateful for in the film. Chris: I mean, the, the chapter on animal welfare was quite devastating for me in part because it had reminded me that in my early twenties, I had visited Thailand and I had gone to an elephant sanctuary. Not a zoo but a sanctuary, and had the opportunity to ride an elephant for a short time, and I felt really uncomfortable probably because I was on top of an elephant, just the kind of immediate awkwardness of such a thing, having never seen one in person, having never [00:25:00] experienced that before, but also kind of like, "what am I doing here?" And so, that part of the film really kind of opened up for me why I felt that perhaps existential discomfort, not just about being on top of an animal of that size, but in the context of the dynamic, you around how that was happening and why that was happening and not having the context for it so long ago.And of course, this is one of the things that we touch on in the episodes, in the interviews, in the podcast, is how can we come to understand these things when our visits are so short in these places, when we are only in a place for just a very brief time and there's really no context for the history and the culture and the political dynamics that surround these things.And then, most travelers, most tourists just end up leaving and the consequence of one's presence on the scene is kind of forgotten, at least by the tourist or traveler. Yeah, so thank you for [00:26:00] for that. Jesse: That question did come up actually at the recent screening of the film in Innsbruck at the Nature Film Festival, whereas someone in the audience asked very specifically, even though it would be great to stay at a destination for a long time, most people are, saving up for short travel when they have time off work. And they need to take this kind of tour because they can only afford this one. And what do you say to those people who want to travel better, but feel like they're kind of stuck or don't know where to go. But I would say in short, I think that touches on an issue that we have in the modern world with a lot of things. We are all overtired, overworked, and we don't have time to be ethical, we don't have time to do the research, we don't have time to investigate, if anything is against our core values, and we don't have time to and I get that, you know, it's not easy for everybody.And if you do have the [00:27:00] time and you are able to really do a deep dive then you're very privileged, because you have the time, which just means that you have the money. So we did try to give a lot of smaller tips at the end of the film in terms of how you can do smaller acts of, of kindness and of conscious traveling, to travel local, to put money into local economies to make sure that you're not requesting your sheets to be washed every day, making sure that you're traveling using reusable, to make sure that you're and I guess this goes into a little bit more of the extensive questioning is to ask the destination that you're traveling to what their policies are in connection with the locals, in connections with the environment. Unfortunately, there is a lot of greenwashing in tourism. And you know, that's in all industries right now worldwide. So it's not going to be so easy for someone who isn't an investigative [00:28:00] journalist to really find out the truth behind it all the time, but we can do our best.And there are quite a few links on the website thelasttouristfilm.com where you can see some of the different organizations that we spoke with that have lists upon lists of different collaborating companies that you can look to that can can show you places that are not greenwashing or that are working with locals, but back to the idea of taking the time and it is about taking the time, whether it's an hour even, just to take the time and do a bit of research and this especially comes back to the topic of child welfare and people who are still, en masse, volunteering worldwide to orphanages and orphanages where children have existing family members and that these orphanages have become of monetary value to developing nations [00:29:00] because they make money and it's really easy for us to pass judgment on places that do this, and it's definitely wrong, but if we as travelers are going there and saying with our travel dollars, this is something we want to invest in, then people in developing nations are going to say, this is how I make money.And it's the same with animal welfare. You pay for an animal sanctuary that you haven't done the research on. They're going to keep perpetuating that cycle. It's going to be the same with child welfare. So, if you do want to be ethical, you have to fit in a little bit of research in your travel time. And that's it. And I know it's not so easy for everybody.Tyson: Yeah, I'd like to expand a little bit on a theme that sort of both of you have talked about. Jessie, you had mentioned greenwashing. Chris, you had mentioned that you had been to an elephant sanctuary in Thailand. One of the most memorable takeaways that I had from this film is just the massive amount of greenwashing [00:30:00] and deception that exists within the industry.I came to know a lot of companies that appeared to just be normal travel companies doing the same thing that has been going on in the travel industry but marketing "green" although nothing really changes. It's just their marketing strategy that's changed. If we look at, for example, in Thailand, there are a number of places that call themselves an elephant sanctuary, an elephant retirement home, an elephant rescue center. And we can't rely on those names anymore to know that the service provider is giving us an ethical experience. We really need to ask deeper questions. It's the trend in the industry now to use this type of language, " sustainable," "responsible," "eco," all of these buzzwords.And I've just come to find these completely meaningless, in those terms. We really need to ask some deeper, more challenging questions of these experiences and the tour operators and the service providers to actually know whether what they're doing is ethical or not because it is very easy to call yourself a [00:31:00] sanctuary, when in fact, it's the complete opposite. If it truly was an elephant sanctuary, we wouldn't be able to ride the elephants, in that place and they would be providing them a life of dignity free from exploitation. And it's the same with children. Calling these places orphanages ,I think it's a misnomer. It's incorrect. You know, 70 percent of children who live in these quote unquote "orphanages" actually have at least one living parent.But it's all under the guise of trying to gain sympathy from the traveler. "Oh, come see an elephant at a retirement home. Come see a child at an orphanage." It's just a piece of marketing that doesn't reflect the truth. We have a lot of companies doing the same unethical practices they've been doing for decades.However, they've just really changed their marketing to appear more green.Chris: Yeah, it seems to be a never ending cycle where responsible isn't good enough, that now we got to be regenerative. So many of these words just end up becoming, marketing tools. Tyson: I'm hearing that word a [00:32:00] lot more these days as well. Chris: Yeah, so how do we proceed, not just with a degree of dedication towards research and, and and planning, but also deep discipline as to how these words are unfortunately, as you said, becoming kind of meaningless in their significance..I want to take a little turn with you both to ask about what happened as the film was going through post production and its release because most of the footage that you have is quote unquote pre pandemic and the COVID 19 pandemic hit, obviously, in 2020 and from what I understand your team was entering into the post production process and, of course, tourism ground to a halt almost completely, worldwide. And throughout the film, there are people that you two interview that contend with the consequences and context of tourism and look [00:33:00] to a more honorable path that it might take. But I'm curious in regards to the people that you did interview who had found a degree of success and perhaps within a more small scale, a more honorable way of doing tourism that those flights, those trains, the reception of people in their villages went from a hundred to zero, basically overnight.So much of the dire consequences of tourism revolve around or end up as exile, local people can't afford to produce food anymore in their places. And the education systems kind of move them towards getting jobs in the next city or even in other countries, and I'm curious in the context of the film and I guess the treatment that you put forward, you know, never perhaps thinking that something like this could happen. What was the fallout among the people that you interviewed in regards to their understandings of tourism and if it was [00:34:00] still this kind of for lack of a better word, golden goose or calf or sacred cow that they could rely on for the rest of their lives.What did you hear kind of in the ether as you were doing that post production? Tyson: I think it substantially expanded the wealth gap. I think during COVID the people that were hit the hardest are the people in the tourism industry that often are paid the least.Depending on what their jobs were, they were the ones who were suffering layoffs and they were the ones whose businesses couldn't afford to sustain themselves. And so I think, for the most vulnerable populations, the pandemic was absolutely devastating.People couldn't afford to put food on the table and pay rents, not just, I think, in developing countries, but even in the developed world. Airlines were laying off massive amounts of employees. Hotels were cutting staff. This was a global challenge that affected everyone. However, at that same time, we did hear stories that, you know, CEOs of major airlines were taking million dollar bonuses[00:35:00] for cutting costs. And that was an observation of mine, through that experience, you know, that the people who needed tourism the most for daily sustenance and to put bread on the table were the ones who were absolutely the most affected and the people kind of at the top of the tourism industry were still fine and they were also taking bonuses, which really bothered me just because the wealth gap just seemed to get further and further apart through that. But we do know, with the stories, that were featured in our film... there's a wonderful lodge in Ecuador, a homestay that we look at and they lost their income during that time.The elephant sanctuary in Thailand, the one that does do great work, not one that greenwashes an elephant sanctuary but they lost a lot of revenue where it was very challenging to feed the elephants and to house the elephants because they didn't have that revenue coming in to support the project. Jesse: We were hearing in in Africa, right?Some of the rangers [00:36:00] were who were placed in defense of the elephants and animals and rhinos and such were just gone. They just weren't there anymore at that time because if they're not getting paid, they can't stay there. And so poaching also went up in those areas as well.But you know, I think that in terms of what the positive was, I think a lot of people were hoping that post COVID that there was going to be hope for change, for renewal for doing things differently. And I think this was in when we were in post that this was maybe, potential to show people how things can be different by showing kind of the polar opposite and the effect and also showing how intrinsically connected people's livelihoods are to this industry and how vulnerable they are to massive change like this. I mean, the Dominican Republic that has [00:37:00] almost 90 percent of their GDP related to tourism? Tyson: Island nations are the ones who are most affected by tourism. You know, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic. The Caribbean islands specifically. I don't know if it's as high as 90%, but the vast majority of their GDP from island nations comes from the travel and tourism industry, and they were certainly hit the hardest during the pandemic. Jesse: And so I think that we can see from that, I think the hope for us during post production was, okay, you know, this is a horrific blow to the people most vulnerable in this industry, but if we can get this message out after the pandemic, perhaps this could be something that could really change. And to be fair, change is slow sometimes and I mean, it's wishful thinking that post pandemic right after that suddenly everyone was going to become ethical travelers but I see so much potential just in the discussions online the people that we're [00:38:00] meeting at different screenings, the interest that we're getting worldwide, just to have these conversations and see that there is an interest in change.And when you talk about moving change, it does often come from the people, and I think, across the world over the past few decades, we've all been seeing again, I think our power as people, as citizens, as individuals, and the power that we have to come together over certain issues that we feel need radical change and even if it is slow change, I do see the inklings of that change happening within the tourism industry and I think it's really positive.Tyson: You still have a lot of work ahead of us. Chris: Amen. I think that's really, really important and, and perhaps fits properly inside of the context of the dominant culture, at least of North America or the quote unquote West, wherein, the pandemic also produced a deepening of the [00:39:00] culture of "everything now."Suddenly it was like, "okay, well, I can't go out here, so everything has to be deliverable, and at the tip of your fingers, right? And what might come with that is this notion that, we also expect social change to happen overnight. Right? And that it might be overshadowed by this kind of dominant culture of wanting everything now and also the unwillingness to do the necessary work, which is sometimes generational.Right? Not just a week or a month or a year, but generations.In that regard, the themes of the film are extremely broad and you go into a lot of detail and depth with each. So I'm very grateful for that, but I'm also curious what might've gotten left out.What might, one day end up on a director's cut of the film. Jesse: Oh, so much. Tyson: Ask the editor. Jesse: Oh. Well, I mean, you had so many stories that you brought [00:40:00] to the table that were beautiful, beautiful stories. Forgive me. I don't remember his name and you'll remember Tyson.But one of the. Tyson: I know who you're talking about. Jesse: Oh, do you? One of the men you interviewed at the UN had a really beautiful story to tell. And then we also had a really beautiful story from Costa Rica. An animal welfare and environmental story. Oh, my goodness. There were so many stories.Tyson: We had a wonderful story from Cusco Peru with an organization that was putting the first female porters on the Inca Trail and really fighting for gender equality on the Inca Trail.Jesse: What was that company's name again, Tyson? Well, the reason why I bring it up is because it's so unique that I just think, "oh, we should definitely highlight that to listeners" because they were taking female porters and they were reorganizing the whole industry based on their [00:41:00] precedent because they were treating porters with dignity, with safe conditions, with, valuable wages and this is something that's just not done across the industry on the Inca Trail with the male porters and there was some really, really horrific footage that we came across of the way these porters were living just not too far from where the tourists were sleeping comfortably in their tents. And this is a wide practice across the industry and Miguel from this company Evolution Treks and the gallon, do you remember his full name, tyson? Tyson: Miguel Angel Gongora Jesse: from Evolution Treks, yeah, a wonderful, wonderful man who was really, really passionate about changing the industry. And we spoke with many of the female porters, and yeah, that was a story that we were really, really sad to lose that [00:42:00] story. Tyson: Yeah. Yeah. With only 90 minutes, you know, we yeah, really had to make some challenging decisions on what to be included in the film and I really feel that a 90 minute film can scratch the surface, it can spark some interest in a number of these themes, but certainly, and maybe that's next steps for us, but I certainly think that what this the subject matter, deserves is a series, you know, cause we could dive much deeper.Jesse: Tyson and I have been talking about it. Tyson: Yeah, we, we can dive much deeper into each of these subjects and create a 90 minute doc on each of them. And so, at some point in the future, we'll be making some pitches and writing some additional treatments into how we can make a six part series and expand on the themes in this film, you know, from the environment to gender inequality to animal welfare and everything deserves a lot more time, but hopefully, what we've done with this film is just been able to spark a number of conversations and inspire people to go and do some additional research [00:43:00] into how these themes impact these communities.Chris: Yeah, well, thank you both so much for that. I have a lot more questions, but maybe that'll also be saved for a sequel. Jesse: Yeah, we'd love to speak to you again, Chris, if you'd like, in the future. Chris: That'd be great. Before we finish, I'd like to ask you what might be next for you two in your respective filmmaking and writing lives?Tyson: My world currently revolves around photographing wildlife particularly large wildlife. Yeah, I've been spending a lot of time traveling recently and in the ocean. I mentioned to you, I mean, tomorrow I'm hopping on a flight and I'm heading to Norway to go photograph large marine mammals in Norway. So that's that's where my life is taking me right now is in pursuit of wildlife filmmaking and photography. Jesse: Although I wish I could, I could say similarly, I right now my life is a little bit calmer. I had a baby 20 months ago. So, I've been on an extended maternity leave [00:44:00] and I'm currently just in development of projects for the future.I finished up this project in full right before my child was born. And I still have a few projects that were finished up recently, but as of the moment I'm completely in development and yeah, I really look forward to developing something with Tyson in the future in regards to what he was talking about a series on travel and on a lot of stories that we were so passionate and so blessed to come across, but that we just didn't have the ability to give the podium to in our film, but yeah, so I'm really excited for the future and just coming from this festival that I was at recently, I'm just so invigorated with the energy of the audiences and the passion to travel better and to demand better travel from the industry and from travelers as a whole. So this just really gives me a lot of hope. Chris: Well, congratulations on your [00:45:00] motherhood. Thank you. And having a little one in your life and this work and Tyson and the opportunity to be able to travel as you do, and to try to honor the lives of those beautiful four leggeds and no leggeds and the tailed and finned ones. So finally, how can our listeners watch The Last Tourist? Are there any screenings coming up? Jesse: Definitely on the website, thelasttouristfilm.com, right when you go to the webpage, there's a whole list of all the different avenues you can watch the film.But maybe Tyson could elaborate more. Tyson: Absolutely. Yeah, you can connect with us on Instagram at Last Tourist Film, as well. We're just kind of wrapping up the fall festival season before we do some additional screenings next spring. We just wrapped up in Germany and Iceland.I think streaming is the best way to find us, in Canada we're streaming on Crave. In the United States, we're streaming on Hulu. Delta Airlines, Emirates Airlines. In other countries around the world, you can also find us, I [00:46:00] know in France, in French Polynesia, Hong Kong on Amazon Prime. And there's a number of other markets that the film will be opening in very shortly which is really exciting.It's not available everywhere, unfortunately, around the world, but if you have a desire to see it, you know, please get in touch with us and we'll do our best to make sure that you have an opportunity to see the film. You can host a private screening. There's a number of ways that you can see this film, but please let's keep the conversation going.Let's get in touch. I'd love to hear from a number of the listeners, and let's find a way that we can allow everyone to see this film. Jesse: And what's been really exciting is we've got a lot of interest from schools. So, educational screenings have been happening all across the world, and that's just been amazing.Those are the best for us, I think. And I would just say, if any of the listeners have any further questions for us, we're always open to taking questions and chatting. Personally, Tyson and I can both be reached at our Instagram. So you can I think Tyson's is @TysonSadler, and mine is [00:47:00] @JesseMann, two S's, two N's. So if you want to leave that for your listeners, they're welcome to contact us. And anyone who's listening can contact us directly that way, who want to host a screening or find out ways to watch. Chris: Absolutely. Yeah, I'll make sure that all the websites and handles are available for our listeners at theendoftourism. com. And on behalf of them on behalf of myself, I'd like to thank you both for joining me today. Your film is incredibly inspirational, necessary, and deeply important for these times and I don't doubt that our listeners think the same. So, I wish you the most beautiful paths ahead on your travels with your families.And ...We get the opportunity to speak again sometime. Tyson: Thank you, Chris. This has really been a meaningful conversation. Thank you. Jesse: Yeah. Thank you so much for giving us this space and I wish you all the same. Chris: My pleasure. Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

​​Li Sumpter:So welcome back to another episode of Future Memory. My guest today is Jesse Hagopian. He is a Seattle-based educator and the author of the upcoming Teach Truth: The Attack on Critical Race Theory and the Struggle for Antiracist Education. Hagopian is an organizer with the Zinn Education Project and co-editor of the books Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice and Teaching for Black Lives. Welcome, Jesse.Jesse Hagopian:Oh, thanks so much for having me. Good to be with you. Li:Thank you for joining us. Well, I want to get started with some questions about your own education and how you got started. I was curious about what your own early education and high school experiences were like. As a youth, what ways did you relate to or even resist to your own classroom curricula? Jesse:I was very alienated from school growing up. I felt like it didn't really speak to me. I didn't feel like I was intelligent. I can remember very clearly a parent-teacher conference in third grade where the teacher brought us out into the hallway with me and my mom, and she took out my standardized testing scores and there was a blue line that ran through the middle that was the average, and then there was the dot far below that line that represented my reading scores.And I knew from that day forward until about halfway through college, I knew that I was not smart, and I had the test scores to prove it to you. And school just felt like a place that reinforced over and over again that I was not worthy, that I was not intelligent. And there was very little that we studied that was about helping me understand myself, my identity, my place in the world as a Black, mixed-race kid.And really, it was just a fraught experience, and I took quite a bit to get over that. I was sure I was going to fail out of college, that I wasn't smart enough to go to college. And I think that it was finally the experience of a couple of professors in college that showed that education could be more than just eliminating wrong answer choices at faster rates than other children, that it could be about understanding the problems in our world and how we can collectively solve those problems.And then I realized I did have something to contribute. Then I realized that I did have some perspectives on what oppression looks like and how it feels and what we might need to do to get out of it, and I was hungry to learn about the systems that are set up in our society to reproduce inequality. And that was a real change for me. But growing up, my mom would tell me, "You're good with kids. I think you're going to be a teacher." And I said, "That's the last thing I'm going to be."Li:Oh, really?Jesse:School is just so arduous, and why would I want to come back? And then she was right. I came back to my own high school. I came back to Garfield High School, where I graduated, and I taught there for over a decade now. Li:I think that's an amazing story, coming full circle to teach back where you got your first experiences in the classroom. And going back to that, I was wondering if you had any standout memories, like I did, with the actual content. You were saying you didn't relate to it so much, but I remember very clearly a moment with my mother coming to the school when I had a moment in the classroom around Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, things like that. Do you have any standout memories of content that really either made you feel excluded or exploited or any of these things that really stuck with you? Jesse:For sure. I mean, there are many experiences that I think shaped my approach to education throughout the years. I mean, one of my firsts is from kindergarten. I remember very clearly one of the boys called me the N-word. And I didn't really know what it meant, but I knew it was directed at me and not the other kids. So I went and told the teacher, but there was parent-teacher conferences going on and parents were coming through, prospective parents, to look at the school, and the teacher got just beet red in front of the parents and was very embarrassed that I had said this, and said, "Oh, yeah. We'll deal with that," and just sort of pushed it aside and never came back to it.And the message that I got was that I had done something wrong, like I had disrupted the education process and that it was wrong for me to have done that because nothing was taken care of. And that's something that still sits with me and I think guides a lot of my approach to how to handle situations in the classroom. And I can remember the first time I had a Black teacher and that I began to learn about Black history in sixth grade, an incredible educator named Faith Davis, taught us about ancient Egypt. And it was the first thing I really got excited about learning, and I was amazed by all these accomplishments that Black people had done.And then after that class, it just sort of disappeared for a long time, and I never learned about anything else that Black people had done, and it made me wonder, "Is that why I score so poorly on these tests? Because I'm Black? Because I don't see other people like me in the advanced classes? And maybe those aren't for us. Maybe it has something to do innately with my race." And that's such a disempowering feeling, and I wanted to ensure that no other kids had to go through that kind of humiliation. Li:No, that's a great point that you bring up because I think we had similar experiences. I was actually recently going through some old photos at my mom's house, and I came across my elementary school class photo, the classic one, everyone's lined up, shortest to tallest kind of thing. And there I was, the only Black child in a class of 25 white students. And I think at that young, innocent age, I didn't really understand what I was up against, and today's youth and teachers are facing so many challenges in the classroom today, things that I don't think either of us could have really imagined.And so, as I was exploring the amazing tools and campaigns that you've been authoring and spearheading, like Teaching for Black Lives, Black Lives Matter at School, and the Zinn Education platform of so many resources, I think, "What would my early school experience have been like if these tools were available?" Right?And I'm wondering, would you have thought the same thing? Because when I think about these amazing tools that are being offered, I just imagine, and we're not even talking about the digital stuff. I'm just talking about the things around critical race theory, these ideas, just about things that are showing a representation of Black folks. Like you said, even just having a Black teacher and what that meant for you. So even thinking about, what if the tools that you are all creating today were actually in your classroom back at Garfield when you were youth? Jesse:Oh, wow. That would've been incredible. I mean, at the Zinn Education Project, we have scores of free downloadable people's history lessons that center Black history and struggles against structural racism. And these lessons tell history from the perspective of people who have been marginalized, who have been pushed out of the centers of power. We look at the founding of America from the perspective of those who have been enslaved, not those who were doing the enslaving. We look at American history through the eyes of those who are organizing multiracial struggles for racial and social justice, not the ones that are trying to maintain segregation and hoarding wealth in the hands of the few.And I would've just lit up to be able to have a teacher say that your family's history matters, that struggles that your family went through shaped this country, and whatever semblance of democracy that we're able to hold onto in this country is the result of the Black freedom struggle and the result of multiracial struggles for social justice. Instead, we got the message in American government class that democracy is something that's handed down from those in power and those on high.I can remember, at Garfield High School, my American government teacher assigned a research project, and I did a project about J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director. And it was the only paper I think I ever really tried on in high school. I was very disengaged from school and didn't see any point in it, but this research project captured my imagination because I learned about some really despicable things that someone in power had done.I couldn't believe that J. Edgar Hoover had led a campaign against the Black freedom movement, had targeted Martin Luther King, someone who we're all supposed to revere, and yet our government was wiretapping and even trying to get him to commit suicide and some pretty despicable things. And I poured myself into the research and I wrote the best paper I had done up until that point, and she gave me a C with the notes that the claims I was making were unsubstantiated. Li:Wow. Jesse:And it's clear that she just didn't agree, that she didn't want to hear that a white man in power had misused it. And that was a strong message I got that some ideas are off-limits, and it doesn't matter how hard you work. If you go against what makes a white teacher comfortable, then there are consequences for that.And after that, I really didn't want to try anymore. I didn't feel like my opinions mattered, and I would've loved to have a teacher help me understand how we can live in a society that calls itself the freest nation on earth, and yet was based on enslavement of Black people and genocide of Native people, continued with Jim Crow segregation to where up through my dad's generation couldn't vote if you were Black.And then in our own generation, we have mass incarceration. And how is it that racism continues to change in focus and character, but is a constant in American society? And I wasn't able to learn that until much later, and I would've loved to have some of the resources that the Zinn Education Project provides today. Li:Yes, you and me both. Jesse:Yeah. Li:And that brings me to my next question about one of your ongoing campaigns is Black Lives Matter at School. And this year, the 2023 Creative Writing Challenge prompt was, "How can a school community support you in being unapologetically Black?" How might the young Jesse have answered that same question? Jesse:Wow. Well, the young Jesse would've been scared to answer that question. Li:Really? Say more. Jesse:I think that because I was so worried about what it meant to be Black and what that meant about my intelligence, that being unapologetically Black was very foreign for me for far too long. It was hard to come to loving my blackness, and it was a long road to get there. And I'm just so glad that the Black Lives Matter at School movement exists, because so many children like me who are scared to embrace their blackness because they're afraid that it could make them labeled as lesser, not as beautiful, not as deserving of love, not as deserving of care, and everything that all of our kids deserve.Now, these students are celebrated in our Week of Action that happens the first week of February every year, and also on our Year of Purpose. So every month, we're revisiting the principles of the Black Lives Matter Global Network and we're highlighting different aspects of the Black freedom struggle. And this would've been transformative in my life, helped me come to love my blackness much earlier. And I hope that for many thousands of kids across this country, they are having that experience. Li:I love that answer. Thank you. So Garfield High School in Seattle is where you actually attended school as a youth and were also a teacher for over a decade. It's the place where your role as an activist also took root. So history was made here, not just for you as an individual, but really locally and then nationally. So why do you think this was happening at Garfield? Why Garfield High School? And what's the culture and social climate of this school that made it such fertile ground to spark local protests and now national change? Jesse:Yeah. I love that question because I bleed purple and I'm a Bulldog to the core. Garfield is a special place to me, and I think the history of the school is a lot of the reason why it was a fertile ground recently for social change. Garfield High School is the school that the founder of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party graduated from in 1968, Aaron Dixon. Li:Wow. Jesse:It's the site where Stokely Carmichael came to speak as the Black Power movement was rising. And before that, Martin Luther King came and spoke at Garfield High School in his only visit to Seattle. It's the heart of the Central District, which was the Black neighborhood in Seattle that was redlined so that Black people could only live in that area. And for that reason, it developed a culture of resistance, and it's an important part of the Black freedom struggle throughout Seattle's history.And I think that in recent years, we've been able to revive some of that legacy in some of the struggles we've participated in. In 2013, we had a historic boycott of the MAP test, the Measures of Academic Progress test. And this was one of the myriad of high-stakes standardized tests that the kids had to take, and studies show that the average student in K-12 education now take 113 standardized tests. We used to take one in elementary, one in middle school, maybe a couple in high school, and now they're taking standardized tests just constantly.And this was a particularly egregious test that wasn't aligned to our standards. And finally, one educator at Garfield, Mallory Clarke, said she wasn't going to administer this test anymore, and she contacted me and wanted to know if I could help, and we began organizing the entire faculty at Garfield. And we called a meeting in the library and we asked everybody, "Is anybody getting useful information out of this test that's helping them with creating their curriculum?" And nobody found this test useful.And then Mallory said she wasn't going to give the test anymore, and who would join her? And we took a vote, and it was unanimous. Everybody said they were going to refuse to administer the test. And so, we organized a press conference in Mr. Gish's room, and we invited the media to come learn why we were going to refuse to give the standardized test, and one of the reasons is because of the legacy of standardized testing based in eugenics. Right? Li:Mm-hmm. Jesse:Standardized testing was created by open white supremacists. A man named Carl Brigham created the SAT exam out of Princeton University, and he was also the author of a book called The Study in American Intelligence, which was one of the Bibles of the eugenics movement. And the book concludes by lamenting that American intelligence is on the decline because we have more Black people than Europe does, and he fears that intermixing of the races will degrade the intelligence of Americans. And so, he created the SAT exam as a gatekeeper.And lo and behold, these tests prove that white native-born men were smarter than everybody else. Right? Well, they designed the test to show that, and then they get the feedback that they were looking for, and that's why people like W.E.B. Du Bois, Horace Mann Bond were some of the first opponents of these bogus IQ standardized testings that started to be grafted onto the public schools at the behest of the eugenics movement.And we knew this history. I'd read Wayne Au's book, Unequal By Design, that explained the racist history of standardized testing, and then we saw it playing out in our own school. We saw how English language learners would get low scores and it would make them feel deficient and unintelligent. But it wasn't measuring their intelligence. It was just measuring their proximity to white dominant culture, the English language, and not their intelligence. And we had so many examples of the way these tests were abusing kids, and we refused to do it. And the school district threatened the faculty of Garfield High School with a 10-day suspension without pay for the tested subject teachers in reading and math, and even our testing coordinator refused to administer the test. Jesse:Kris McBride was an amazing advocate for the MAP test boycott. And even the first-year teachers, who didn't have any tenure protections, none of them backed down. And at the end of the school year, not only did they not suspend any of the teachers because of the overwhelming solidarity we received from thousands of educators and parents and students, not only around the country but around the world, who had heard about our boycott, at the end of the year, they actually suspended the test instead and got rid of the MAP test for all of Seattle's high schools, and it was just a resounding victory. Li:Yeah. That's a triumph. That's a triumph for sure. Jesse:Yeah. Right? Li:And I was watching some of the news coverage, and it was just, like you said, quite a victory to have that test obliterated, really, just removed completely from the system, and also then making way for this idea of multiple literacies and ways of learning that are more just and equitable for all students. And I love to see that, like you said, it begins just with one person. Shout out to Mallory and everyone who followed that one teacher. And like you said, that's all it takes, but then just to see the students really take lead in their own way was a beautiful thing. Jesse:Yeah. Yeah. It was cool that the students, when they knew we weren't going to administer the test, they sent administrators in to try to get the students to march them off to the computer labs to take the test, and some of them just staged to sit in in their own classroom, refused to get up and leave, and then the ones that went just clicked the button on the computer through very quickly so the score was invalidated.So the BSU supported us and the student government supported us, and it was an incredible solidarity that emerged in this struggle. And it wasn't about not wanting assessment. I think as you said, we wanted more authentic forms of assessment, ones that could actually help us understand what our students knew. And we started doing much more performance-based assessments. Li:Right. Jesse:When you get your PhD, they don't want you to eliminate wrong answer choices at faster rates. They want to know, can you think? Can you create? Li:Right. Are you a critical thinker? Jesse:Right. Yeah. Can you critically think? Can you make a thesis and back it up with evidence? And so, that's what we began doing. We wanted to have kids develop a thesis. And it might not be at the PhD level, but it'll be at a developmentally appropriate level for them, and then back it up with evidence and then present that evidence to the class or to other teachers and administrators and defend their position, and that, I think, was a real victory for all of our students for authentic assessment. Li:And went down at Garfield. Jesse:Yeah. No doubt. No doubt. Li:So another question I got for you. Part of the work of Monument Lab is to engage community in the current state of monuments and public memory in this country and beyond. Have you made any connections to this parallel movement to take down monuments that stand as symbols that continue to uphold oppressive systems and then honor the same false histories that you and your comrades are fighting in the classroom? Jesse:Yeah. Definitely. I think one of my favorite assignments I ever gave my students at Garfield was to research the debate over monuments around the country and think about, "How do we decide as a society who to honor, and who should be honored, and who shouldn't be?" And all the students got a big chunk of clay and they created their own monument to replace one that they thought was inappropriate. And so, many chose Confederate monuments or monuments to any slaveholders, including the hallowed Founding Fathers, that many of my students didn't hold in reverence given that they could have been owned by George Washington.And so, at the University of Washington, we have that statue of George Washington. Some people wanted to replace that with a statue of Aaron Dixon, who graduated from Garfield High School, founded the Black Panther Party, went to the University of Washington, and they felt far better represented our community as somebody who started the Free Breakfast Program in Seattle and who founded a free medical clinic that's still open to this day, just a few blocks away from Garfield High School, where many of our students receive free medical care to this day. Li:Oh, that's amazing. Jesse:So creating themselves some beautiful monuments to really honor the people that have made their lives better rather than just powerful people who imposed their will on our society. And I just think it was such an incredible moment in the 2020 uprising when all across the country, people said, "We are no longer going to honor slaveholders and perpetrators of genocide." It was incredible to see them dump the statue of Columbus into the Bay in Baltimore and teach the whole country a lesson, a history lesson about the genocidal attack of Columbus on Native people and how we need to find better heroes. Li:I like that. Find better heroes. You've dedicated a bunch of your recent efforts to resisting House Bills 1807 and 1886 introduced by state Republican Representative Jim Walsh. As you put it in your article that I read, these bills are designed to mandate educators lie to Washington students about structural racism and sexism, essentially forcing educators to teach a false, alternative history of the United States. Can you break down the basic proposals of these bills and their connection to, say, recent book bans, critical race theory, and resources like The 1619 Project? Jesse:For sure. Many people imagine that the attack on critical race theory is mostly in red states or it's just a product of the South. But instead, people should know that actually the attack on critical race theory originated from Christopher Rufo, who ran for city council in Seattle, and he is still a resident in Washington state, and that every state in the nation, except for California, has had a proposed bill that would require educators to lie to students about structural racism or sexism or heterosexism.And even in California, the one state that hasn't had a proposed bill, they have many local school districts that have one of these educational gag order policies in place that seek to coerce educators to lie to students about American history, about Black history, about queer history. And Washington state is one of the many states that has had proposed bills by Republican legislators that are trying to deceive students. They were so frightened of the 2020 uprising and all the questions that young people were asking about our deeply unequitable society that instead of working to try to eliminate that inequality, they just want to ban people from understanding where it comes from.So in my state, last year, they proposed House Bill 1886 that would make it illegal to teach about structural racism. And I found it deeply ironic that the House bill was numbered 1886, because that was the same year as a mob of white people in Seattle rounded up hundreds of Chinese people and forced them into wagons and hauled them to Seattle docks where they were placed on ships and illegally deported. And the chief of police helped this riotous white mob illegally, Police Chief William Murphy, and he never had faced any penalty for it. He was acquitted, even though this racist attack on Chinese people was carried out. Right?And our students have the right to learn about this. They should know that this happened in our city, and too many don't grow up learning the reality of that anti-Chinese attack. And then when hate crimes skyrocketed in our own era in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, you saw hate crimes increase by several hundred percent against Asian Americans, and people wonder why. There's a long history of this Yellow Peril narrative in American society that has labeled Asian Americans and Chinese Americans as the other, as dangerous, as dirty, and our students need to learn about that if they're going to overcome those racial divisions today. Li:And what would the passing of these bills mean for the next generation of youth and their futures, and their education? What's the status of these bills now? Jesse:Well, thankfully, the bill in Washington state did not pass, but they are proliferating around the country. 18 states have already passed bills that seek to coerce educators into lying about structural racism, denying the fact that our country was built on structural racism, of enslavement of Black people, and genocide of Native people, and the exploitation of labor of immigrants, hyper-exploitation of Chinese labor on the railroads and Latinx labor in farms, and they want to hide this history.And you saw it in Florida when they banned the AP African American Studies course. In Virginia, they're trying to rework the state standards to hide the legacy of structural racism and the contributions of Black people, and they are trying to send us back to the era of the 1940s and '50s during the second Red Scare known as the McCarthy era. In the McCarthy era, hundreds of teachers, thousands of teachers around the country were fired after having been labeled communist.And then the Red Scare had the overlapping Lavender Scare, which was the attack on LGBTQ people, and that was especially intense against educators, and Florida had a particularly pernicious attack on queer educators. They had the Johns Committee there that would interrogate teachers about their sex lives and then fire them, remove their teaching certificate so they could never teach again. And this is what people like Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida are trying to revive with the Don't Say Gay bill that has outlawed any discussions of LGBTQ people for the younger grades, and also his so-called Stop W.O.K.E. Act that imposes anti-truth laws on Black history.And in Florida now, it is a third-degree felony for an educator to be caught with the wrong book about Black people or about queer people in their classroom. You can get five years in jail and a $5,000 fine for having the wrong book. Thousands of books are being banned all over the country, and they are rapidly trying to bring us back to that Red Scare, Lavender Scare era where they could just label you a communist or today label you a critical race theorist and push you out of the classroom.So we're at a crossroads right now, where everybody has to decide, "Are we going to build a multiracial struggle to create a true democracy? Or are we going to submit to this fearmongering and this racial hatred and allow them to turn back the clock?" And I hope that people will value social justice enough to join our struggle. Li:I'm just blown away by all the things you're saying, and it's really powerful because I come from a family of educators. Both my father and my mother are educators. My brother and myself are both educators. So I see it not as a job, but like a vocation. And it really sounds like you and the folks that you're in community with, in solidarity with in Seattle and beyond are really making amazing strides and asking such critical questions that could determine the future of our country. Jesse:No doubt. Li:For me and so many other educators, Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress were defining transformative works that greatly impacted my trajectory in the world. And I wanted to know, can you share what books or even creative works that inspired the path that got you where you are today? Jesse:Yeah. I love that question. Definitely those two books are at the top. Li:Oh, you like those books? Aren't they at the top? Jesse:I love those books. Yes. Li:I love them. Jesse:Yes. Li:I mean, and I'm sure you reread them because I'm always rereading those books. Jesse:Sure. Yes. I'm quoting them in the book I'm writing right now. So much of what I'm doing would not be possible without the theoretical framework that bell hooks gave us and that Paulo Freire gave us to understand how to use dialogic pedagogy to engage your students in a conversation, and educating isn't about filling their heads with what you know, the banking model of education, as Paulo Freire put it, right? Li:Right. Jesse:It's about learning from your students. Li:Right. That relationship between this... I learned so much from my students, especially now that I'm getting older. Jesse:Yeah. No doubt. Li:You got to stay in the know with the youth. Jesse:Hey, the students created the greatest lesson plan of my lifetime when they organized the uprising of 2020. That was mostly young BIPOC folks that organized that uprising and taught the nation what structural racism is and taught many of their teachers that they needed to learn something about it and they needed to begin teaching about it. Right? That's where this whole backlash to critical race theory started.And I think that all of us in the struggle would do well to join in study groups around books that can help deepen our understanding of history and theory that will help us in these struggles to come. There are so many books that I could cite that have been pivotal to my understanding of the struggle. I mean, working at the Zinn Education Project, Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States has been really important. Li:Yes. Jesse:So I think reframing who the subjects of history are and... Li:And the authors of history, right? Jesse:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. I think that Jarvis Givens book, Fugitive Pedagogy, should be read by all educators. Li:Yes. I'm familiar, very familiar with that project, and it is super inspiring. Yes. Jesse:Yeah. I mean, that book is just a key that unlocks the truth about why we're in the situation we're in right now, where they're trying to outlaw education. Li:And all the overlapping systems, because you talked about that, like these intersecting oppressions and overlapping systems of oppression that are really creating something that it feels like it's impenetrable, but people are making strides. Jesse:Yeah. No doubt. And I would just say that the book, Fugitive Pedagogy, just gives you that history of how Black education has always been a fugitive project. It's always been a challenge to the power structure. It's always been verboten. And starting in 1740 were the first anti-literacy laws in South Carolina banning Black people from learning to read and write.Li:How about that? Right. Jesse:Why was that? Because in 1739, the Stono Rebellion happened. A man named Jemmy helped lead an uprising of enslaved people, and he marched with a banner that read "Liberty" as they collected more enslaved people along the way during their uprising, and this terrified the enslavers. And they not only wanted to kill all the people that were trying to get their freedom, they wanted to kill the idea of freedom. They wanted to kill the ability of Black people to ever write the word liberty again.And so, they imposed these laws to ban Black people from learning to read and write. And today's racists aren't so bold as to ban the ability for people to learn to read and write, but they do want to ban the ability to read the world, as Paulo Freire put it. They don't want us to be racially literate. They don't want us to understand how systems of power and oppression are maintained. And so, they're banning ideas now in the classroom. And once you understand the long history of the attacks on Black education, you can understand why it's happening again today. Li:And even through the digital divide, right? This idea of being disconnected from these resources that are so much a part of education today that Black and brown communities don't always have really makes a difference in the education that they receive and how they learn as well. Jesse:No doubt. I mean, that was emphasized during the pandemic, right?Li:Exactly. So much was amplified during the pandemic, especially that digital divide. Jesse:No doubt. No doubt. Li:So, Jesse, I want to think about the future and speculate. In the best-case scenario, maybe a utopian future for education in the United States. Teachers often have to draft a wish list for what they want, the resources, the needs they have for their classrooms as the academic year comes around. So thinking about what you would want, the three essentials that would be on your wish list for the classroom of the future.Jesse:Yeah. I love this question, because too often, images of the future are all about dystopias. Those are the movies and books we get, and there's not enough freedom dreaming about what's possible. Li:I love that. Shout out to Robin D. Kelley. Jesse:No doubt. Another essential book to read. Li:Yes. Jesse:So I think in the classroom of the future that provides a liberatory education for our youth, the first thing I think we might see is the breakdown of subjects and getting rid of these artificial divisions between the different academic disciplines. And so, school would look very different. Instead of going to math class in the first period and then language arts and then social studies, you might have a class called Should Coal Trains be Used in Seattle? Right? They were just debating whether we should allow coal trains to come through our city.So it would be based on a real problem that exists in your society, and then you would use math and science and language arts and social studies to attack this problem. You would want to learn about the science of climate change and the math that helps you understand the changing climate. Right? We would want to learn the history of coal extraction in this country, the toll it's taken on working people who are minors and the toll it's taken on the environment.We would want to use language arts to write speeches, to deliver your opinion to the city council about this. So we would have problem-posing pedagogy, as Paulo Freire put it, where the courses would be organized around things that the kids care about that impact their lives, and then we would use the academic disciplines in service of that.I think in addition to that, my second requirement for this liberatory classroom would be about wraparound services, so that when kids come to school, they also get healthcare. They also get tutoring services, dental care, mental health care, food for their families. And schools could be really the hubs of community where people have their needs taken care of and are invested in to support not just the students, but their families as well.And lastly, I think schools would be flooded with resources, so that instead of wasting trillions of dollars on the Pentagon so that the United States can go bomb countries all over the world and kill children and their families, we would take that money and flood it into the school system so that kids have all the state-of-the-art resources they need, from the digital equipment, recording equipment, music, art supplies, to funding the school nurse, to the auditoriums, and the music halls. I mean, you can imagine that the richest country on earth could have incredible resources for their kids if we valued education, if we valued our young people.Instead, so many schools in America today are falling apart. The first school I ever taught in in Washington, D.C., an elementary school, I had a hole in the ceiling of my classroom, and it just rained into my classroom and destroyed the first project that I ever assigned the students, their research project, and they never even got to present the projects. Li:No way. Jesse:And our kids deserve better than that. Li:Oh, they definitely deserve better than that. Right? Oh my gosh. Jesse:We're in a society where 81 billionaires have the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of humanity, and that wealth divide means that our kids go to schools that are falling apart, and we would transform that in a future society that's worthy of our kids. Li:Most definitely. And if I can, I wanted to add a fourth thing, because I remember something you said about performance-based assessment. Jesse:Oh, yeah. Li:And I think that would- Jesse:I should put that in. Li:... definitely be essential, right? Make sure you get that one in. But last but not least, my final question to you is, what's next for Zinn Education? And more specifically, what is next for Jesse Hagopian? Jesse:Oh, thank you. Well, I'm really excited about the June 10th National Day of Action. The Zinn Education Project has partnered with Black Lives Matter at School and the African American Policy Forum to organize the Teach Truth Day of Action on June 10th, and I hope everybody will join us on that day of action in organizing an event in your community. This is the third annual Teach Truth Day of Action, and the past ones have been incredible.People have organized historical walking tours in their community to highlight examples of the Black freedom struggle and sites that were important in the Black freedom struggle in their own communities or sites of oppression and racial injustice that students have the right to learn about in their own communities. Some people went to sites where Japanese people were rounded up and incarcerated during World War II. Some people in Memphis, Tennessee went to a site right on their school grounds where there was a race riot and many Black people were killed.In Seattle, we went by the clinic that the Black Panther Party started and gave that history and highlighted how, if the bill passed to deny teachers the right to teach about structural racism, we couldn't even teach about the origins of the health clinic in our own community. And so, there'll be many creative protests that happen on June 10th, 2023, and I'm excited to say we have more cosponsors than ever before.The National Education Association is supporting now, and many other grassroots organizations from across the country. So I expect hundreds of teachers and educators will turn out to protest these anti-truth laws, and I'll be right there with them all helping to organize it and learning from the educators and organizers, who are putting these events on, and hopefully helping to tell their story in the new book that I hope to be finishing very soon about this- Li:You're going to finish it. You're going to finish. This month, man. Jesse:Thank you. Li:This is your month. Jesse:I need that encouragement. Li:You got this. Jesse:I hope I finish it on this month. Li:Believe me. When I was so close to finishing my dissertation, everyone kept asking me, "Are you done yet? Are you done yet?" So I know, because I could see you cringe when I asked you that in the beginning. All I can say is, look, I mean, I'm just so grateful to have this conversation with you today. Thank you for joining me. And I also got to say, I'm sorry to say, Jesse, your mother was right. I think this was your calling. I think this might have been what you were set on this planet to do. Jesse:It feels that way now. Thank you so much. Li:Yes, indeed. So this is Monument Lab, Future Memory. Thank you to my guest, Jesse Hagopian. Jesse:Hey, I really appreciate you having me on. I just felt your warm spirit come across and brighten my day. Really great to be with you. Li:My pleasure. 

About Jesse Jesse Vincent is the cofounder and CTO of Keyboardio, where he designs and manufactures high-quality ergonomic mechanical keyboards. In previous lives, he served as the COO of VaccinateCA, volunteered as the project lead for the Perl programming language, created both the leading open source issue tracking system RT: Request tracker and K-9 Mail for Android.Links: Keyboardio: https://keyboard.io Obra: https://twitter.com/obra TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: You could build you go ahead and build your own coding and mapping notification system, but it takes time, and it sucks! Alternately, consider Courier, who is sponsoring this episode. They make it easy. You can call a single send API for all of your notifications and channels. You can control the complexity around routing, retries, and deliverability and simplify your notification sequences with automation rules. Visit courier.com today and get started for free. If you wind up talking to them, tell them I sent you and watch them wince—because everyone does when you bring up my name. Thats the glorious part of being me. Once again, you could build your own notification system but why on god's flat earth would you do that?Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Jellyfish. So, you're sitting in front of your office chair, bleary eyed, parked in front of a powerpoint and—oh my sweet feathery Jesus its the night before the board meeting, because of course it is! As you slot that crappy screenshot of traffic light colored excel tables into your deck, or sift through endless spreadsheets looking for just the right data set, have you ever wondered, why is it that sales and marketing get all this shiny, awesome analytics and inside tools? Whereas, engineering basically gets left with the dregs. Well, the founders of Jellyfish certainly did. That's why they created the Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform, but don't you dare call it JEMP! Designed to make it simple to analyze your engineering organization, Jellyfish ingests signals from your tech stack. Including JIRA, Git, and collaborative tools. Yes, depressing to think of those things as your tech stack but this is 2021. They use that to create a model that accurately reflects just how the breakdown of engineering work aligns with your wider business objectives. In other words, it translates from code into spreadsheet. When you have to explain what you're doing from an engineering perspective to people whose primary IDE is Microsoft Powerpoint, consider Jellyfish. Thats Jellyfish.co and tell them Corey sent you! Watch for the wince, thats my favorite part.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. As you folks are well aware by now, this show is at least ostensibly about the business of cloud. And that's intentionally overbroad. You can fly a boat through it, which means it's at least wider than the Suez Canal.And that's all well and good, but what do all of these cloud services have in common? That's right, we interact with them via typing on keyboards. My guest today is Jesse Vincent, who is the founder of Keyboardio and creator of the Model 01 heirloom-grade keyboard, which is sitting on my desk that sometimes I use, sometimes it haunts me. Jesse, thank you for joining me.Jesse: Hey, thanks so much for having me, Corey.Corey: So, mechanical keyboards are one of those divisive things that, back in the before times when we were all sitting in offices, it was an express form of passive aggression, where, “I don't like the people around me, and I'm going to show it to them with things that can't really complain about. So, what is the loudest keyboard I can get?” Style stuff. And some folks love them, some folks can't stand them. And most folks to be perfectly blunt, do not seem to care.Jesse: So, it's not actually about them being loud, or it doesn't have to be. Mechanical keyboards can be dead silent; they can be as quiet as anything else. There's absolutely a subculture that is into things that are as loud as they possibly can be; you know, sounds like there's a cannon going off on somebody's desk. But you can also get absolutely silent mechanical switches that are more dampened than your average keyboard. For many, many people, it's about comfort, it is about the key feel.A keyboard is supposed to have a certain feeling and these flat rectangles that feel like you're typing on glass, they don't have that feeling and they're not good for your fingers. And it's been fascinating over the past five or six years to watch this explosion in interest in good keyboards again.Corey: I learned to first use a computer back on an old IBM 286 in the '80s. And this obviously had a Model M—or damn close to it—style buckling spring keyboard. It was loud and I'm nostalgic about the whole thing. True story I've never told on this podcast before; I was a difficult child when I was five years old, and I was annoyed because my parents went out of the house and my brother was getting more attention than I was. I poured a bucket of water into the keyboard.And to this day, I'm surprised my father didn't murder me after that. And we wound up after having a completely sealing rubber gasket on top of this thing. Because this was the '80s; keyboards were not one of those, “Oh, I'm going to run down to the store and pick up another one for $20.” This was at least a $200 whoops-a-doozy. And let's just say that it didn't endear me to my parents that week.Jesse: That's funny because that keyboard is one that actually probably would have dried out just fine. Not like the Microsoft Naturals that I used to carry in the mid-'90s. Those white slightly curved ones. That was my introduction to ergonomic keyboards and they had a fatal flaw as many mid-'90s Microsoft products did. In this case, they melted in the rain; the circuit traces inside were literally wiped away by water. If a cup of water got in that keyboard, it was gone.Corey: Everyone has a story involving keyboard and liquids at some point, or they are the most careful people that are absolutely not my people whatsoever because everyone I hang out with is inherently careless. And over time I used other keyboards as I went through my life and never had strong opinions on them, and then I got to play with a mechanical keyboard had brought all that time rushing back to me of, “Oh, yeah.” And my immediate thought is, “Oh, this is great. I wonder if I could pour water into it? No, no.”And I started getting back into playing with them and got what I thought was the peak model keyboard from Das Keyboards which, there was the black keyboard with no writing on it at all. And I learned I don't type nearly as well as I thought I did in those days. And okay. That thing sat around gathering dust and I started getting a couple more and a couple more, and it turns out if you keep acquiring mechanical keyboards, you can turn an interest into a problem but you can also power your way through to the other side and become a collector. And I started building my own for a while and I still have at least a dozen of them in various states of assembly here.It was sort of a fun hobby that I got into, and for me at least it was, why do I want to build a keyboard myself? Is it, do I believe intrinsically that I can build a better keyboard than I can buy? Absolutely not. But everything else I do in my entire career as an engineer until that point had been about making the bytes on the screen go light up in different patterns. That was it.This was something that I had built that I could touch with my hands and was still related to the thing that I did, and was somewhat more forgiving than other things that I could have gotten into, like you know, woodworking with table saws that don't realize my arm it just lopped off.Jesse: Oh, you can burn yourself pretty good with a soldering iron.Corey: Oh, absolutely I can.Jesse: But yeah, no, I got into this in a similar-sounding story. I had bad wrists throughout my career. I was a programmer and a programming manager and CEO. And my wrist hurts all the time, and I'd been through pretty much every ergonomic keyboard out there. If you seen the one where you stick your fingers into little wells, and each finger you can press back forth, left, right, and down, the ones that looked like they were basically a pair of flat capacitive surfaces from a company that later got bought by Apple and turned into the iPads touch technology, Microsoft keyboards, everything. And nothing quite felt right.A cloud startup I had been working on cratered one summer. Long story short, the thing went under for kind of sad reasons and I swore I was going to take a year off to screw around and figure out what the next thing was going to be. And at some point, I noticed there were people on the internet building their own keyboards. This was not anything I had ever done before. When I started soldering, I did figure out that I must have soldered before because it smelled familiar, but this was supposed to be a one-month project to build myself a single keyboard.And I saw that people on the internet were doing it, I figured, eh, how hard could it be? Just one of those things that Perl hackers are apt to say. Little did I know. It's now, I want to say something like eight years later, and my one-month project to build one keyboard has failed thousands and thousands and thousands of times over as we've shipped thousands of keyboards to, oh God, it's like 75 or 78 countries.Corey: And it's great. It's well made. The Model 01 that I got was part of an early Kickstarter batch. My wife signed me up for it—because she knew I was into this sort of thing—as a birthday gift. And then roughly a year later, if memory serves, it showed up and that was fine.Again, it's Kickstarter is one of those, this might just be an aspirational gift. We don't know. And—because, Kickstarter—but it was fun. And I use it. It's great.I like a lot of the programmability aspects of it. There are challenges. I'm not used to using ergonomic keyboards, and the columnar layout is offset to a point where I miss things all the time. And if you're used to typing rapidly, in things like chats, or Twitter or whatnot, were rapid responses valuable, it's frustrating trying to learn how a new keyboard layout works.Jesse: Absolutely. So, we got some advice very early on from one of the research scientists who helped Microsoft with their design for their natural keyboards, and one of the things that he told us was, “You will probably only ever get one chance to make a keyboard; almost every company that makes a keyboard fails, and so you should take one of the sort of accepted designs and make a small improvement to help push the industry forward. You don't want to go do something radical and have nobody like it.”Corey: That's very reasonable advice and also boring. Why bother?Jesse: Well, we walked away from that with a very different take, which was, if we're only going to get one chance of this, we're going to do the thing we want to make.Corey: Yeah.Jesse: And so we did a bunch of stuff that we got told might be difficult to do or impossible. We designed our own keycaps from scratch. We milled the enclosure out of hardwood. When we started, we didn't know where we were manufacturing, but we did specify that the wood was going to be Canadian maple because it grows like a weed, and as you know, not in danger of being made extinct. But when you're manufacturing in southern China and you're manufacturing with Canadian maple, that comes on a boat from North America.Corey: There's something to be said for the globalization supply chain as we see things shipped back and forth and back and forth, and it seems ridiculous but the economics are there it's—Jesse: Oh, my God. Now, this year.Corey: Yeah [laugh], there's that.Jesse: Supply chains are… how obscenity-friendly is this podcast? [laugh].Corey: Oh, we can censor anything that's too far out. Knock yourself out.Jesse: Because what I would ordinarily say is the supply chains are [BLEEP].Corey: Yep, they are.Jesse: Yeah. This time around, we gave customers the—for the Model 100, which is our new keyboard that the Kickstarter just finished up for—we gave customers the choice of that nice Canadian maple or walnut. We got our quotes in advance. You know, our supplier confirmed wood was no problem a few months in advance. And then the night before the campaign launched, our wood supplier got in touch and said, “So, there are no walnut planks that are wide enough to be had in all of southern China. There are some supply chain issues due to the global container shortage. We don't know what we're going to be able to do. Maybe you could accept it if we did butcher block style walnut and glued planks together.”They made samples and then a week later, instead of FedExing us the samples, I got a set of photographs with a whole bunch of sad faces and crying face emojis saying, “Well, we tried. We know there's no way that this would be acceptable to your customers.” We asked, “So, where's this walnut supposed to be coming from that you can't get it?” They're like, “It's been sitting on the docks at the origin since March. It's being forested in Kentucky in the United States.”Corey: The thing that surprised me the most about the original model on Kickstarter campaign was how much went wrong across the board. I kept reading your updates. It was interesting, at some point, it was like, okay, this is clearly a Ponzi scheme. That's the name of the keyboard: ‘The Ponzi', where there's going to be increasingly outlandish excuses.Jesse: I don't think a Ponzi scheme would be the right aspersion to be casting.Corey: There's that more pedestrian scam-style thing. We could go with that.Jesse: We have a lot of friends who've been in industry longer than us, and every time we brought one of the problems that our factory seemed to be having to them, they said, “Oh, yeah, that's the thing that absolutely happens.”Corey: Yeah, it was just you kept hitting every single one of these, and I was increasingly angry on your behalf, reading these things about, “Oh, yeah. Just one of your factory reps just blatantly ripped you off, and this was expected to be normal in some cases, and it's like”—and you didn't even once threatened to burn the factory now, which I thought was impressive.Jesse: No, nobody threatened to burn the factory down, but one of the factories did have a fire.Corey: Which we can neither confirm nor deny—I kid, I kid, I kid.Jesse: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so what our friends who had been in industry longer that said, it was like, “Jesse, but, you know, nobody has all the problems.” And eventually, we figured out what was going on, and it was that our factory's director of overseas sales was a con artist grifter who had been scamming both sides. She'd been lying to us and lying to the factory, and making up stories to make her the only trusted person to each side, and she'd just been embezzling huge sums of money.Corey: You hear these stories, but you never think it's going to be something that happens to you. Was this your first outing with manufacturing a physical product?Jesse: This was our first physical product.Corey: But I'm curious about it; are you effectively following the trope of a software person who thinks, “Ah, I could do hardware? How hard could it be? I could ship code around the world seconds, so hardware will be just a little bit slower.” How close to that trope are you?Jesse: So, when we went into the manufacturing side, we knew that we knew nothing, and we knew that it was fraught with peril. And we gave ourselves an awful lot of padding on timing, which we then blew through for all sorts of reasons. And we ran through a hardware incubator that helped us vet our plans, we were working with companies on the ground that helped startups work with factories. And honestly, if it hadn't been for this one individual, yes we would have had problems, but it wouldn't have been anything of the same scale. As far as we can tell, almost everything bad that happened had a grain of truth in it, it's just that… you know, a competent grifter can spin a tiny thing into a giant thing.And nobody in China suspected her, and nobody in China believed that this could possibly be happening because the penalties if she got caught were ten years in a Chinese prison for an amount of money that effectively would be a down payment on an apartment instead of the price of a full apartment or fully fleeing the country.Corey: It seems like that would be enough of a deterrent, but apparently not.Jesse: Apparently not. So, we ended up retaining counsel and talking to friends who had been working in southern China for 15 years for about who they might recommend for a lawyer. We ended up retaining a Chinese lawyer. Her name's [Una 00:13:36]; she's fantastic.Corey: Referrals available upon request.Jesse: Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. I'm happy to send her all kinds of business. She looked at the contract we had with the factory, she's like, “This is a Western contract. This isn't going to help you in the Chinese courts. What we need to do is we need to walk into the factory and negotiate a new agreement that is in Chinese, written by a Chinese lawyer, and get them to sign it.”And part of that agreement was getting them to take full joint responsibility for everything. And she walked in with me to the factory. She dressed down: t-shirt and jeans. They initially thought she was my translator, and she made a point of saying, “Look, I'm Jesse's counsel. I'm not your lawyer. I do not represent your interests.”And three-party negotiations with the factory: the factory's then former salesperson, and us. And she negotiated a new agreement. And I had a long list of all the things that we needed to have in our contract, like all the things that we really cared about. Get to the end of the day and she hands it to me and she's like, “What do you think?” And I read it through and my first thought is that none of the ten points that we need in this agreement are there.And then I realized that they are there, they're just very subtle. And everybody signs it. The factory takes full joint responsibility for everything that was done by their now former salesperson. We go outside; we get into the cab, and she turns to me—and she's not a native speaker of English, but she is fluent—and she's like, how do you think that went, Jesse? I'm like, I think that went pretty well. And she's like, “Yes. I get my job satisfaction out of adverse negotiation, and the factory effectively didn't believe in lawyers.”Corey: No, no. I've seen them. They exist. I married one of them.Jesse: Oh, yeah. As it turned out, they also didn't really believe in the court system and they didn't believe in not pissing off judges. Nothing could help us recover the time we lost; we did end up recovering all of our tooling, we ended up recovering all of our product that they were holding, all with the assistance of the Chinese courts. It was astonishing because we went into this whole thing knowing that there was no chance that a Chinese court would find for a small Western startup with no business presence in China against a local factory, and I think our goal was that they would get a black mark on their corporate social credit report so that nobody else would do business with this factory that won't give the customer back their tooling. And… it turns out that, no, the courts just helped us.Corey: It's nice when things work the way they're supposed to, on some level.Jesse: It is.Corey: And then you solve your production problems, you shipped it out. I use it, I take it out periodically.Jesse: We'd shipped every customer order well before this.Corey: Oh, okay. This was after you had already done the initial pre-orders. This was as you were ongoing—Jesse: Yeah, there were keycaps we owed people, which were—Corey: Oh, okay.Jesse: Effectively the free gift we promised aways in for being late on shipping.Corey: That's what that was for. It showed up one day and I wondered what the story behind that was. But yeah, it was—Jesse: Yeah.Corey: They're great.Jesse: Yeah. You know, and then there was a story in The Verge of, this Kickstarter alleges that—da, da, da, da, da. We're like, “I understand that AOL's lawyers make you say ‘alleges,' but no, this really happened, and also, we really had shipped everything that we owed to customers long before all this went down.”Corey: Yeah. This is something doesn't happen in the software world, generally speaking. I don't have to operate under the even remote possibility that my CI/CD system is lying to me about what it's doing. I can generally believe things that show up in computers—you would think—but there are—Jesse: You would think. I mean—Corey: There a lot of [unintelligible 00:17:19] exceptions to that, but generally, you can believe it.Jesse: In software, you sometimes we'll work with contractors or contract agencies who will make commitments and then not follow through on those commitments, or not deliver the thing they promised. It does sometimes happen.Corey: Indeed.Jesse: Yeah, no, the thing I miss the most from software is that if there is a defect, the cost of shipping an update is nil and the speed at which you can ship an update is instantly.Corey: You would think it would be nil, but then we look at AWS data transfer pricing and there's a giant screaming caveat on that. It's you think that moving bytes would cost nothing. Yeah.Jesse: [unintelligible 00:17:53] compared to international shipping costs for physical goods, AWS transfer rates are incredibly competitive.Corey: No, no, to get to that stage, you need to add an [unintelligible 00:18:02] NAT gateway with their data processing fee.Jesse: [laugh].Corey: But yeah, it's a different universe. It's a different problem, a different scale of speed, a different type of customer, too, on some levels. So, after you've gotten the Model 01's issues sorted out, you launched a second keyboard. The ‘a-TREE-us', if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Or ‘A-tree-us'.Jesse: So Phil, who designed it, pronounces is ‘A-tree-us', so we pronounce it A-tree-us. And so, this is a super minimalist keyboard designed to take with you everywhere, and it was something where Phil Hagelberg, who is a software developer of some repute for a bunch of things, he had designed this sort of initially for his own use and then had started selling kits. So, laser-cut plywood enclosures, hand-built circuit boards, you just stick a little development board in the middle of it, spend some time soldering, and you're good to go. And he and I were internet buddies; he had apparently gotten his start from some of my early blog posts. And one day, he sent me a note asking if I would review his updated circuit board design because he was doing a revision.I looked at his updated circuit board design and then offered to just make him a new circuit board design because it was going to be pretty straightforward to do something that's going to be a little more reliable and a lot more cost-effective. We did that and we talked a little more, and I said, “Would you be interested in having us just make this thing in a factory and sell it with a warranty and send you a royalty?” And he said, but it's GPL. You don't have to send me a royalty.Corey: I appreciate that I am not compelled to do it. However—yeah.Jesse: Yeah, exactly. It's like, “No. We would like to support people who create things and work with you on it.”Corey: That's important. We periodically have guest authors writing blog posts on Last Week in AWS. Every single one of them is paid for what they do, sometimes there for various reasons that they can't or won't accept it and we donate it to a charity of their choice, but we do not expect people to volunteer for a profit-bearing entity, in some respects.Jesse: Yeah.Corey: Now, open-source is a whole separate universe that I still maintain that is rapidly becoming a, “Would you like to volunteer for a trillion-dollar company in your weekend hours?” Usually not, but there's always an argument.Jesse: Oh, yeah. We have a bunch of open-source contributors to our open-source firmware and we contribute stuff back upstream to other projects, and it is a related but slightly different thing. So, Phil said yes; we said yes. And then we designed and made this thing. We launched an ultra-portable keyboard designed to take with you everywhere.It came with a travel case that had a belt loop, and basically a spring-loaded holster for your keyboard if you want to nerd out like that. All of the Kickstarter video and all the photography sort of showed how nice it looked in a cafe. And we launched it, like, the week the first lockdowns hit, in the spring of 2019.Corey: I have to say I skipped that one entirely. One of the things that I wound up doing—keyboard-wise—when I started this company four years ago and change, now was, I wound up getting a fairly large desk, and it's 72 inches or something like that. And I want a big keyboard with a numpad—yeah, that's right, big spender here—because I don't need a tiny little keyboard. I find that the layer-shifting on anything that's below a full-size keyboard is a little on the irritating side. And this goes beyond. It is—it requires significant—Jesse: Oh, yeah. It's—Corey: Rewiring of your brain, on some level.Jesse: And there are ergonomic reasons why some people find it to be better and more comfortable. There's less reaching and twisting. But it is a very different typing experience and it's absolutely not for everybody. Nothing we've made so far is intended to be a mass-market product. When we launched the Model 01, we were nervous that we would make something that was too popular because we knew that if we had to fulfill 50,000 of them, we'd just be screwed. We knew how little we knew.But the Atreus, when we launched it on Kickstarter, we didn't know if we were going to have to cancel the campaign because no one was going to want their travel keyboard at the beginning of a pandemic, but it did real well. I don't remember the exact timing and numbers, but we hit the campaign goal, I want to say early on the first day, possibly within minutes, possibly within hours—it's been a while now; I don't remember exactly—ultimately, we sold, like, 2600 of them on Kickstarter and have done additional production runs. We have a distributor in Japan, and a distributor in the US, and a distributor in the UK, now. And we also sell them ourselves directly online, from keyboard.io.So, this is one of the other fascinating logistics things, is that we ship globally through Hong Kong. Which, before the pandemic was actually pretty pleasant. Inexpensive shipping globally has gotten kind of nuts because most discount carriers, the way they operated historically is, they would buy cargo space on commercial flights. Commercial international flights don't happen so much.Corey: Yes, suddenly, that becomes a harder thing to find.Jesse: Early on, we had a couple of shipping providers that were in the super-slow, maybe up to two weeks to get your thing somewhere by air taking, I want to say we had things that didn't get there for three months. They would get from Hong Kong to Singapore in three days; they would enter a warehouse, and then we had to start asking questions about, “Hey, it's been eight weeks. What's going on?” And they're like, “Oh, it's still in queue for a flight to Europe. There just aren't any.”Corey: It seems like that becomes a hard problem.Jesse: It becomes a hard problem. It started to get a little better, and now it's starting to get a little worse again. Carriers that used to be ultra-reliable are now sketchy. We have FedEx losing packages, which is just nuts. USPS shipments, we see things that are transiting from Hong Kong, landing at O'Hare, going through a sorting center in Chicago, and just vanishing for weeks at a time, in Chicago.Corey: I don't pretend to understand how this stuff works. It's magic to me; like, it is magic, on some level, that I can order toilet paper on the internet, it gets delivered to my house for less money than it costs me to go to the store and buy it. It feels like there's some serious negative externalities in there. But we don't want to look too closely at those because we might feel bad about things.Jesse: There's all kinds of fascinating stuff for us. So, shipping stuff, especially by air, there are two different ways that the shipping weight can get calculated. It can either get calculated based on the weight on a scale, or it can get calculated using a formula based on the dimensions. And so bulky things are treated as weighing an awful lot. I'm told that Amazon's logistics teams started doing this fascinating thing where ultra-dense, super-heavy shipments they pushed on to FedEx and UPS, whereas the ultra-light stuff that saved on jet fuel, they shoved onto their own planes.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build.With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: I want to follow up because it seems like, okay, pandemic shipping is a challenge; you clearly are doing well. You still have them in stock and are selling them as best I'm aware, correct?Jesse: Yes.Corey: Yeah. I may have to pick one up one of these days just so I can put it on the curiosity keyboard shelf and kick it around and see how it works. And then you recently concluded a third keyboard Kickstarter, in this case. And—Jesse: Yeah.Corey: —this is not your positioning; this is my positioning of what I'm picking up of, “Hey, remember that Model 01 keyboard we sold you that you love and we talked about and it's amazing? Yeah, turns out that's crap. Here's the better version of it.” Correct that misapprehension, please. [laugh].Jesse: Sure. So, it absolutely is not crap, but we've been out of stock in the Model 01 for a couple of years now. And we see them going used for as much or sometimes more than we used to charge for them new. It went out of stock because of the shenanigans with that first factory. And shortly before we launched the Atreus, we'd been planning to bring back an updated version of the Model 01; we've even gotten to the point of, like, designing the circuit boards and starting to update the tooling, the injection molding tooling, and then COVID, Atreus, life, everything.And so it took us a little longer to get there. But there is a larger total addressable market for a keyboard like the Model 01 than the total number that we ever sold. There are certainly people who had Model 01s who want replacements, want extras, want another one on another desk. There are also plenty of people who wanted a Model 01 and never got one.Corey: Here's my question for you, with all three of these keyboards because they're a different layout, let's be clear. Some more so than others, but even the columnar layout is strange here. Once upon a time, I had a week in which I wasn't doing much, and I figured, ah, I'll Dvorak—which is a different keyboard layout—and it's not that it's hard; it's that it's rewiring a whole bunch of muscle memory. The problem I ran into was not that it was impossible to do, by any stretch, but because of what I was doing—in those days help desk and IT support—I was having to do things on other people's computers, so it was a constant context switching back and forth between different layouts.Jesse: Yeah.Corey: Do you see that being a challenge with layouts like this, or is it more natural than that?Jesse: So, what we found is that it is easier to switch between an ergonomic layout and a traditional layout, like a columnar layout, and what's often called a row-stagger layout—which is what your normal keyboard looks like—than it is to switch between Dvorak and Qwerty on a traditional keyboard. Or the absolute bane of my existence is switching between a ThinkPad and a MacBook. They are super close; they are not the same.Corey: Right. You can't get an ergonomic keyboard layout inside of a laptop. I mean, looking at the four years of being gaslit by Apple, it's clear you can barely get a keyboard into a MacBook for a while. It's, “Oh, it's a piece of crap, but you're using it wro”—yeah. I'm not a fan of their entire approach to keyboards and care very than what Apple has to say about anything even slightly keyboard-related, but that's just me being bitter.Jesse: As far as I can tell, large chunks of Apple's engineering organization felt the same way that you did. Their new ones are actually decent again.Corey: Yes, that's what I've heard. And I will get one at some point, but I also have a problem where, “Oh, yeah, you know that $3,000 laptop with a crappy keyboard, you can't use for anything? Great. The solution is to give us 3000 more dollars, and then we'll sell you one that's good.” And it's, I feel like I don't want to reward the behavior.Jesse: I hear you. I ditched Mac OS for a number of years. I live the dream: Linux on the desktop. And it didn't hurt me a lot—printing worked fine, scanning worked fine, projectors were fine—but when I was reaching for things like Photoshop, and Lightroom, and my mechanical CAD software, it was the bad kind of funny.Corey: I have to be careful, now for the first time in my life I'm not updating to new operating systems early on, just because of things like the audio stuff I have plugged into my nonsense and the media nonsense that I do. It used to be that great, my computer only really needs to be a web browser and a terminal and I'm good. And worst case, I can make do with just the web browser because there are embedded a terminal into a web page options out there. Yeah, now it turns out that actually have a production workflow. Who knew?Jesse: Yep. That's the point where I started thinking about having separate machines for different things. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, I'm rapidly hitting that point. Yeah, I do want to get into having fun with keyboards, on some level, but it's the constant changing of what you're using. And then, of course, there's the other side of it where, in normal years, I spent an awful lot of time traveling and as much fun as having a holster-mounted belt keyboard would be, in many cases, it does not align with the meetings that I tend to be in.Jesse: Of course.Corey: It's, “Oh, great. You're the CFO of a Fortune 500. Great, let me pair my mini keyboard that looks like something from the bowels of your engineering department's reject pile.” Like, what is this? It's one of those things that doesn't send the right message in some cases. And let's be honest; I'm good at losing things.Jesse: This is a pretty mini keyboard, but I hear you.Corey: Or I could lose it, along with my keys. It will be great.Jesse: Yeah. There are a bunch of things I've wanted to do around reasonable keyboards for tablets.Corey: Yes, please do.Jesse: Yeah. We actually started looking at one point at a fruit company in Cupertino's requirements around being able to do dock-connector connected keyboards for their tablets, and… it's nuts. You can't actually do ergonomic keyboards that way, it would have to be Bluetooth.Corey: Yeah. When I travel on the road these days, or at least—well, ‘these days' being two years ago—the only computer I'd take is an iPad. And that was great; it works super well for a lot of my use cases. There's still something there, and even going forward, I'm going to be spending a lot more time at home. I have young kids now, and I want to be here to watch them grow up.And my lifestyle and use cases have changed for the last year and a half. I've had an iMac. I've never had one of those before. It's big screen real estate; things are great. And I'm looking to see whether it's time to make a full-on keyboard evolution if I can just force myself over the learning curve, here. But here's the question you might not be prepared to answer yet. What's next? Do you have plans on the backburner for additional keyboards beyond what you've done?Jesse: Oh, yeah. We have, like, three more designs that are effectively in the can. Not quite ready for production, but if this were a video podcast, I'd be pulling out and waving circuit boards at you. One of the things that we've been playing with is what is called in the trade a symmetric staggered keyboard where the right half is absolutely bog-standard normal layout like you'd expect, and the left side is a mirror of that. And so it is a much more gentle introduction to an ergonomic-style keyboard.Corey: Okay, I can almost wrap my head around that.Jesse: Because if you put your hands on your keyboard and you feel the angles that you have to move on your right side, you'll see that your fingers move basically straight back and forth. On the left side, it's very different unless you're holding your hand at a crazy, crazy angle.Corey: Yeah.Jesse: And so it's basically giving you that same comfort on the right side and also making the left side comfy. It's not a weird butterfly-shaped keyboard; it is still a rectangle, but it is just that little bit better. We're not the first people who have done this. Our first prototype of this thing was, like, 2006, something like that. But it was a one-off, like, “I wonder if I would like this.” And we were actually planning to do that one next after the Model 01 when the Atreus popped up, and that was a much faster, simpler, straighter-forward thing to bring to production.Corey: The one thing I want from a keyboard—and I haven't found one yet; maybe it exists, maybe I have to build it myself—but I want to do the standard mechanical keyboard—I don't even particularly care about the layout because it all passes through a microcontroller on the device itself. Great. And those things are programmable as you've demonstrated; you've already done an awful lot of open-source work that winds up being easily used to control keyboards. And I love it, and it's great, but I also want to embed a speaker—a small one—into the keyboard so I can configure it that every time I press a key, it doesn't just make a clack, it also makes a noise. And I want to be able to—ideally—have it be different keys make different noises sometimes. And the reason being is that when we eventually go back to offices, I don't want there to be any question about who is the most obnoxious typist in the office; I will—Jesse: [laugh].Corey: —win that competition. That is what I want from a keyboard. It's called the I-Don't-Want-Anyone-Within-Fifty-Feet-Of-Me keyboard. And I don't quite know how to go about building that yet, but I have some ideas.Jesse: So, there's absolutely stuff out there. There is prior art out there.Corey: Oh, wonderful.Jesse: One of the other options for you is solenoids.Corey: Oh, those are fun.Jesse: So, a solenoid is—there is a steel bar, an electromagnet, and a tube of magnetic material so that you can go kachunk every time you press a key.Corey: It feels functionally like a typewriter to my understanding.Jesse: I mean, it can make it feel like a typewriter. The haptic engine in an iPhone or a Magic Trackpad is not exactly a solenoid but might give you the vaguest idea of what you're talking about.Corey: Yeah, I don't think I'm going to be able to quite afford 104 iPhones to salvage all of their haptic engines so that I can then wind up hooking each one up to a different key but, you know, I am sure someone enterprising come up with it.Jesse: Yeah. So, you only need a couple of solenoids and you trigger them slightly differently depending on which key is getting hit, and you'll get your kachunk-kachunk-kachunk-kachunk-kachunk.Corey: Yeah, like spacebar for example. Great. Or you can always play a game with it, too, like, the mystery key: whenever someone types in the hits the mystery key, the thing shrieks its head off and scares the heck out of them. Especially if you set it to keys that aren't commonly used, but ever so frequently, make everyone in the office jumpy and nervous.Jesse: This will be perfect for Zoom.Corey: Oh, absolutely, it would. In fact, one thing I want to do soon if this pandemic continues much longer, is then to upgrade my audio setup here so I can have a second microphone pointed directly into my keyboard so that people who are listening at a meeting with me can hear me typing as we go. I might be a terrible colleague. One wonders.Jesse: You might be a terrible colleague, but you might be a wonderful colleague. Who knows?Corey: It all depends on the interests we have. I want to thank you for taking the time to walk me through the evolution of Keyboardio. If people want to learn more, or even perhaps buy one of these things, where can they do that?Jesse: They can do that at keyboard.io.Corey: And hence the name. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me about all this. I really appreciate it.Jesse: Cool. Thanks so much for having me. I had fun.Corey: I did, too. Jesse Vincent—obra on Twitter, and of course, the CTO of Keyboardio. I am 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 comment, but before typing it, switch your keyboard to Dvorak.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.

Jesse Frost Take both feet and jump right in! It's clear Jesse Frost is well informed on gardening and things he's passionate about. But for he and his wife Hannah Crabtree to take that passion and turn it into not only a way of life but a way of making a living is truly impressive. Join us for some fabulous insight, from getting a start in farming, to what it takes to get your book published. Oh, and did we mention Jesse's terrific No-Till Market Garden Podcast and the quality information you can get from listening...all for free! Check out the links below for more info on Jesse and Hannah's Rough Draft Farmstead, to No-Till Growers Podcasts and Jesse's new book published with Chelsea Green Publishing called, The Living Soil Handbook. The Living Soil Handbook - https://www.notillgrowers.com/livingsoilhandbook/d9z5gkf1bbnhu0w5xxb3trngiqhwgo No-Till Growers Podcasts - https://www.notillgrowers.com/home Podcast on Youtube Also - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLhu5JoRWPgEGDoUFfQHTPQ Rough Draft Farmstead - https://roughdraftfarmstead.com/ Show Notes From Wine to Farming: My Start in No-Till Farming with Bugtussle Farm to Starting Rough Draft Farmstead Type of Vegetables We Grow at Rough Draft Farmstead How We Found Our First Customers Why Being Certified Organic Was A Big Move For Us Keeping No-Till Growers Podcast Accessible For All New Book: Living Soil Handbook with Chelsea Green Publishing Positive Response Since The Books Been Launched How We Started The No-Till Market Garden Podcast How To Find No-Till Growers Podcast Big Following on YouTube Why We Choose the keyword “No-Till” What I Like Best About Farming & Podcasting Being Open to New Ideas In Farming & Media Happy Life: Importance of Family and Relationships My Advice to Farmers Transcription Brian: How did you start your podcast? Jesse: Originally, I started on my cell phone with a call Recorder an app that journalists will be familiar with. And my audio wasn't great. I recorded it in our cooler for our vegetables, like our walking cooler. And also we had two young kids and it was the only place I could go to do it. And it kind of evolved from there. You know, we're going into our fourth season this fall, each season has gotten a little better and gotten a little bit better at interviews and more comfortable. But the beauty of podcasting, like, I think that when you're a curious person, it really fills that need for you to just dive into things. Podcast Intro: If you're someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family. If you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing. You may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman. We are here to celebrate you whether you're looking to improve your maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel. From selling chicken eggs online, to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure, life off the grid. Brian: Jesse Frost lives in central Kentucky, where he runs Rough Draft Farmstead with his wife Hannah Crabtree. Frost is also the host of the No-Till Market Garden Podcast and the author of, The Living Soil Handbook: The No-Till Growers Guide to Ecological Market Gardening. Jesse frost, welcome to The Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast. Jesse: Well, thank you so much for having me, Brian. I'm excited to be here. Brian: This is real fun. So tell us a little bit about what it is that you do? Jesse: Well, I do a lot of different things. But my primary vocation is farming. As you said,

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I'm Jesse DeRose.Amy: I'm Amy Negrette.Tim: And I'm Tim Banks.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we've seen AWS used and abused in the wild. Today, we're going to be talking about AWS, an open-source software. Now, that's kind of a broad topic, but there have been some specific, recent events I'll say, over the last year maybe or maybe even less, related to AWS and open-source software that really got us talking, and I wanted to have a deeper conversation with both of you on this topic.Tim: Well, you should probably start by going over some of the things that you're mentioning, when you say ‘some of these things,' what are those things, Jesse?Jesse: Yeah. So, I think the best place to start is what constitutes open-source software. And specifically, I think, not just what constitutes open-source software, but how does that differ from an open-source company?Tim: So, open-source software can be anything: Linux kernel, bash, anything like that, any Python functioning module. If you make a piece of software, whatever it is, and you license it with one of the various open-source licenses, or your own open-source license or whatever, it's something that the community kind of owns. So, when they get big, they have maintainers, everything like that, but at its essence, it's a piece of software that you can freely download and use, and then you're free to modify it as you need, and then it's up to the specifics of the license to whether you're required to send those modifications back, to include them, or to whatever. But the essence is that it's a piece of software that's free for me to use and free for me to modify under it's license.Jesse: And one of the other things I want to add to that is, correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't a lot of open-source software is very community-owned, so there's a lot of focus on folks from the community that is using this software giving back not because they need to under the licensing, necessarily, but because they want to continue using this and making it better over time.Amy: I think one of the issues is that becomes a very opinionated kind of statement where there are a lot of people in the open-source community who feel that if you're going to use something and make changes to better suit what your needs are, that you should be able to submit those changes back to the community, or back to whoever owns the base of the software. But that said, it's like the community edition of MySQL before Microsoft bought it, where the assumption was that there's essentially a candidate of it that anyone can use without the expectation of submitting it back.Jesse: So, that's a broad definition of open-source software, but how does open-source software, broadly speaking, differ from an open-source company? I'm thinking specifically there is the open-source software of Elasticsearch, for example, or I should say, previously the open-source software of Elasticsearch that was owned by the open-source company, Elastic. So, what does that relationship look like? How does an open-source company like that differ from the open-source software itself?Tim: So, there are typically a couple of ways. Usually, a company that is the owner of an open-source product still has some kind of retention of the IP in their various licenses that they can do that with, but essentially—and this is in the words of one of the founders of Elastic—that they're benevolent dictators over the software. And so they allow folks to contribute, but they don't have to. And most of those open-source software companies will have a commercial version of that software that has other features that are not available, packages with support or some of the things like that, some kind of value-added thing that you're going to wind up paying for. The best way to describe—like you said—there's the company Elastic and then the product Elasticsearch.I relate back to before: there was Red Hat Linux, which was open-source, and then the company Red Hat. And I remember when they went public and everyone was shocked that a company can make profit off of something they gave away for free. But while the core of the software itself was free, the support was not free, nor was the add-on features that enterprises wanted. And so that tends to be kind of what the business model is, is that you create the software, it's open-source for a while to get a big user base, and then when it gets adopted by enterprises or people that really would pay for support or for other features, that's when the license tends to change, or there's a fork between the open-source version and then the commercial version.Jesse: And it definitely sounds like there can be benefits to an open-source company essentially charging for not just the open-source software, but these extra benefits like supports and additional features because I know I've traced multiple code bugs back to a piece of open-source software that there's a PR or an issue that has been sitting open for months, if not longer because the community just doesn't have the time to look into the issue, doesn't have the time to work on the issue, they are managing it on their own, separate as a side job, separate from their day-to-day work. Whereas if that is a bug that I'm tracing back to a feature in an open-source piece of software, or I should say software that I am paying for through an open-source company, I have a much clearer support path to a resolution to resolving that issue.Tim: And I think what the end up doing is then you see it more like a traditional core software model, like, you know, a la Oracle, or something like that where you pay for the software essentially, but it comes packaged with these things that you get because of it, and then there's a support contract on top of it, and then there's hosting or cloud, whatever it is, on top of that, now, but you would still end up paying for the software and then support as part of the same deal. But as you know, these are for-profit companies. People get paid for them; they are publicly traded; they sell this software; they sell this product, whether it's the services or the hosting, for profit. That is not open-source software. So, if company X that makes software X, goes under, they are acting like the software would then go under as if the software doesn't belong to the community.So, a business that goes after a business is always going to be fair play; I believe they call it capitalism. But when you talk about going after open-source software, you're looking at what Microsoft was doing in the '90s and early 2000s, with Linux and other open-source challenges to the Windows and the other paid commercial enterprise software market. When folks started using Linux and servers because it was free, customizable, and they could do pretty much everything they wanted to or version of it that they were using commercial Unices for, or even replacing Windows for, you didn't really see the commercial Unices going after it because that very specialized use cases; the user had specialized hardware. What folks were doing, they're buying Wintel machines and putting Linux on them, they were getting them without Windows licenses, or trial licenses, throwing Linux on it. And Microsoft really went after open-source; they really went after open-source.They were calling it insecure, they were calling it flash in the pan, saying it would never happen. They ran a good marketing campaign for a long time against open-source software so that people would not use it and would instead use their closed-source software. That is going after open-source, not going after quote-unquote, “Open-source companies.”Jesse: Yeah, I think that's ultimately what I want to dive into next, which is, there's been a lot of buzz about AWS going after open-source, being a risk to open-source software, specifically, with the release of AWS Managed Services for software like Elasticsearch, for example, Kubernetes, Prometheus vs. Other open-source packages that you can now run as a managed service in AWS. There's a lot of concern that AWS is basically a risk to all of these pieces of open-source software, but that doesn't necessarily seem to be the case, based on what we're talking about. One of the things that I want to dive into really specifically here is this licensing idea. Is it important to end-users? How would they know about what license they're using, or if the license changes?Tim: I'll let Amy dig in on it because she's probably the expert of three of them, but I will say one case in point, I remember where licensing did become very important was Java. JDK licenses, when Oracle started cornering the market on enclosing all the licenses, you had to use different types of Javas. So, you had to get, like, open JDK; you couldn't use Sun, Oracle Java, or whatever it was. And so that became a heavy lift of replacing packages and making sure all that stuff was in compliance, and while tracking packages, replacing them, doing all the necessary things because if you're running Java, you're probably running it in production. Why you would, I don't know, but there are those things that you would have to do in order to be able to just replace a package. The impact of the license, even if it doesn't cost a dime for usage, it still matters, and in real dollars and real engineering time.Amy: Even free licensing will cost you money if you do it wrong. The reason why I love talking about licensing is because I used to work for the government—Jesse: [laugh].Amy: —and if you think a large company like Amazon or Microsoft loves doing anything to rattle the cage of smaller businesses, it's not nearly as much as they love doing it to the government. So, any company that has a government-specific license, and the government is not using it, they will get sued and fined for a bunch of money, which sounds like a conflict between a super-large company and the government and who the hell cares about that, but this also translates the way they handle licensing for end-users and for smaller companies. So, for the most part for the end-user, you're going to look at what is generally sent to you to use any piece of licensing, the EULA, the End-User License Agreement, and you're just going to say, “Yeah, fine, this thing is 20 pages long; I'm not going to read this, it's fine.” And for most end-users, that is actually, you're good to go because they're not going to be coming after small, single-person users. What these licenses do is restrict the way larger organizations—be it the government or mid to larger companies—actually use their software, so that—this is a little dating—someone does not buy a single disk that does not report home, and then install that one disk on 20 computers, which is a thing that everyone has seen done if they've been in the industry long enough.Jesse: Yeah.Amy: Yeah. And it means things like licensing inventory is important, to the single you're using this license at home and you install Adobe on three computers, you would think it's not… would not hurt their value very much, but they also make it so that you can't even do that anymore. So, in purchased software, it makes a big deal for end-users; if it's just something free like being able to use some community SQL workbench just to mess around with stuff at home or on personal projects, you're usually going to be okay.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at ChaosSearch. You could run Elasticsearch or Elastic Cloud—or OpenSearch as they're calling it now—or a self-hosted ELK stack. But why? ChaosSearch gives you the same API you've come to know and tolerate, along with unlimited data retention and no data movement. Just throw your data into S3 and proceed from there as you would expect. This is great for IT operations folks, for app performance monitoring, cybersecurity. If you're using Elasticsearch, consider not running Elasticsearch. They're also available now in the AWS marketplace if you'd prefer not to go direct and have half of whatever you pay them count towards your EDB commitment. Discover what companies like HubSpot, Klarna, Equifax, Armor Security, and Blackboard already have. To learn more, visit chaossearch.io and tell them I sent you just so you can see them facepalm, yet again.Jesse: Yeah, this is a really big issue. There's so much complexity in this space because Tim, like you said, there's some amount of capitalism here of AWS competing with open-source companies; there's business opportunities to change licensing, which can be a good thing for a company or it could be a terrible thing for a company's user base. There's lots of complexity to this issue. And I mean, in the amount of time that we've been talking, we've only really scratched the surface. I think there's so much more to this space to talk about.Tim: There really is, and there's a lot of history that we really need to cover to really paint an accurate picture. I think back when web hosting first became a thing, and everyone was running LAMP stacks and nobody was saying, “Oh, no, using cPanel is going to kill Apache.” That wasn't a thing because, yeah, it was a for-profit company that was using open-source software to make money and yet Apache still lived, and [unintelligible 00:15:00] still lived; MySQL still made it; PHP was still around. So, to say that utilizing open-source software to provide a service, to provide a paid service, is going to kill the open-source softwares, at best it's misrepresentation and omits a lot of things. So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff we can dig into, a lot of things we can cover.And the topic is broad, and so this is why it's important for us to talk about it, I think, in the context of AWS and the AWS, kind of, ecosystem is that when you see companies with big crocodile tears, saying, “Oh, yeah, AWS is trying to kill open-source,” it's like, “No, they're not trying to kill open-source.” They may be trying to go after your company, but they aren't the same.Jesse: And it feels to me like that is part of the way that the business world works. And I'm not saying that it's a great part of the way the business world works, but how can you differentiate your company in such a way that you still retain your user base if AWS releases a competing product? I'm not thrilled with the fact that AWS is releasing all these products that are competing with open-source companies, but I'm also not going to say that it's not beneficial, in some ways, for AWS customers. So, I see both sides of the coin here and I don't have a clear idea of what the best path forward is.Amy: As much as I hate the market demands it type of argument, a lot of the libraries, and open-source software, and all of these other things that AWS has successfully gone after, they've gone after ones that weren't entirely easy to use in the first place. Things like Kubernetes, and Prometheus, and MongoDB, and Elastic. These are not simple solutions to begin with, so if they didn't do it, there are a lot of other management companies that will help you deal with these very specific products. The only difference is, one of them is AWS.Jesse: [laugh]. One of them is a multibillion-dollar company.Amy: Oh, they've all got money, man.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: I mean, let's be real. At our pay grade, the difference between a multimillion-dollar and a billion-dollar company, I don't think affects you at your level at all.Jesse: No.Amy: I'm not seeing any of that difference. I am not. [laugh].Tim: Yeah, I definitely think if you all want us to dig into more of this—and we could do a lot more—let us know. If there are things you think we're wrong on, or things that you think we need to dig deeper on, yeah, we'd love to do that. Because this is a complex and nuanced topic that does have a lot of information that should be discussed so that folks can have a clear view of what the picture looks like.Jesse: Well, that'll do it for us this week, folks. If you've got questions you'd like us to answer please go to lastweekinaws.com/QA, fill out the form and we'll answer those questions on a future episode of the show.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us your thoughts on this conversation, on AWS versus open-source software versus open-source companies.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Links:The cloud economist starter kit: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/aws-morning-brief/cloud-cost-management-starter-kit-2/ TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I'm Jesse DeRose.Amy: I'm Amy Negrette.Jesse: This is the podcast within the podcast where we like to talk about all the ways we've seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today, we're going to be talking about balancing cost optimization work against feature work.Amy: Buckle up everyone. I've got a lot of thoughts about this. Just kidding. It's just the one: don't.Jesse: You heard it here first, folks. Don't. Amy Negrette just says, “Don't.”Amy: Don't. [laugh].Jesse: So Amy, does that mean, don't balance the work?Amy: More like don't choose. It's always hard to make the argument to take an engineer off of feature work. This goes for all sorts of support tasks like updates and documentation, and as a group, we figured out that trying to put those off until an engineer has time to do it is not going to be a thing that becomes prioritized, it eventually gets deprioritized, and no one looks at it. And that's why DocOps is the thing. It's a process that now gets handled as part of and in parallel with software development.Jesse: Yeah, I've had so many conversations in previous companies that I've worked for, where they basically said, “Well, we don't have time to write documentation.” Or they will say, “The code is the documentation.” And, to their credit, there are a lot of places where the code is very cleanly documented, but if somebody is coming into this information for the first time and they don't have technical knowledge or they don't have deep expertise in what you're looking at, they need documentation that is clear, understandable, and approachable. And it is so difficult to find that balance to actually make sure that that work is part of everything that you do.Amy: And I think what the industry has decided is that if you make it a requirement for pull requests that if you're going to make a change, you have to document that change somewhere, and that change if it has any kind of user impact, it will be displayed alongside it. That's the only way to make it a priority with software. And cost optimization has to be treated in a similar respect.Jesse: Yeah, so let's talk about cost optimization as a process. To start, let's talk about when to do it. Is this something that we do a little bit all the time, or do we do it after everything's already done?Amy: I know I just cited CostOps as a good model for this, even though that's literally what we cannot do. We can't treat cost optimization as something we do a little bit along the way because, again, speaking as an engineer, if I'm allowed to over-optimize or over-engineer something, I'm going to take that opportunity to do that.Jesse: Absolutely.Amy: And if we're going to do project-wide cost optimization, we need to know what usage patterns are, we need to have a full user and business context on how any system is used. So, if we do a little at each step, you get stuck in that micro-optimization cycle and you're never actually going to understand what the impact of those optimizations were. Or if you spent too much time on one part over-optimizing another part.Jesse: It's also really hard if this is a brand new workload that you've never run in the cloud before. You don't necessarily know what the usage is going to be for this workload. Maybe you have an idea of usage patterns based on some modeling that you've done or based on other workloads that you're running, but as a whole, if this is a brand new workload, you may be surprised when you deploy it and find out that it is using twice the amount of resources that you expected, or half the amount of resources that you expected, or that it is using resources and cycles that you didn't expect.Amy: Yeah. We've all been in the situation, or at least if you work with—especially with consumer software—that, you're going to run into a situation where the bunch of users are going to do things that you don't expect to happen within your application, causing the traffic patterns that you predicted to move against the model. To put it kindly. [laugh].Jesse: Yeah. So, generally speaking, what we've seen work the best is making time for cost optimization work maybe a cycle every quarter, to do some analysis work: to look at your dashboards, look at whatever tooling you're using, whatever metrics you're collecting, to see what kind of cost optimization opportunities are available to you and to your teams.Amy: So, that comes down to who's actually doing this work. Are we going to assign a dedicated engineer to it in order to ensure it gets done? Anyone with the free cycles to do it?Jesse: See, this is the one that I always love and hate because it's that idea of if it's everyone's responsibility, it's no one's responsibility. And I really want everybody to be part of the conversation when it comes to cost optimization and cloud cost management work, but in truth, that's not the reality; that's not the way to get this work started. Never depend on free cycles because if you're just waiting for somebody to have a free cycle, they're never going to do any work. They're never going to prioritize cost optimization work until it becomes a big problem because that work is just going to be deprioritized constantly. There's a number of companies that I worked for in the past who did hackathons, maybe once a quarter or once every year, and those hackathons were super, super fun for a lot of teams, but there was a couple individuals who always picked up feature work as part of the hackathon, thinking, “Oh, well, I didn't get a chance to work on this because my cycles were focused on something else, so now I'll get a chance to do this.” No, that's not what a hackathon is about.Amy: You don't hack on your own task list. That's not how anything works.Jesse: Exactly. So instead, rather than just relying on somebody to have a free cycle, kind of putting it out there and waiting for somebody to pick up this work, there should be a senior engineer or architect with knowledge of how the system works, to periodically dedicate a sprint to do this analysis work. And when we say knowing how the system works, we're really talking about that business context that we've talked about many, many times before. A lot of the cloud cost management tooling out there will make a ton of recommendations for you based on things like right-sizing opportunities, reservation investments, but those tools don't have the business context that you and your teams do. So, those tools don't know those resources that are sitting idle in us-west-2 are actually your disaster recovery site, and you actually kind of need those—even though they're not taking any work right now, you need those to keep your SLAs in check in case something goes down with your primary site.Or maybe security expects resources to be set up in a certain way that requires higher latency times based on end-to-end encryption. There's lots of different business context opportunities that a lot of cloud cost management tools don't have, and that's something that anybody who is looking at cloud cost optimization work should have and needs to have those conversations with other teams. Whoever does this cloud cost optimization work, or whoever makes the cloud cost optimization recommendations to other teams needs to know the business context of those teams' workloads so that the recommendations they make are actually actionable.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you've built anything from serverless, you know that if there's one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it's that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications. It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You've created more problems for yourself; make one of them go away. To learn more visit lumigo.io.Amy: And they should also have the authority to do this work. It's easy to deliver a team a list of suggestions saying, “Oh, I've noticed our utilization is really low on this one instance. We shouldn't possibly move it,” or what have you. And because they're not the ones making the full architectural decisions, or leading that team, or in charge of that inventory, they actually don't have the authority to tell anyone to do anything. So, whoever gets tasked with this really needs to be an architect on that team—if you're going to go with this embedded resource type of person—where they have that authority to make that decision and to act on it and move things.Jesse: Yeah. It's really important that teams stay accountable to the resources that they're running. And some teams don't know any of the resources that they're running; they, kind of, deploy into the cloud as a black box. And that is a perfectly fine business model for some organizations, but then they also need to understand that if the senior engineer or architect who is focused on cloud cost optimization work for this group says, “Hey, we need to tweak some of these workloads or configurations to better optimize these workloads,” the teams need to be willing to have that conversation and be a part of that conversation. So, we've talked about a couple different ideas of who this person might be that does this work. This could be a DevOps team that attaches a dedicated resource to doing this analysis work, to making these recommendations, and then delegates the cost optimization work to the engineering teams, or it could be a dedicated cloud economist or cloud economist team who does this work.Amy: We did touch on having someone in DevOps do this, just because they have a very broad view and the authority to issue tasks to engineering teams because if they see an application or an architecture, where resources are being—or are hitting their utilization cap, or if they realize there are applications that need more or less resources, they're able to do those types of investigations. Maybe someone on that team can take up this work and have a more infrastructure-minded view on the entire account, see what's going on on the account and make those suggestions that way.Jesse: Absolutely. It's so important. Or if there is a dedicated cloud economist or maybe a cloud economist team that is able to make these recommendations, that has the authority to make these recommendations, maybe that's the direction your group should go.Amy: If only we spent an entire podcast talking about this.Jesse: [laugh]. Huh, if only we spent an entire podcast talking about how to build a cloud cost team and talk about how to get started as a cloud economist. Hmm…Amy: Please check out the cloud economist starter kit that we all have already published.Jesse: Yes, several weeks ago. We'll post the episode link in the [show notes 00:12:38] again. So, Amy, we've talked about when to do this work, who should do this work. What I want to know is how do these teams come together to have these conversations together? I'm thinking about best practices here. I'm thinking about how do teams start building best practices around this work so that each team isn't working in a silo doing their own cost optimization work?Amy: If you're lucky, someone in your company has already done this work. [laugh]. And you can just steal their work.Jesse: Absolutely.Amy: Or borrow. Or collaborate. Whatever word you want to use.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: See if you can see how the project went, how they structured it. Maybe they ran into a process issue like they weren't able to get the kind of access they needed without jumping through a whole bunch of red tape and hoops. That's a good thing to know going into one of these projects, just being able to see the resources that you're going to be looking at, and making sure you have access to them.Jesse: Absolutely. This is part of why we also harp so much on open and clear communication across teams about the cloud cost management work that you're doing. If you are trying to solve a problem, it's likely that another team in the organization is also trying to solve that same problem, or ideally has already solved that problem, and then they can help you solve the problem. They can explain to you how they solved the problem so that you can solve it faster so you don't have to waste engineering cycles, trying to reinvent the wheel essentially. It's a really, really great opportunity to build these best practices, to have these conversations together, maybe to build communities of practice within the organization, depending on how large your organization is, around the best ways to use these different tools and resources within the organization.Jesse: Well, that will do it for us this week. If you've got questions that you would like us to answer on an upcoming episode, go to lastweekinaws.com/QA. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us how you integrate cost as a component of your engineering work.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part byLaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visitlaunchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Today, on a very special episode of AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field, we say our goodbyes to Pete Cheslock.Amy: Oh, no. Did the ops bus finally get him?Jesse: No. Wait, what? What? No. No, he’s not—Amy: You know, the ops bus, the one that takes out all of the ops people, which is why you need data recovery plans.Jesse: [laugh]. I mean, I have plans for other reasons, but no. No, Pete, Pete’s not dead. He’s just—I mean, he’s dead to me, but he’s just not going to be here anymore.Amy: Only on the inside.Jesse: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Jesse DeRose.Amy: I’m Amy Arumbulo Negrette.Pete: I am Pete Cheslock. I’m here for one last, beautiful, glorious time.Jesse: I feel like this is going to be like Breakfast Club but in the data center server room.Pete: Yeah. A little bit. I think so. We will all sit cross-legged on the floor in a circle, share our thoughts and feelings. And maybe some sushi. There were sushi in that movie. And that was, like, really advanced back then in the ’80s.Jesse: Yeah, I like that. So Pete, you want to give us a little bit of background about why you will be moving on from this podcast?Pete: Moving on to a whole new world. Yes. Sadly, I am not dead. The ops bus did not get me, and I was not eaten by my smoker, my meat smoker.Jesse: [laugh]. Although at this point, it’s probably overdue.Pete: You know, the odds of all three of those are pretty high out, to be really perfectly honest, given this pandemic and everything else going on in this world.Amy: Isn’t that how it works? You eventually become the smoked meat.Pete: Yeah, yeah.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: All the time. You know, you are what you eat. And if you eat junk and whatnot—so I eat smoked meats, eventually, I’m just going to become, you know, smoked meats, I guess. But no, I am moving on from The Duckbill Group. Just bittersweet is the best word I can come up with. Very sad, but also very excited.I’m moving on to a new role at a new company that was just kind of an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. And I’m really excited for something new, but really sad because I don’t get to work with two of my three favorite cloud economists, Jesse, and Amy. Yeah, Corey is one, too, and yes, it’s fun to work with him. But it’s also fun to rag on him a little bit as well.Jesse: I’m pretty sure you still have the opportunity to rag on him no matter where you go.Pete: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, we’re Twitter connected. So, I can just slide into his DMs as needed. Yeah.Amy: And really, what else is Twitter for—Pete: Exactly.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: —than roasting former coworkers and bosses?Pete: Yeah, I expect a constant stream of Twitter DMs every time you find something, some little fun nugget that I’ve left behind.Jesse: I feel like that’s appropriate. So today, Pete, I have two questions for you now that you will be moving on from Duckbill Group, moving on from this podcast, I want to know, looking back at your time here working with Duckbill Group, what did you learn? What are the things that surprised you, that you didn’t expect? And what would you say to somebody who wanted to start working in this space, maybe start a career in cloud economics on their own?Pete: Yeah, so this kind of feels like an exit interview a little bit.Jesse: [laugh]. And a very public exit interview at that. So, make sure that we bleep all the swear words.Pete: I think it’s in Duckbill fashion to do a public—a very public-facing exit interview, right? That is Duckbill in a nutshell.Jesse: I think the only thing more public is if Corey asks you to hold the exit interview on Twitter.Amy: Exactly.Pete: [laugh]. I mean, we might have to do that, now. I like that idea. Yeah, so I think those are great questions, and I love the opportunity to talk about it. Because Duckbill is a fantastic company, and coming into Duckbill last year was totally by luck.Not really—no, not—luck is maybe not the right word. But I had been doing some consulting on my own, and the pandemic and some other forces caused a bunch of my consulting work to dry up really quickly. And I was sitting at home and I’m like, “Wow, I should get a real job.” And I saw a tweet from Mike on Twitter that was like, “Oh, we’re growing The Duckbill Group.” And Mike and Corey and I have known each other for such a long time.We’ve always said it’d be great to work together at some point in the future, but it’s so hard [laugh] to do. You know, to kind of work with your friends, and timing, and circumstance, and schedule, and everything else. And so when I saw that, I was like, wow, like that might be a lot of fun working with that crew. And I’ve got a lot of experience in AWS and I’ve—my title at one of my previous companies was Captain COGS—for Cost Of Goods Sold—because I was so diligent with the Amazon bill. So, it’s kind of one of those things where I felt like I could be useful and helpful to the organization, and talking with Mike and Corey, it just made a ton of sense.And so, it was a lot of fun to come on board. So, but then once you’re kind of in, and you start doing this type of work—and you know, Amy and Jesse, you’ve both experienced this—I think no matter how much knowledge you have of Amazon, very, very quickly, you realize that you actually don’t know as much as you really think you did, right?Jesse: Yeah.Pete: Because it’s so—there’s just so much.Amy: And it changes once every five minutes.Pete: [laugh].Jesse: Oh, yeah.Amy: Literally if you—well, just keep an eye on that changelog, you can watch your day get ruined as time goes on.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: [laugh]. It’s—yeah, it’s a real-time day ruining. And that’s the new. It’s like Amazon Kinesis: It’s all real-time.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: Yeah, it’s so true. And I think the reason behind it is, you know, one of the first things I kind of realized is that when you are working inside of a business and you’re trying to understand, like, an Amazon service, you don’t necessarily go that deep because you’ve got a real job and other stuff to do. And when you’re finally, like—let’s say you’re in Cost Explorer; this is actually my favorite one because learning this took us a while. The documents aren’t very good. But in Cost Explorer, there’s a dropdown box that can show you your charges in different ways: unblended view, blended view, amortized view—if I’m saying that word really incorrectly—net-amortized view, net-unblended view. Like, what do all these mean?Most people just are like, unblended, move on with their lives. But at some point, you kind of need to know and answer that question, and then understand the impact, and all those things, and spending more hours than I care to count trying to correlate the bill and Cost Explorer to look the same. Something that simple, why is that so hard? You know, it’s things like that.Amy: Why is that so hard? I do not understand it. It is exhausting. [laugh].Jesse: It drives me absolutely crazy, and it’s something that in previous roles, you could just say, “Well, this isn’t my responsibility, so I’m not going to worry about it.” But now we’ve got clients who are asking us these questions because it is our responsibility and we do need to worry about it.Pete: Yeah, exactly. So, I think that’s just, kind of, one example. Now, there was a ton that I learned. I mean, just in how discounts might be applied when you look at charges in an account whether if you have an enterprise discount program, or private pricing in some way. I think one of my favorite ones—and this is actually something that catches a lot of people up—is especially in Cost Explorer, there’s kind of two ways that you can view a charge.So, let’s say you’re looking at S3, and you are trying to find your usage by the usage type. Like, I want to compare standard storage to maybe data transfer or something like that. And you go and group by usage type, and they’ll show you, “Hey, for your S3 for this month or day or whatever, you’ll have some spend associated storage and data transfer,” and you’re like, “That’s neat.” And then you say to yourself, “Now, I want to look at it by API.” And maybe you’ll see, wow, there’s a ton of spend associated with GETs or PUTs.And you’ll think that that is actually a request charge. And it’s totally not. It’s like, when you group by API, it’s the API that started the charge, not the charge itself. So, you could have a PUT that started the charge, but the charge itself is actually storage. It’s the little things like that, where you might glance at it in your account and go, “Oh, okay.” But then when you actually need to get down to the per penny on spend and share it with a client, you go even further down the rabbit hole.Jesse: Because why would all of the billing information across different sources be accurate?Amy: And also, why would things be named the same between the bill, and Cost Explorer, and the curve? Having those names be the same, that would just make it too easy, and just streamline the process too much, and be too logical. No, let’s work for it. We have to work for it. It’s a pillar of excellence; we have to work for it.Pete: [laugh]. Exactly. So yeah, I think it’s those types of things that you just start seeing the edge cases. But because of, kind of, the work we do, we keep going. We’re not just, “Oh, wow. Haha, silly Amazon.”But then we keep diving in deeper and deeper to figure out the why. And the reason for that really just comes down to the fact that we’ll need to communicate that in some effective way to the client to get them to understand it. And actually, that kind of leads me to the other thing that I think is probably the most important skill of being a cloud economist, of being in finops, is your ability to write long-form writing, being able to write clear, concise information explaining why the spend is what it is, explaining all of these edge cases, all these interesting parts of cloud cost management, and being able to write that down in such a way that anyone could read it; like a CFO could understand how the charges are happening, just like a head of engineering, who has maybe more impact to the spend.Jesse: Being able to communicate, the differences between different AWS services, between different billing modes, to different audiences is so critical to the work that we do because we’re ultimately going to be working with different people with different backgrounds at every single client that we work with. So, we need to be able to speak the language of different audiences.Amy: And it’s really different, how different C Suites, different departments, their goals are going to be different, too, because they have requirements that they have to fulfill. Finance is very concerned about the literal cost of things, while engineering is—they understand that their architecture comes at a price, and so long as they have the budget for it, they’re cool with it. And you just have to align what those goals are, and have that translate as like, into the document as, “They built it this way for this reason, which was fine at that stage. But as you grow, you need to make sure that it also fulfills these other external expectations.”Corey: Let’s be honest—the past year has been a nightmare for cloud financial management. The pandemic forced us to move workloads to the cloud sooner than anticipated, and we all know what that means—surprises on the cloud bill and headaches for anyone trying to figure out what caused them. The CloudLIVE 2021 virtual conference is your chance to connect with FinOps and cloud financial management practitioners and get a behind-the-scenes look into proven strategies that have helped organizations like yours adapt to the realities of the past year. Hosted by CloudHealth by VMware on May 20th, the CloudLIVE 2021 conference will be 100% virtual and 100% free to attend, so you have no excuses for missing out on this opportunity to connect with the cloud management community. Visit cloudlive.com/corey to learn more and save your virtual seat today. That’s cloud-l-i-v-e.com/corey to register.Pete: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, it’s just—and can you imagine, you have some knowledge you want to share around something as complex as the Amazon bill. I mean we ask for a PDF of your bill when you start working with Duckbill Group. That could be hundreds of pages long, and you’re trying to distill that down into something that, really, anyone can understand. It’s a true superpower to be able to write long-form content like that really well.And I never used to like writing. I was never—never really enjoyed it that much and over the last year, that muscle that you’re working out, now, the ability to write many, many pages around this type of content, just it comes so much more easily. So, I think that’s another big aspect, right? The more you work on it, obviously the easier it gets.Jesse: I don’t know about you, but now that I have focused more on flexing that writing and communication muscle, I’ve noticed it more in both everyone that I work with day-to-day with Duckbill Group and also in my daily life, just watching how people communicate with each other, and how effectively people communicate with each other; it’s both amazing and nerve-wracking all at the same time.Pete: [laugh]. I know. And even—not to say that whenever we sit down to write our reports that we give to our clients, we don’t go through the wave of emotions between the back and forth of, like, “I don’t know what to write,” and then, “Oh, I know of a lot of stuff to write. Let me just get something down.” And then you can’t stop writing. It’s just—it’s this emotional roller coaster that I feel like no matter how many times we need to write a lot of detailed information down, everyone always goes through.Amy: And we really do have a highly collaborative process here, too, where we’re all in the same document, writing, and the person who owns any given report will always have the same stage at the end when all of the sections are filled out, where they go to one of the other people on the team and go, “Every word I put down is absolute garbage. Please help me trim it down, take it out. I don’t even care anymore. Just look at it and tell me that I wrote down words that are in some kind of human language.” [laugh].Jesse: [laugh].Pete: [laugh]. Oh, the plight of the writer. It’s, like, the imposter syndrome that affects the writer. It’s like, “Okay. I wrote a bunch of stuff. I think it’s terrible.” And then you sleep on it, you come back the next day, and you’re like, “Actually, this is pretty good.” [laugh].Amy: I explained concepts. It was fine. I didn’t use a single comma for three pages, but it’s probably fine. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh].Pete: You can take one of mine. Usually, all of my draft documents are commas and M-dashes, just all over the place. Yeah, so I think that’s honestly a big superpower. And I think the last two things that—this is actually something that I’ve looked for in people that I’ve wanted to work with, and people I was hiring, and I see it here as well as these, kind of, two concepts of intellectual curiosity and aptitude to learn, where if you have a base knowledge around Amazon and you have those other attributes—that curiosity and truly enjoying learning—you can accelerate your ability to understand this so incredibly quickly because there’s such a wealth of information out there, and there’s so many documents, there’s so much stuff. It just requires someone who really cares enough to dive in and really want to understand.That’s something that I think we’ve seen here is that the folks who are most successful are just—they want to know why, and they’re not satisfied until they can explain it in a simple way to someone else. That’s the key, right? The attribute of a true expert is someone who can explain something very difficult in a simple way. And I think that’s something that would be critical if you were joining Duckbill, if you were building your own finops or cloud finance team, it is so complex. It’s the intersection of technical architecture and cost, and it touches almost the entire business. So, I think those are some other attributes that I think are just incredibly helpful.Jesse: We’re also usually not entirely satisfied until we’ve either opened a support case with AWS, responded to one of their feedback icons in the AWS documentation—the public AWS documentation—or trolled somebody on Twitter saying, “Shame on you, AWS, for writing documentation that doesn’t make sense.”Amy: It’ll be fine. Someone in your mentions will go, “Did you check the region?” And you would have, and then it’ll still be wrong.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: And it’ll be fine. [laugh]. Eventually, we’ll fix it.Pete: That one—Jesse: Too soon.Pete: —that one still hurts, when we—oh, I’m just like, “Why do the numbers not line up?” And then someone was like—Amy: It's a thing I check for, even if it’s like, “It’s a global resource.” I don’t care. Just tell me. Just tell me it’s fine. [laugh].Pete: “Are you in the right region?” Like—“Dammit, no, I’m not. Oh.” [laugh]. Yeah, that happens to the best of us.Amy: I did, unfortunately, burn so many hours, I think it was last week trying to find out where someone had put their resources. It’s like, “Oh, not us-west-2. It’s us-west-1. Of course.” [laugh].Jesse: So, annoying. Well, I would just like to say, Pete, it has been a joy and a pleasure working with you, it has been a joy and a pleasure complaining about AWS with you, on this podcast, so thank you for your time. That sounded really… really, really standoffish. I didn’t mean it quite as bad as it came off there. [laugh].Pete: Well, you know, I think we need to thank Corey for having a child and thus needing to offload some of his podcast duties over to us, and then the fact that we just never gave him the podcast back, and we just took it over.Jesse: Well, if you’ve got questions that you’d like us to answer, you can go to lastweekinaws.com/QA. And if you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us what qualities you’re looking for when building out your cloud finance team.Pete: Thanks for coming in.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Jesse James Garret is a renowned leader in the user experience design field. He's a co-founder of the influential UX consultancy Adaptive Path and author of The Elements of User Experience. These days, Jesse coaches UX design leaders. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between leadership and information architecture. Listen to the show Download episode 58 Show notes Jesse James Garrett's website @jjg on Twitter Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond, 2nd Edition by Jesse James Garrett Peter Merholz Finding Our Way podcast MacGuffin Concept map Mind maps Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Jesse, welcome to the show. Jesse: It's good to be here. Thank you. Jorge: Well, it's my pleasure and honor to have you on the show as a guest. I don't imagine that there are too many folks in the audience who don't know you, but for those who don't, would you please tell us about yourself? About Jesse Jesse: Sure! I'm Jesse James Garrett. I have been working as a professional in the user experience field for, 20 years or so now. If I am known to you at all, I am probably known to you, dear listener, from my book, The Elements of User Experience, which was published in 2002, or the work of my company Adaptive Path, which I co-founded in 2001 and was a part of through its acquisition by Capital One in 2014. I now work as an independent leadership coach working with leaders of UX design teams. Jorge: And as we're recording this, I believe that the founding of Adaptive Path happened 20 years ago. Jesse: Yeah! Yeah, yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the launch, a fun milestone to reflect on. Jorge: Well, the influence that the work has had both in Adaptive Path and The Elements of User Experience is palpable in the field. I occasionally still run into people who bring that diagram — "The Elements of UX" — bring it up so many years later, and it's an artifact that has proven long-lived. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on why that might be. On the longevity of The Elements of UX Jesse: It's a little bit of a mystery because Elements seems to have an enduring appeal to people that other similar models don't seem to have that kind of traction. I think that part of it is that I tried with the model to capture — as much as possible — to capture the things that I thought were less likely to change. Although I put the date really prominently at the top of the document when I first published it, in part because I was expecting to update it. I was thoroughly expecting there to be multiple versions and each one would have a date stamp and there would be iterations and evolutions of the model. But then when people started using it and getting really attached to it, I changed my mind about it and felt like I should really leave well enough alone and not tinker with it too much. I've made some little adjustments to the language that I use in the model over time, but the model itself has stayed the same. And I think the fact that people keep picking it up and putting it into practice is surprising to me as it is to anybody, I think. Jorge: Apart from minor tweaks to the language, do you feel like the model stands up overall? Even today? Jesse: Well, I do really think that if it didn't people wouldn't be using it if it didn't produce some sort of positive result... It may not be the positive result I intended. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot more to be said than what is encapsulated in that model. It is intended to provide a basic level framework and obviously there's a lot more complexity to what it takes to actually get those things done. And there is a lot of nuance to how these issues play out. So yeah, in some ways it's not my call as to whether or not the model is still relevant. It's like, it's up to other people as far as I can see. Jorge: Well, that's as good enough as any test for relevance, right? Whether people are using it or not. And for any listeners who might not know what we're talking about, this is a model that describes the work of user experience as happening in... would it be fair to call it five distinct layers? Jesse: Yeah. I call them 'planes' in the book, but it's a visualization. It's this sort of layer cake, sort of visualization of all of the considerations that go into UX work. Jorge: And they range from strategy at the lowest plane, scope, structure, skeleton and surface, which is the stuff that we see when we interact with a product that has been designed. Information architecture and leadership Now, I asked you to come on the show, not to talk about The Elements of User Experience, but because you and your fellow Adaptive Path co-founder and our mutual friend, Peter Merholz recently wrapped up what I'm describing as the first season of your podcast, Finding Our Way, and you and Peter had a conversation in that final episode where you synthesized the things you'd learned in the course of that first season. And you made a statement, you said, and I'm going to quote you back to you now, which is always nerve wracking! You said, "I think leaders are of necessity, orchestrators of systems. And systems instantiate knowledge as information architecture within them. So, the IA that gets embedded and coded, baked into your systems, becomes the way that the organization understands the world. And so, it is on the leader to imbue, infuse, enrich that IA with as complex and nuanced and understanding as they possibly can." There's a lot there... Jesse: I believe that statement. So, so that's a good test. Jorge: That's great. But I feel like there's a lot there to unpack and I wanted to talk about it with you. The context of the podcast, Finding Our Way, is about design leadership, but this strikes me as a statement that might apply to leaders in any field. Jesse: I believe that's true. I believe that any leader, anyone who gives direction to people in an organization, is on some level a steward of the organization's understanding of the problems that the team is trying to solve. And that understanding — when that gets systematized -information architecture is systematized understanding; it takes the associations between ideas that give meaning to human endeavor, human behavior, the world, and makes that concrete in ways that systems can then use. So that knowledge, that insight, can be scaled. And a lot of organizations run into trouble when their information architectures internally don't match the nuances and the complexities of the problems that they're trying to solve. Either problems that they're trying to solve for users or problems that they're trying to solve as a business. Businesses are often getting caught flat footed by market trends that they didn't see coming because they weren't paying attention to the right signals. Because those signals weren't part of the fabric of their understanding of the problem that they were facing. So yes, absolutely. We were talking about the context of design leadership specifically because that's what the mission of that show is. But yeah, I completely agree with you. It is something that I think is a part of what leaders do for organizations is give shape to the ways that organizations, hold onto the ephemeral meaning that otherwise just lives in the heads of the people in the organization. Jorge: Now, this is something that has been happening for way longer than we've had the phrase 'information architecture' and I'm wondering if there are any practices, tools perhaps, that have been around for a while that might point to this function of leadership, as a going concern for leaders. Jesse: It's an interesting question because honestly, a lot of the sensitivity to this stuff, when you're talking about what data does an organization collect, what systems does an organization put in place to make sense of the data that it has collected — this kind of stuff often ends up being the domain of like IT and business analytics and people who do some serious number crunching, which is fine and great. And, in the case of a lot of organizations... I've done a lot of work with financial services organizations. Insurance companies are fascinating in this respect because the actuarial tables rule all, in that business. And the keepers of the actuarial tables really are, expressing a point of view about what constitutes risk in the world. Jorge: And that is a formal structure of information that is stewarded by someone in the org, right? Jesse: Yeah. It's the foundation of the business. If your actuarial tables, as an insurance company, don't reflect the reality of things, then you're a bad insurance company, because you're likely to take on risks that you shouldn't. Jorge: What this implies for folks who are either in positions of leadership or aspiring to be in such positions, is that A) they need to embrace systems thinking, right? A systemic perspective of the work. And the other is that it would behoove them to look for the structures that best articulate the core of the business somehow. And there are formal information structures in a lot of organizations. You've pointed out that in the case of insurance, they're very manifest, but what you're saying there resonates for me in other fields as well. Jesse: Yeah. It's definitely something that I saw in my consulting career across, a lot of different kinds of organizations. I feel like every organization has its own sort of arbiter of truth, internally. I think one thing that we've been doing for a long time as UX practitioners, or at least, one thing that we often did as UX consultants was encourage the leaders that we were working with to step into storytelling as a tool to be able to make their case for what they wanted to do from a design perspective. Storytelling is a sense-making activity. It's a way of giving people an understanding of the world. It's very similar to information architecture in that way. So, for leaders of any stripe, whether you're leading a design team or whether you're leading any other kind of team, to take a step back and ask myself, "Where am I the sense-maker for the organization? Where am I the one who is interpreting and giving meaning to information?" And sometimes that is happening largely in Slack or emails to the team or other kinds of communications, and sometimes that's happening in the context of more formal data structures like you and I have been talking about. So, if the leader is noticing and attending to sense-making as a core part of the value that they bring to the organization as a leader, then they can look across their communications and the various pools of data that they may be responsible for tending and to interpret what they're doing in terms of creating more robust and more nuanced and more accurate information structures. Jorge: I'm hearing two things there. One is that leaders need to have the wherewithal to understand the organization, its context, its goals, its way of being in the world — understand it in some kind of systematic way. And the other thing I'm hearing is that they also need to be able to reflect that understanding back to the organization — through things like stories — in ways that affect how the team understands what they're doing, basically. Jesse: Yes. It gives meaning to the team's activities by placing those activities in a larger frame — a larger context. IA as MacGuffin Jorge: In my experience in interacting with teams and organizations and their leadership, I get the sense that these two functions — the "let's first structure the environment for ourselves, and then, let's think about how we share that structure with others" — they're happening, to greater or lesser degrees, in different organizations. But they're happening somewhat informally. Like, I haven't seen too many processes to say, "let's now draw up the information architecture for what we're doing here." Usually, when people talk about information architecture, it happens in the context of redesigning the website or making changes to the navigation structure of our apps or what have you. And in some ways, those projects end up being kind of MacGuffin for these deeper conversations that need to happen. And I'm wondering if there's a way to overcome that gap where we do information architecture more explicitly in service of having the organization understand itself better, or the team understand itself better and its role. Jesse: Yes. I have done work like that in the guise of process work, that engaging with a team, trying to understand what the different elements of the team are, what each element of the team is intended to accomplish, how those pieces are supposed to work together. In order to engineer any kind of a process like that, that has to be rooted in an understanding at a conceptual level of what are the factors that go into play in producing whatever the team is there to produce. Or achieving whatever the team is attempting to achieve. And how are you making sure that all those factors are accounted for? And how are you setting priorities among those things? These are all decisions that inform the process work, but that's not the process work. That's the IA work that underlies the process work. Jorge: Is this more of a top-down or a bottom-up effort? Jesse: I think of it as being more of a top-down effort, just because I am... I've been thinking a lot about stewardship as one of the elements of leadership that we don't really talk about. Which is that you have a group of people and a set of resources in your care as a leader. And that creates certain obligations from my perspective, on you as a leader, to ensure that you pass those things along to the next leader in the healthiest possible state that you can. And that means looking out for your team. It also means looking out for your processes. It also means looking out for your systems. And it also means looking out for that deep, underlying understanding that drives all of those things. I mean, where are leaders doing that information architecture work right now? I'd say they're doing it every time they structure a document that presents to their executive leadership what they want to try to accomplish with their work. Jorge: What that hints at — to me at least — is the fact that this storytelling function that you were talking about earlier — the part that has to do with sharing with the rest of the organization, the understanding that we have of our own understanding — that act of telling the story influences the understanding. It's like the two are related, right? Jesse: Yeah. Jorge: There's a feedback cycle happening, where you put it out there, you say, "well, this is how we see things." And maybe your peers and other groups might say, "no, it's not like that at all. From our perspective, it looks like this!" And that tweaks your own architecture, no? Jesse: Yeah, I mean when we talk about cross-functional collaboration, what we're often talking about is the process of aligning the differing information architectures. The differing models understanding of the problem that these cross-functional teams have. That the design team has one understanding of a problem, technology team has a different understanding of the problem, business folks have a third different understanding of the problem. These things need to be reconciled in order for those teams to move toward a common goal together. So, we don't end up with the design team is designing a car, but the engineering team is building a submarine while the business folks have sold to the senior leadership that we're building an airplane! Jorge: This is such important work, and it strikes me — just in hearing you describe it — that it's something that happens often as a side effect of other initiatives. It's not like you set out to explicitly build that understanding and compare the delta with the understanding of that other org. It's more that both of you are tasked with collaborating on something and the process of collaboration is what surfaces these distinctions. Jesse: It forces it! Yeah. You're not really doing it as a separate explicit step because it's part of everything you have to do as a leader, in a lot of ways. Leadership as a design problem Jorge: It feels to me like we're talking kind of in the abstract when we talk about these understandings. And when we say that somebody is presenting to their colleagues, what might come to mind is something like a slide deck, right? And folks tend to gravitate towards things that they can see and understand. And the slide deck might be the manifestation of this understanding, but it's not... it might not be its purest expression. And I'm thinking of things like concept maps, where we map out our understanding of a domain, just not even for sharing with others, but to understand it ourselves. And I'm wondering if in the process of stewarding this understanding of who we are, what we do, what our role is, how we're structured, what our processes are... I'm wondering if there are artifacts that could embody that kind of abstract understanding? Jesse: I think so much of it depends on the leader. And I feel like what you're reaching for, or suggesting, is a mode of leadership that is really kind of an IA-centered or an IA-driven leader. And that's a very interesting idea to me. I haven't met one. You know, I would say I have met some leaders who, because of their experience with collaborative ideation processes, are used to getting their ideas out in a way that is still abstract. You talked about concept maps. That's a great example. Mind mapping is a tool that I've seen business leaders use. That is definitely an information architecture tool. You're doing an IA process when you're engaging with mind mapping. But they wouldn't necessarily think of that as IA work. And they don't necessarily make it central to how they analyze problems or make decisions. The people that I've worked with who have been those kinds of leadership roles tend to be a little bit more constrained and not have formal tools for getting their ideas out. They just communicate. And they do it in the context of structuring and organizing their communications. And a lot of times, that is what is foisted upon them by the communications culture of the organization. I have worked with organizations where there were such strong cultural... Taboos around what you could and could not do in the context of a slide deck. Where, you know, like I had worked with an organization, for example, where if you had anything that was going to the board of directors, the Deck had to follow a very specific structure and format. And if your idea needed more than three to five basic sections to express that idea, your idea was not ready for the board of directors. Because they were consuming so much content from across a very large organization, they needed everything encapsulated and summarized and standardized so that they could make the decisions that they had to make. But what that forced on the entire organization was a communication style that drove out nuance. Drove out conversation. Drove out a lot of what you're talking about, which is that moment to moment flexibility in the decision-making process that you know, for a lot of decisions is utterly necessary. Jorge: Yeah, it comes back to this notion of top-down versus bottom-up, right? Because the implication there is that there is a level of nuance that is inappropriate for folks at this level. And that's a questionable stance, I think. Jesse: Yeah. Jorge: So, you advise leaders, you advise folks who are stepping into leadership. How would someone who is either in a leadership position or looking to get into leadership, how could they develop these particular muscles? Jesse: The way that I talk to folks about design leadership, who have come from a design background -that is to say they've been doing design work — is that leadership is just another design problem. And you're working with different materials and you're working toward different outcomes and you're having to follow different principles, but the task is the same task. It is a creative problem-solving task. It is a systems-thinking task, as a leader. So, looking at the ways that you're already doing that systems-thinking, the ways in which you already doing that architecture for yourself in the work that you're already doing, and those will be your strengths. And those will be the pillars that you can lean on that are going to support your work as a leader going forward. They will evolve and they will not look like what they looked like when you were doing content inventories or task flows or whatever other artifacts you might've been working on as a designer. But the skill set that you're building is the same skill set. Jorge: So, it's in you, you just have to recognize it as such, and build into it. Which is kind of what we've been talking about, right? Getting the sensitivity to read the environment and articulate it in a structured way. Jesse: And also, to remain true to your own perspective. You know, I see a lot of people who step into leadership for the first time, and they start trying to emulate what they've seen of other leaders. Which is a totally natural thing to do. It makes total sense. However, every effective leader leads from their own strengths and recognizes that those strengths are going to be different from the strengths of the people around them, and leverages that difference. And leaders who try to emulate modes of leadership that don't suit their natural abilities, they struggle. And they create a lot of hardship for themselves that they don't need to have if they could just believe that they already had the power. Because I believe they do. Closing Jorge: Well, that strikes me as a fabulous place for us to wrap this conversation. It's an empowering exhortation to folks to be themselves and develop their own powers. Thank you so much for that, Jesse. Where can folks follow up with you? Jesse: You can find me on Twitter. I'm @jjg. I'm also on LinkedIn from time to time these days. You can find our podcast, Finding Our Way, at findingourway.design, and you can find out more about my coaching practice at jessejamesgarrett.com. Jorge: Well, thank you so much, Jesse. It's been a real treat having you on the show. Jesse: Thanks, Jorge! It's been fun.

Rose Ramirez and Mr. Jesse Van Toll a CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) discuss the racial wealth divide, power imbalances and bridging the gap. Rose: Awesome. So, Jesse could you tell us a little bit about NCRC?Jesse: Sure, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition is a membership organization of more than 600 groups around the country who have an economic justice mission and we fulfill that mission by championing fairness in banking housing and in business. Jesse: The racial wealth gap can be understood in a number of ways. I think that you have historic discrimination, you've ongoing discrimination. I really think about it in terms of power. We have an economic system, capitalism, which produces more wealth than any other system we've ever known but it doesn't distribute it equally. And if you think about the theory of capitalism this notion that Adam Smith had that when two parties engage in a transaction, you know, it's mutually beneficial. Jesse: So when we look at the history of capitalism, we see that power imbalances lead to more power imbalances over time. And so you might think of physical and coercive force as being part of the original power imbalance, but on an ongoing basis, part of what we see today. So thinking about Europeans engaging in the slave trade, right? That was a power imbalance that was physical and coercive. Well it led over time to an accumulation of wealth by slave traders, by people engaging the slave trade, by farmer capitalists in the United States. And that wealth and balanced led to an accumulation of power.Jesse: So we're very focused on this sort of power imbalance that we see wealth inequality is the result of an economic system that many times has been based on coercive power. that this led to wealth accumulation in the hands of the very few and that that in and of itself tends to lead to even more wealth accumulation in the hands of the very few. Both because wealthy people have a lot of political power, they have a lot of economic power. There's a lot of ways in which power gets expressed through our system of economics. I think many people would argue that when you look at rates of incarceration among black people in this country, that that you have sort of a criminalization of poverty that exists to express some physical power in many cases over a certain part of the population and that also impacts people's ability to build wealth, to hold a job, to make an income and in turn to invest in things that might help them secure their wealth assets over time. Jesse: Our theory is that we need significant relationships with a significant number of, in our case our members are community-based organizations around the country. Because we understand that in order to correct things like the racial wealth gap, to work on inequality in this country, it's going to take people making sacrifices. Its going to take people doing hard things to overcome what is an incredibly powerful system of capitalism. Our capitalist economy has produced more wealth than any other system in the history of the world; it just doesn't share it very equally.Rose: What does economic justice mean to you?Jesse: Well economic justice to me is not an act charity. It's not about doing something that makes us feel good. Economic justice is about ensuring that in terms of the systems that we have, the policies that we have, that everybody has an opportunity to provide for themselves and their family. That they don't start life at a disadvantage just because of where they were born, their race, what family they were born into. That people have this kind of opportunity to do well and I don't think we have that kind of system.

In this episode, I get to speak with Jesse Well, he's the creator of habit-based lifestyle. He's the best author for a man in the mirror, a podcast coast for a habit-based lifestyle, and a multimillion-dollar fitness business owner. So he's got some of The technology that your mind can use and building habits is a surefire way to get the success that you're looking for. And we all have habits and Jesse here, he's created this system that helps you figure out what habits are going to get you to the next level. Enjoy the episode! Our Guest Jesse Ewell LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/coachjesse Website: linktr.ee/jesseewell1 / closerpanel.peek.link/bER (Company Website) Hacks to take Away The best author for a man in the mirror, a podcast coast for habit based lifestyle and multimillion dollar fitness business owner. Some of the technology that your mind can use and building habits is a surefire way to get the success that you're looking for. Figure out what habits are going to get you to the next level. Built a multimillion-dollar fitness business. Relationship habits no one ever taught you about. Paying attention to your life. It's the lifestyle of habits that I've lived that has gotten me to where I am. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/hacksandhobbies/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/hacksandhobbies/support

Hello and welcome to Further, Faster with Daniel Neilson and in association with Montane. In Further, Faster we have an in-depth conversation with explorers, mountaineers and athletes to understand exactly why, and how, they do what they do. What is it that pushes them to the limit of human endurance and why do they feel the need to do it. This time we’re speaking to Jesse Dufton. So who is Jesse? Well, he’s a climber. A good one. His dad first took him climbing at the 2. At the age of 11, he led his first route. His climbing life continued through his uni years, and then recently he led a climb on the Old Man of Hoy. So far, so impressive, but what you may not know about Jesse is that he is almost completely blind. His story, told in the film Climbing Blind, is touring now. Catch it at the Kendal Mountain Festival or on the BritRock tour. But first, listen in to his remarkable story.

Braze's Director of Data Jesse Tao and Tech Alliances Manager at Looker Erin Franz graciously break down BI tools and the value of data for the rest of us civilians. They walk through the marketization of data and the power of Looker blocks.        TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ: Hi there. This is PJ Bruno. Welcome back to Braze For Impact, your weekly tech industry discussed digest. And I'm thrilled today to have two very good friends of mine, Jesse Tao, our director of data, the man about data. What's the title Jesse? It's just data person?   [0:00:33] Jesse: Well my Slack title is just data stuff.   [0:00:35] PJ: Right. So we have Jesse Tao, data stuff-   [0:00:38] Jesse: Official title is, Head of Data Strategy.   [0:00:41] PJ: Head of Data Stuff, Jesse Tao, and also our very good friend joining us from Looker, that's Erin Franz. Hi Erin.   [0:00:48] Erin: Hi.   [0:00:49] PJ: Good to have you here.   [0:00:50] Erin: Yeah, glad to be here.   [0:00:51] PJ: How's the day been so far? You guys have been doing workshops right?   [0:00:54] Erin: Yeah. Flew in last night. Just starting the day early, east coast time. Feeling great.   [0:00:58] PJ: Awesome. Not too jet lagged yet? You're feeling good?   [0:01:01] Erin: So far.   [0:01:02] PJ: Hitting our stride. That's what I like to hear. So we're here today to talk about data, about insights. I'm sure as you two know, over the past 30 years there's been monumental strides in what that means to companies, and the value that it can add. So let's start really, really general, where we are today. Erin, can you speak to some patterns that we've since in data, since the beginning of it? I guess from relational, to non relational databases, to the kind of stuff that you work with right now?   [0:01:34] Erin: Yeah. I mean, I can speak to ... Since I've joined Looker about four years ago, sort of how the landscape's changed and how we've seen sort of the product evolve with the technologies that have become available. So I think when Looker was founded six years ago or so, Redshift was just emerging as this modern analytical data warehouse. And those technologies didn't really exist before. And what this enabled, was the ability to actually expose large volumes of data across an organization in a way that multiple people could be accessing at the same time, and really using it to make data-driven decisions. Luckily, Looker took a bet on SQL being kind of this language of querying that would scale with all these different technologies that have come out. And luckily, that's been the case. With Redshift, we've also seen other databases like Snowflake and Google has BigQuery, that have really enabled organizations to become data-driven and self-serving when it comes to making decisions based on data.   [0:02:37] PJ: And making it more accessible to people like me, like pedestrians, plebs, who just don't really understand kind of the technical side of data. It's like-   [0:02:47] Erin: Exactly.   [0:02:48] PJ: Democratizes it a bit.   [0:02:49] Erin: Right. Making it accessible in a way that it's not just accessible to technical folks, to data analysts, to people who understand SQL and know how to code, to people who just want to click and drop and create reports and explore data on their own, products like Looker make that possible.   [0:03:06] PJ: And Jesse you work with Looker pretty regularly at this point?   [0:03:10] Jesse: Yes, almost every day.   [0:03:11] PJ: Almost every day. And I mean we wouldn't call you a pedestrian, you're pretty deep in data, you understand it well enough.   [0:03:16] Jesse: Yes I do.   [0:03:17] PJ: Why don't you talk to us a little bit about the marketization of data. This is something that's-   [0:03:22] Jesse: Yeah, you know, I think today we collect a lot of data. And in my opinion, data has more or less become a commodity now, rather than the hot topic. And what the hot topic of today is, it's insights. Because you're thinking about it, we're collecting a lot of data. We have data coming in from IOT and all these other sources, and most of the data that's collected, isn't being used. So, how useful is something that's sitting in the data of our house, kind of just collecting dust? So, very low value there. The value is from the insights, from actually analyzing the data, getting the data and figuring out what you want to do with it, to drive business decisions. And this is kind of where Braze comes in, and Looker comes in. We're providing the data and also providing the framework and the tools for people who are not using data, to get insights out of it and actually use that data. So I think in terms of the marketing pressure in the industry, we're moving ... We're going to still collect a lot of data, but more of the focus is going to be on how do we actually use that data faster and more efficiently?   [0:04:21] PJ: Right. Because if you're not using that data and you're not taking action on it, you're going to be left in the dust, more or less, right? Is that the ...   [0:04:27] Jesse: Yes. To put it in Marie Kondo terms, data just sitting there, brings us no joy.   [0:04:33] PJ: And you're all about sparking joy.   [0:04:36] Jesse: Sure.   [0:04:38] PJ: All right then. Okay, well what sorts of data, insights are available to day that wasn't available in the past? Obviously this is kind of a big sweeping generalization, but what can we speak to currently?   [0:04:49] Erin: I think some common themes that we've seen emerging are, people are collecting data from tools that they are using in their business, whether that's a Salesforce as a CRM's index as a support system and centralizing all that data in one place. So you're not just accessing one data set, not just your transactional data set, but also the data sets that define your whole business and your whole customer journey. So you're actually able to create kind of that 360 view of the customer that we're all sort of striving for, from as many sources as possible. And that's become possible because of these data warehousing technologies that are now available.   [0:05:27] PJ: It's all about that 360 degree view these days, isn't it?   [0:05:30] Jesse: Absolutely.   [0:05:33] PJ: Because I'm still kind of just getting my feet wet with my understanding of the eco system of products right? You have your attribution, you have your CDPs, Braze is in there somewhere-   [0:05:44] Jesse: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-   [0:05:46] PJ: Engagement. So Looker is the analysis, it's less the visualization and more the business intelligence right? Because I feel like on our call, we talked a little bit, it's not just graphs right?   [0:05:57] Erin: Right. Part of it is graphs for sure-   [0:06:00] PJ: Right.   [0:06:00] Erin: You need to be able to visualize your data, but much more than that, of course we always say the starting point for Looker is a dashboard, or a visualization. You can really drill into that visualization, see the components that have built that. If you're technical, you can even see the SQL that is being written to the database to supply that result set. And then you can modify that report, you can drill down into the granular level data that's supplying the data for that visualization. So let's say you're looking at event count by day on your application, you can see what those events are just by clicking into one of those data points.   [0:06:36] PJ: Gotcha. And that data, that belongs to the company effectively, or that belongs to the user?   [0:06:45] Jesse: I have a point of view on that. And before I share my thoughts, I'll preface it by saying I'm not a lawyer, so do not use this as legal advice.   [0:06:53] PJ: Okay, thanks for that.   [0:06:55] Jesse: I think the data ultimately belongs to the end user, but the company is basically the custodian of that data. Because without the end user, there is no data but without the company, there's not way of collecting or storing that data. So, the company is more or less using, collecting that data on behalf of the user. They're creating some sort of value from it, either from messaging or personalization or just understanding the user a little bit better. Some way of using that data to create insights into the level of value to that user. But ultimately, it is that user's data and the user should own that data. I think that's the point of view that many countries and regulatory bodies are holding as well. If you look at GDPR as well as the upcoming California privacy laws, the focus is really on the end user and their ability to control the data that they collect, the accuracy of it and the right to be forgotten. So, I think there is a common theme where the view point is the end user owns the data whereas, the companies are the ones who are using it to provide value both to the user and to the marketplace.   [0:08:03] PJ: That makes sense. And the California protection, that's going to happen at the end of this year right?   [0:08:11] Jesse: I don't know the exact timeline. We'll have to refer to our legal team about that.   [0:08:14] PJ: Okay. Well we can patch that up later if we need to. So Erin, let's dig more into Looker a little bit. What's the real differentiator for you guys? What do you guys kind of hold up as a torch? This is kind of who we are and what makes us stand out-   [0:08:29] Erin: Yeah.   [0:08:30] PJ: Amongst the other tools.   [0:08:31] Erin: I think luckily, the core Looker product has been fundamentally the same since its inception. With the core differentiators being that it's entirely in database. So as we talked about, the ability to access all of the data, down to the granular ... Most granular level that you're collecting it and exposed that across your organization. And the way that we're able to do that while still providing standards governance, so users are not creating their own one-off definitions of revenue, something that's incredibly important to reporting, is through our modeling layer, which is called LookML. So that's where you define all the business logic that your end data consumers will be using, whether by just exposing them to pre-built dashboards, visualizations or having them build their own content. And the way this works, while still leveraging the database, is it's really just an abstraction of SQL, or the language that you're using to create those database investments. And then finally, it's a web-based modern application. So that makes it really easy to share, collaborate and extend into plenty of other users. We have a fully baked API where you can serve data from Looker elsewhere to bring it into the tools where you need it.   [0:09:46] PJ: So LookML, you said it's your own language-   [0:09:50] Erin: Yup.   [0:09:50] PJ: It's built on another language-   [0:09:53] Erin: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-   [0:09:54] PJ: And so if you know LookML, it actually is useful outside of Looker as well.   [0:09:59] Erin: It's proprietary to the product, but it's very ... What you're doing is modeling the components of SQL, which is a core skillset of any data analyst. It really just makes it easier because instead of writing one-off queries, you're writing the components of those queries so they can be reused, by not only the data analyst, but also by all the data consumers.   [0:10:21] PJ: Gotcha. Cool. Well let's talk Looker Blocks. This is what I really want to get into because I first heard about it at LTR 2018, because we announced our first Looker Block right?   [0:10:34] Jesse: Two Looker Blocks actually.   [0:10:35] PJ: Thank you Jesse. Fact checking on the go. Do you want to talk about that? That was kind of a big release right?   [0:10:43] Jesse: Yeah, it was a pretty big release because it was still pretty early on in our relationship with Looker but we saw the immediate value pretty early on, so we decided to move quickly in that direction. And I'll let Erin talk a little bit about what our Looker Blocks, but the two Looker Blocks that we released back in November, are based around our currents data export and it focuses on market engagement and user behavior. So marketing engagement on the Braze data side will be things like email sends, push opens and at message clicks, stuff like that. And user behavior includes things like session starts and app purchases, so the behaviors of the users. We take all of that information together to create really useful insights around how campaigns are performing, user retention, if campaigns are improving your driving purchases, things like that.   [0:11:32] PJ: Gotcha. And Looker Blocks for those of us who don't actually know the definition-   [0:11:39] Erin: Yeah.   [0:11:39] PJ: Are basically ...   [0:11:40] Erin: They're basically templates for LookML. So LookML is a text-base modeling language. So we can model expected data sources upfront. So, data sources that are going to have a common schema, so common tables, columns, fields, within that. We've created a bunch of these for sources that are commonly used across our customers like Salesforce, Zendesk, as I mentioned before, Google AdWords, Facebook ads. The sources we're seeing most often, and then also the sources that we want to model proactively with our partners like Braze.   [0:12:12] PJ: Cool. And so these two Looker Blocks, these are the first of many.   [0:12:16] Jesse: Yes.   [0:12:18] PJ: Cool. I mean, do you know what's on deck? Do we know what's coming up or do we want to save that for our next episode?   [0:12:24] Jesse: We can save that for the next episode, but I actually want to talk a little bit about why we decided to make these Looker Blocks. And I think it's because we saw in it, the common vision with our product, which is data agility, or what we call, data agility. And that means basically speed to insight for us. As I mentioned before, the value of data is not in the data itself, it's what you can do with it, and how you can actually gets insights out of it. And with Looker Blocks, it acts as a template where we are predefining all the data fields and relationships, and providing those fundamental building blocks for us and out customers to build on top of. So, what would historically take a data engineer or a BI developer weeks, days, potentially even months to model, we do all of that leg work for our customers so they can just drag and drop in those Looker Blocks and be ready to find insights within minutes or hours.   [0:13:20] PJ: So that's huge. That's going to save time.   [0:13:22] Jesse: Absolutely.   [0:13:24] PJ: It's exciting. All right, let's move on down to data tech changing roles. How is data tech ... How is it changing the way people are doing their jobs and what will the change for real expectations be in the future?   [0:13:39] Jesse: Sure. Now, I think that people are becoming a lot more data-driven, and thinking about how to both collect and use data in their every day lives. Well not just their every day lives, but every day professional lives. They're using data to not just justify their decisions, but also to understand what the implications are in areas that they may not have seen before. And I think that's going to be a point of differentiation for customers, for our companies, because if you can actually use the data in a very insightful way, you can understand more about your users, your competitors, the marketplace and be able to confidently act in a way that will set you apart. And I think in terms of the data collection, the aspect of privacy is going to be more and more important as well. As I mentioned before, there's GDPR, there's the California privacy laws. I think people are just going to be ... Sorry. I think people are going to have to be more careful about what they collect because in the past, you could collect everything. And now with the privacy breeches you've been seeing at big tech companies, big banks, people have to be careful about both what they're collecting and how they're using it.   [0:14:49] PJ: What's the most insightful way you've collected data to make a decision about your life? Putting you on the spot Jesse. I'll start.   [0:14:58] Jesse: Okay.   [0:15:00] PJ: Mine will have to be using Rotten Tomatoes to decide to not watch movies. That's probably it. That's probably saved me several hours of viewing time.   [0:15:11] Jesse: Okay. So I actually have a script that I write, that scrapes lottery websites for the winning numbers, as well as the pay out. And I modeled out something where something like Powerball or Mega Millions, the optimal time to buy is a jackpot of around 3.25 to 3.5 million because at that time, there are not so many buyers where you have to split the pot. So you basically maximize your payout that way. So, we have office lotto pools here and I don't really partake in them up until a certain point where I think there's a higher payout.   [0:15:49] PJ: I'm going to keep that in mind Jesse. That's a good one. That was a really good one.   [0:15:52] Erin: Yeah, saving time, stress. I'm more on the Rotten Tomatoes path.   [0:15:59] PJ: Yeah?   [0:15:59] Erin: Yeah.   [0:16:00] PJ: Do your homework, do your reviews, leverage the data available.   [0:16:03] Erin: I guess restaurants also.   [0:16:05] PJ: Yup. Yeah.   [0:16:07] Erin: Avid Yelp user.   [0:16:08] PJ: I'm a latecomer-   [0:16:09] Erin: Not a reviewer but-   [0:16:10] PJ: Not a reviewer, right. I'm a voyeur. I hide in the comments and I watch.   [0:16:13] Erin: Yes.   [0:16:14] PJ: I'm a-   [0:16:14] Jesse: Lurker.   [0:16:15] PJ: What's that?   [0:16:16] Jesse: A lurker.   [0:16:16] PJ: I'm a lurker. I'm a lurker, that's right.   [0:16:18] Erin: Yeah, I rely on those people who are letting people know their opinions.   [0:16:22] PJ: And I'm a latecomer to Reddit actually. I kind of just joined the bandwagon because I needed information on a certain thing. I was like, wow, this isn't just funny comments, there's a lot of really useful information here. Who knew? Anyways, so what were some trends, some hot ideas in the last few years that really didn't deliver on its promise? What are some current trends or hot ideas you think do have promise in the future? Erin, you want to weigh in?   [0:16:48] Erin: Well, getting back to technology here, I think that as companies starting becoming more digital, and they were collecting so much more data and they wanted a place to put it, a data lake, and I think you know, I don't know how long ago it was, but Hadoop technology has emerged as kind of this place where you could be putting all your log data, all of your transactional data, all of this data. And it was easy to collect potentially, but not easy to actually self serve. So you were collecting all this data, but you didn't know ... There was no way to expose it to the organization. So I think that these analytical data warehouses have really filled that void and actually made that possible. And we've only seen that within the past five years or so.   [0:17:33] PJ: Can you tell me the different between a data warehouse and a data lake? Because I've heard data lake around this office over the past eight or nine months, and is there a big different that I'm missing?   [0:17:45] Erin: I can give the high level and then I think Jesse might want to comment on the more details. But you can think of a data lake as more like a file system. So you're putting all these files of data in this place for storage, but that doesn't make it necessarily accessible to the people who need it.   [0:18:02] PJ: But the warehouse, you can actually do more with it?   [0:18:05] Erin: Right. In a more performant way.   [0:18:07] Jesse: Yeah, I mean the way I would kind of think about it is a little bit more literally if you will. A data warehouse you can image as potentially a physical warehouse that you can just put anything in there. In this case, it's going to be data. And a data lake, you can think of as a warehouse that has a giant pool in it. All that data is kind of just swimming around in a, I wouldn't call it a liquid form, but there's ... It's potentially unstructured, it's very fluid, it's just there.   [0:18:31] PJ: Makes sense.   [0:18:32] Jesse: And then people can go into that data lake with buckets or whatever tool to extract the data that they need.   [0:18:40] PJ: That's a good metaphor. And so data lakes versus data ponds, is there ...   [0:18:45] Jesse: There have been some ... I've heard the term data ponds before-   [0:18:48] PJ: Really? Okay. I thought I was just messing with you, but I guess I wasn't-   [0:18:53] Jesse: No I've heard it before. I don't think we're currently using that though.   [0:18:56] PJ: All right, Jesse, hot shot, will data proficiency be a core skill for talent in the future? What do you think?   [0:19:05] Jesse: Yeah, I think absolutely. I think here at Braze, and just at other companies, just reading the news, you hear more and more about how companies try to be data-driven. If you just look at our job descriptions, by the way we're hiring, and job descriptions of other companies you see, the requirement of understanding the different data warehouses, technologies, how to use data. A move from Excel to more complicated analytics technologies like Looker for example, becoming more and more popular. So it's absolutely going to be more important in the future. And you know I think for data analysts, that's ... Their role has kind of changed over the recent years and will continue to change as well. I think for the data analysts that I see, it's moving more and more towards a full staff knowledge. So before, you would see people focusing on one element of the data pipeline, whereas analysts today tend to have more visibility over how to bring data in, how to clean it, how to do the app analysis and the visualization, everything. And I think there's going to be more focus on the domain knowledge as well because data and insights out of context, is not going to be terribly useful to the organization. So we need to know how to appropriately analyze and interpret enough information in a way that the business or the end users can actually use. Also, I think in terms of the marketplace, you're just going to see more and more technologies. Some better, some worse than others, within the visualization space. Looker is pretty new, they're a ... I would call them a challenger, again something encompassing the place and they're doing very well. But going further upstream, you're seeing a lot of new database, data warehouse technologies, a lot of new ETL technologies. So I think the data analysts of today and tomorrow, are just going to be more familiar with these technologies and how to use these technologies. And then flipping a little bit to the non technical people, so the end consumers of the data. I think you're going to see changes there as well, especially as data becomes more democratized, and easier to use and consume. We're definitely seeing a trend towards self service. So, drag and drop analysis of data rather than actually going into the data warehouse to write the code and analyze it. We're seeing more sophisticated alerting, so we know when data isn't looking the way we think it should be looking. And that's just going to allow people to move a lot more quickly and more confidently as they try out experiments, they do AB tests and iterate quickly.   [0:21:37] PJ: Brave new world.   [0:21:38] Jesse: Yes.   [0:21:40] PJ: Erin, you want to weigh in? What does the future hold for Looker? You don't need to show your full hand. I know you guys have stuff. But anything you want to leave us with?   [0:21:49] Erin: Yeah, I think beyond sort of self service, the core BI use case, Looker's really trying to position itself as a data platform. So, not just for internal analytics and reporting, but also serving data elsewhere to other applications, to deliver data where it needs to go, like the action hub integration that we built with Braze. So, basically connecting the dots when it comes to doing analysis and taking action on it. So, building your list of users you want to target a campaign to and not just having to export that and then upload it into a tool, but creating that link directly to that product you're using.   [0:22:32] PJ: Awesome. Cool. A lot stuff to look forward to then.   [0:22:35] Jesse: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-   [0:22:35] PJ: Thank you guys so much for being here with me, and thank you guys for joining us. This has been Jesse Tao, Erin Franz and PJ Bruno. Happy visualizing. [0:22:45]

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Jesse and Andrew reflect on their travels to Japan, and Jesse talks about his favorite thing to do when he's in Japan.  Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world. Website: dialog.fm/lple iTunes: bit.ly/LPLEiTunes Facebook: bit.ly/LPLEFacebook Twitter: bit.ly/LPLETwitter Patreon: bit.ly/LPLEPatreon   TRANSCRIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Hey, Andrew. Andrew: Hey, Jesse. Jesse: Before we begin, I'd like to say a special hello to students from two different schools now who are listening to LPLE to improve their English listening skills. Students from EKO English Pronunciation in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, and I also found out that we have some students from our local City University who are also using LPLE for their school assignments and, just in general, to improve their English listening comprehension. So, hello! Andrew: That's great news! Welcome, folks! Jesse: Andrew, one thing you and I have in common is we have both been to Japan. Andrew: Yes. Jesse: When did you go? Andrew: It's been a while; I went back in 2008. Jesse: So, that's about... Andrew: Eight years ago? Jesse: Yeah, that's right. A lot has changed since. Andrew: I'm not surprised. Jesse: The last time I was in Japan was last fall, and before that it had also been about eight years. Let me tell you, I love Japan. I think you feel the same way.  Andrew: I really enjoyed my trip. Jesse: There's a few things I really enjoy about Japan. Every time I go, I always have a wonderful time, and it's primarily because, one, I have friends there, and they always take really good care of me. In general, not just because I have friends, but Japanese people, in general, are very welcoming. Did you experience that yourself? Andrew: That's very much what I experienced when I went there. Even just from people on the street, or the people you met in stores or on the train, they were all very kind and very accommodating, and I was going without any Japanese language experience--I was speaking only English--and they were very accommodating of my need to work in my own language and learn my way around the city and find out what I needed to do. Jesse: So, very similar to my experience in Vietnam, because I can speak Japanese, I found that social barriers and any level of potential discomfort in interacting with a foreigner is immediately removed. Andrew: Right. Jesse: It also makes it much easier for me to establish--to create--my own social network in Japan. That's why every time I go back to Japan, I always let my friends know in advance and then I start to schedule time with them to go have dinner, to go have drinks, and, more importantly--I would say probably most importantly--I make sure to schedule time to go to karaoke. Andrew: Hahaha! That's the only reason you're going to Japan, isn't it, Jesse?... Jesse: Let me tell you, if I ever lived in Japan, I sincerely believe that I would be going to karaoke probably every day, if not every other day. I love it that much when I'm in Japan. You know what's funny? I live here in Seattle, and we have plenty of karaoke places. There's actual places that are just for karaoke and then there are bars, and in bars, there are karaoke machines, and you stand up on a stage in front of people, and you sing. When I'm in Seattle, my desire to go to karaoke is pretty small; I don't think about it that much. When I'm in Japan, that's almost all I can think about--is "when am I going to be going to my next karaoke party?" Andrew: Okay, so what is different about going to do karaoke in Japan that makes you so excited about it? Jesse: Well, in Japan the entire system is different when it comes to karaoke. Again, in America, it's very common to stand up on a stage in front of strangers and sing. Andrew: So you have to put on a performance for people you don't know. Jesse: That's right. So, it feels very intimidating, especially for people who are new. However, in Japan, it's very different. All karaoke places have separate rooms that you rent, and the rooms vary on size: Some rooms are very small for only four people--actually maybe even smaller I hear, sometimes for only two people; very small--and they can be as large as enough to fit 10 people or 15 people; an actual big party. So, you're in a room with just your friends, so the level of intimidation and fear to sing in front of people is a lot lower, and even in those rooms, because you feel more comfortable then you can let yourself have a lot of fun, specifically in this particular room I went to last time they had a mini stage with a microphone stand, and you felt like you were giving a performance, but you were giving a performance to all of your friends who are cheering you on. Now, not only do I speak Japanese but I also can sing in Japanese I will not touch you with my singing in Japanese right now you will have to come because I sing in Japanese and his friends and I'm a foreigner who can speak Japanese in Japanese and that much more amusing to watch them no. And it's a positive feedback loop because I'm having fun and my friends are having fun and then cheering me on which makes me have that much more fun when I'm singing for them overall look I love Japan I love going to Japan I love speaking Japanese I love Japanese food I love Japanese culture music everything but if there's one thing I love the most about going to Japan it's going to karaoke. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Jesse and Andrew talk about female heroes in action movies and television, and compare what they liked and disliked with the Black Widow character in the recent Avengers movie with the female heroes in Game of Thrones. Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world.  Website: dialog.fm/lple iTunes: bit.ly/LPLEiTunes Facebook: bit.ly/LPLEFacebook Twitter: bit.ly/LPLETwitter Patreon: bit.ly/LPLEPatreon TRANSCRIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Hi, Andrew. Andrew: Hey, Jesse. Jesse: Over the past couple of weeks, you and I have been watching a lot of TV and a few movies. Andrew: Yes. Jesse: One of the conversations we had about TV and movies is the role of the women characters. Andrew: Ahhh, yes. Jesse: Now, you and I have had some pretty impassioned discussions about this; very passionate conversations. We have our opinions about what makes an ideal heroine character. Andrew: Right. You mean-... I think you and I have been trying to find a way to agree on what makes for a powerful female lead character in a story and in a TV show, the heroin, the woman who is the main character and the one we are rooting for to succeed. Jesse: The female hero. Andrew: Right. Jesse: A lot of the shows and movies we have been watching have been from the Marvel Universe. So, for listeners who may be unfamiliar with this, Marvel is a comic book company they are the company who has created The Avengers, The X-Men...what else? Andrew: Characters like Captain America, and Ironman, and Hulk, and Thor, and Spiderman. Jesse: Right. And then, we've also been watching a few other individual shows outside of that particular company. So, one show that comes to mind is Game of Thrones, a very popular show. And, you've also been watching Orphan Black. Andrew: That's right. Jesse: And, if I'm not mistaken, the main character in that show is a female. Andrews: Main characters, in fact. Jesse: Main characters. One of the things I mentioned to you was my disappointment in how the female characters were portrayed in the recent Avengers movies. Andrew: Okay, yes. Jesse: Now, you also shared some similar disappointments with a couple of the characters, mainly the Black Widow, if I'm not mistaken. Andrew: Correct. This is Scarlet Johansen playing the one female hero in The Avengers movies next to many other male characters. And, to be clear, you and I agree on a basic point, that is: We think there should be more strong female characters in many of these stories, and the conversation we're having is about what that looks like and what types of representations, what types of characters are best suited for these roles. Jesse: Now, before we continue this conversation, let me just acknowledge the fact that you and I are two males in our early to mid-thirties... Andrew: [chuckling] Right. Jesse: ...Talking about what we think a strong female character looks like in a show. Andrew: [laughing] Right. So you can just shut off the podcast now and stop listening, because we have no right to be having this conversation at all, but we're going to do it anyway... Jesse: [laughing] For those who are still interested in practicing their English listening comprehension skill, please continue to listen on. Andrew: [chuckling] Maybe the rage and insult that you feel from hearing us talk about this will motivate you to practice your English so you can tell us how we're wrong. Jesse: Exactly! Yes. Good point! For the listening audience, if you have an opinion about this matter after listening to this, please share your opinion with us on the LPLE Facebook page. Know that we would love to hear your opinion about this. If there's one thing that you and I agree on, as you just said, we would love to see more strong female characters represented on TV, in general. Andrew: Yes. Jesse: For the Black Widow character in the Avengers, if I remember correctly you weren't a fan of how she was portrayed. Andrew: I like the character in the movies, but I don't like the way that she is underused in the main story lines of the movies. So, she is always present when the Avengers go and do something, but she is usually on the sidelines while someone like Captain America or Iron Man is doing all of the talking, and making a lot of the decisions, and fighting in most of the most complicated battles against enemies, and I wish that she had a more central role to play in the storylines. Jesse: So, my opinion on the matter is I feel like she does have a central role to play in those movies; I'm not a fan of her delivery, of her acting. So, when you mentioned that she should have her own movie, I agree with you that the Black Widow should have her own movie, I'm just not a fan of that particular actress playing that character. So, let's take a look at Game of Thrones; I mentioned Game of Thrones. At our recent group dinner on Monday I came to you excited because I felt like I found a good comparison. Andrew: Right. Jesse: The women on the show Game of Thrones, they don't have too much screen time; although, in this season I think they're having much more. For the limited amount of screen time that they have, I'm a big fan of both their plot position in the show because it's very prominent--I appreciate just how strong they are as a particular-... as that figure in that show, but more importantly I'm a big fan of their acting. Andrew: Right. And, I don't disagree. I think that the Game of Thrones characters are growing and developing very well, and they are being shown very well in the show; and, I agree, also, that the acting being done in most of those cases is very, very good. So, we agree on all of those points. I think that if there is a disagreement, it is about whether or not that is the only way to present a strong female character or not. And, I think where you and I disagree on Black Widow--part of it may be a preference for the actress, which is just personal between you and me, and the other part might have a little bit to do with the character that she is playing and whether that character is bold, and loud, and in-your-face, or more of a subdued personality as a character that might be making her performance less interesting to watch. Jesse: The Black Widow's character, by nature, is supposed to be somewhat subdued, right? Andrew: Yes. She usually tries to stay out of conflicts until absolutely necessary. And, while she has her own opinions, she is not as invested necessarily in the outcomes of some of the disputes that happened in the movies that she's in. And, I think that, to my mind, contributes to why she is less forceful, and less forward, and less commanding like many of the Game of Thrones characters are. Jesse: Do you think that if she had her own movie that that would change? I think by nature, because she is a spy, she can't really engage too much. I mean, it would sound like she would be the female version of Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity, to some extent, right? Andrew: Right. I agree, and what I think would be different about a Black Widow movie that is standing alone is that instead of being a character in other people's stories--like she is in Captain America movies or Avengers movies--she would have a chance to be the main character in her own story, and she might have a much stronger opinion and an opportunity to be much more forceful in those stores. Jesse: Well, to that extent, I really do hope that Marvel gives some consideration, like you suggested, to creating a Black Widow movie. I like Scarlett Johansson, I think, in general, she's a fantastic actress. I feel as though her role in this movie is challenged given the nature of her character. But, nevertheless, it does warrant some consideration for an individual spinoff Black Widow movie. Andrew: I have heard rumors that they are planning to make one, and I can't wait to see it. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Jesse talks about moving into a new house. Andrew explains states, cities, and neighborhoods in America. Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world. Twitter: @LPLEDialogFM Facebook: facebook.com/LPLEDialogFM TRANSCRIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Hi, Andrew! Andrew: Hey, Jesse. Jesse: Cool story. A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I moved into a new house. Andrew: I know! We're actually sitting in it right now. Jesse: We're actually recording this podcast on our new dining table in our new living room. It's quite nice! Andrew: It's a very nice, brand new place. Jesse: Now, we live in the Rainier Valley neighborhood. Now, for those who are unfamiliar with how geography and...what, what's a good word? Municipalities? Andrew: I would just say how cities are laid out... Jesse: How cities are laid out. Andrew: Or, how Seattle is laid out. Jesse: Right, because some cities do it differently. Andrew: Right. Jesse: One big example is New York, where they have something that I don't think any other city has in the nation, which is burrows. Andrew: Well, yes. And, I would call those neighborhoods, but the burrows are mainly-... The burrows are defined by geography, right? By the islands that make up part of New York City and also where you are in relation to the freeway and downtown, is that right? Jesse: I have no idea how burrows work, honestly... Andrew: [hahaha] Jesse: Well, skipping that for just a moment here. How Seattle works is you have the Washington State, you have counties within the state, you have cities within the counties, and then you have neighborhoods, within the cities. Andrew: That's right. Jesse: So, we live in the Rainier Valley neighborhood. The old neighborhood we lived in before was called Judkins Park. We moved from Judkins Park to the Rainier Valley. Andrew: That's interesting, actually, because when you spoke about neighborhoods I was actually thinking about, I guess, a larger version of the "neighborhood" definition. So, Seattle is broken down by different areas, which I would consider to be places like Capitol Hill, First Hill, the Central District, North Beacon Hill, and so on. What you're describing are actually smaller parts of those areas, which are the actual, I guess, communities inside those neighborhoods like Judkins or Rainier Valley, and they refer more closely to the roads and the intersections that are around the area where you live, is that right? Jesse: Yeah, that's correct. Now, originally where we lived before in Judkins Park, we were about seven minutes to 10 minutes away from Chinatown and downtown. Andrew: That's right. Jesse: Now we live five to seven minutes away from Chinatown and downtown. So, we're moving ever closer to Chinatown and downtown, without actually living inside either one of those two areas. Andrew: Yes, which is interesting because you are actually moving south, away from most of Seattle, a little ways away. Jesse: Now, we live in a house-... a style of house that's called a "townhouse." How do we describe a townhouse for people who are unfamiliar with this kind of architecture? Andrew: That's a good question. I think when people think of normal family homes in the United States, in general, they are usually a traditional structure with a sloping roof, they are usually one or two stories tall, and usually take up a lot of space on one floor with a large yard around side it--around it outside. I think I would describe a townhome as taking up much less space with much less yard, and having more floors instead so that they are about the same size inside the home, but on maybe three or four floors instead of one or two. Jesse: That's right, that's right. On our ground floor, immediately when you enter the front door there are stairs going up to the, kind of the main area the living room, the kitchen. But, also on the ground floor when you enter you have the option of going to the side of the stairs to two different bedrooms and a bathroom. Andrew: Right. Jesse: So, they're basically compressing, they're making--for maybe lack of a better word--shrinking the size of a normal house; instead of building wider they're building taller. Andrew: That's correct, yes. And, I would say that it is not--... again it is not smaller, it is just stacked differently. So, like you say, there are only two bedrooms on the ground floor, which means that the floor is smaller, but then the next floor up you have a living room and a kitchen, which in a more traditional American home might all be on the same floor. Jesse: Right, right. Are there townhouses in other states? I think that maybe townhouses are more commonly found in denser cities where land is sma-... where land is fewer. Andrew: I think land is more expensive near big cities, and that is why people choose to build taller rather than wider. Jesse: Yes. Andrew: I think traditional American cities had more space, and many of them are still like that. So, for example, in the middle of the country, in the midwest cities like St. Louis or Chicago, tend to have more space and so they have more single family homes with yards. In cities that are denser like New York or like Seattle or San Francisco, there's not as much space to have a yard and to build out, and so they build up instead, and that's why town homes have become more popular. But, they're also very nice because they are built with the newest technology. Jesse: Yes. Andrew: So, they have bigger windows, they have better insulation so they don't get as cold or as hot in the weather, and they're cheaper to run, so it costs less money to keep them warm in the winter and cool in the summer. And, they stand up to weather well, as well. Jesse: That's right. You talk about yards. Now, how do you feel about yards? Andrew: I personally don't care much for them. I don't-... Let me say that differently, I don't value them very highly because I don't spend my time out in them. I am usually out in the city, and when I want to go out into nature, I drive to the mountains and the forests nearby. So, to me the yard is pretty to look at, but it also means a lot of work. I need to mow the grass, I need to pull weeds, I need to plant flowers or a garden, and these are things that I would not want to do normally for myself. So, they are kind of a responsibility that I don't want. I like living in the city because I am close to everything that I like to do, so bars, restaurants, theater, bands, and other performances, and also to be close to my friends. And, so, I don't feel like it is as important to have an estate, a big piece of land to live on, as well. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Jesse and Andrew talk about the current presidential election season and the possibility of having our first female president. Andrew explains about America's two-party system--Democrat and Republican. Jesse explores how where he grew up and lives influences who he supports to be the next president. Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world. Twitter: @LPLEDialogFM Facebook: facebook.com/LPLEDialogFM TRANSCRIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Hi, Andrew! Andrew: Hi, Jesse. Jesse: How you doing? Andrew: Hanging in there. Jesse: We are in an interesting time in our country. This year is an election year. Andrew: It is, and there is a guarantee that we will have a new president of the United States by the end of the year. Jesse: That's right. Every four years we have a presidential election, and this is the fourth year. So, it's easy to remember: 2016, then every four years after that. Andrew: 2016, 2020, 2024, 2028, at which point we will be very, very old people and probably cranky people, also. Jesse: This year may be the first year that we have a female president in our country. Andrew: It's possible. One of the strong candidates on the Democratic side is Hillary Clinton who is in a good position to win her party's nomination, which leads us into the confusing part about American politics, which is that we have two basic parties--two sides that tend to run against each other every year. And, this is different from most other Western countries because many Western countries are run as a coalition, which means there are many parties that have to team up to run the country. And, in the United States, it is either a Democratic president or a Republican president, and we have had a Democratic president for eight years in President Barack Obama, and now we are waiting to see whether we can have another presidency on the Democratic side. Jesse: My understanding is that in recent time it's always one swung one direction and then the other, right? Andrew: In-... In the past twenty years or so, that is true. Ronald Reagan ran twice and had eight years as president. We had another president on the Republican side, President Bush, who only lasted one four-year term, and then we had President Clinton with eight years in office--he was a Democrat--then President Bush who was eight years in office--a Republican--and then President Obama who was eight years in office--a Democrat. Jesse: This might be the first time where we have back-to-back presidents who are both from the same party. Andrew: Right...in about 20 years. Jesse: Yes. Andrew: It's been a very long time. Jesse: That's right. This is going to be a unique time in our election season not just because we have a strong female candidate who has a really strong chance of becoming the first female president of the United States, but then there's also the element of having two back-to-back democratic presidents who are different from each other, then there's also the element of Hillary Clinton being the wife of a former president, as well. Andrew: Right! We've had a interesting run of elections in the past 25 years or so, where President Bush the senior was president, and then eight years later his son became the president, and now we are in a similar position where President Bill Clinton was president for eight years and now his wife Hillary Clinton is running. So, we are dealing with some very political families that tend to stay in power for a very long time whether by their sons and daughters or their spouses. Jesse: Election Day is in November, November 8th, which is a Thursday. I did tell my boss that I may be showing up late for work on the morning of November 9th... Andrew: ...Because you'll be staying up to see what happens. Jesse: Primarily because I will be staying up late to see what happens, and there may be some celebration in or sharing of sorrows involved depending on who is elected. Andrew: Right. Jesse: Now, I feel it's comfortable enough between you and I to share with the audience which side we take in terms of Democrat or Republican. Andrew: Yeah, that's right. Both of us are strong support of the Democratic Party in the United States. So, both of us voted for Barack Obama... Jesse: That's right. Andrew: And, we both hope that Hillary Clinton will become the next president. Jesse: This is interesting because part of and--maybe I'll speak for myself here--part of my support of the Democratic Party, part of my left-leaning thinking, comes from my upbringing. We live in a liberal city. Andrew: Right. And, we should be clear, in the United States, which is not the same as in some other countries, the Liberal party and the Democratic party and the more Progressive party are all the same thing. So, when we say we are left-meaning-...when we say we are left-leaning, with we also mean we are Democratic, or, rather we support the Democratic party... Jesse: Correct. Andrew: ...And, that is opposite from the Republican party, which is the conservative party, which is the right-leaning party. Jesse: So, terms like "left," "Democrat," and "liberal" are all grouped together. Andrew: Right. Jesse: And then terms like "right," "Conservative," "Republican," "GOP" are all lumped together. Andrew: That's right Jesse: That's right. Because, in some other countries those terms will be dramatically different and represent two different parties. Andrew: Exactly. What you say is correct. We both live in Washington State, which is a state that tends to vote very strongly towards the Democratic party most of the time. So, we will call it a "Liberal State," and that is tending-...that tends to be the truth in the entire west coast of the United States--and actually the east coast in many parts, as well. So, Washington and Oregon and California tend to vote liberally for the Democratic party, so does New York, New Jersey, on up and down through Massachusetts and other parts of the northeastern part of the United States. Jesse: I heard said that the coasts, both west coast and east coast, tend to lean left, and then there's a mix in the center, and then when you go south in America, that's where you get a lot of conservative voters. Andrew: Right. People who vote for the right-wing party or the Republicans. Jesse: Well, I'm excited to see what happens in November. Andrew: So am I. Jesse: We'll have a fun night watching the election together... Andrew: ...and I look forward to celebrating the outcome. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Jesse recounts how many of his Vietnamese female friends dislike being asked by friends and family about when they're going to get married. Andrew explains how American women also experience the same trouble with being asked about their plans for marriage. Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world. Twitter: @LPLEDialogFM Facebook: facebook.com/LPLEDialogFM TRANSCRIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Hey Andrew. Andrew: Hey Jesse. Jesse: So, as you know, I was in Vietnam for the past two-and-a-half weeks. Andrew: That's right! Jesse: And, I had the chance to catch up with many friends during my time in Ho Chi Minh City. Now, turns out that many of my friends happened to be female, and they're also around my age, and they're also single. Now, you might be asking, "where are you going with this, Jesse?" Andrew: I was about to ask. Jesse: Well, mind you, these women--these friends of mine--they already know I'm married, they already know who my wife is, they've already met my wife. The reason why I start this story out like this is because I can say for certain that 100% of all of my female friends I talked to said the exact same thing, which is: They are so tired of getting asked by their relatives and friends when they are going to get married. Andrew: That is excellent, I share their sentiment. I know exactly how they feel. Jesse: You can just see how frustrated they are. They-... Every time they say, "Ah, yeah, my parents keep asking me 'when are you going to get married?' 'We want you to have kids.'" I can see the expression on my friend's face, and that expression is very sad, very annoyed, very frustrated. Andrew: Right. Jesse: In Vietnam, I assume that if you're not on some sort of path to a marriage, which is to say if by 25 you're not in a serious relationship with somebody, that starts to create some sort of concern, panic... Andrew: ...on the part of your family. Jesse: ...On the part of the family, correct. Because, by the time that you start to hit 28, if you're still not in some sort of committed relationship, then there's this term, and this is the derogatory term and actually really don't like this term, the concern is you're going to be called, "ế," which is a term that-... It's like saying "an old maid." Andrew: Right, okay. I was going to say, in the US there is a similar set of terms: "You're a spinster," "you're an old maid." Jesse: Right. But you what the funny thing is, here in the States I don't hear those terms. I know they exist, I know these terms exist. But, for our current culture and our current society--now, perhaps this might be just my understanding based on the fact that I live here in Seattle--my understanding is we don't refer to women like that anymore. Andrew: Not directly, and you and I being young men probably wouldn't hear it, but I'm sure that the feeling that that term, or those terms, are associated with are still alive and well. By which I mean families usually have an interest in seeing their daughters, especially, go on to have happy family lives, and there is an expectation for most of them that they will find a boyfriend, get married, and have children. And, so, I know many female friends of mine on my own who are in a similar situation where they are in their late twenties or thirties and have still not settled down, as it's called, they haven't found a permanent relationship and they have not gotten married and they have not had kids, and they are receiving all kinds of pressure from their families and even sometimes their friends to go down that path and achieve those goals, even if they don't want them themselves. Jesse: You know what's interesting, as a guy--now, I've been married for going on four years, I've been in a relationship for eight prior to that--so, you're right, I'm not-... clearly I've never had to experience that kind of pressure. Whenever my dad asks me, "So, son, when are you going to have children? I want more grandchildren," my answer is always, "We're still thinking about it. Stop asking me." Andrew: Yes. Imagine tha-... that question being asked and that amount of frustration you feel magnified ten or a hundred times, or alternately, imagine that he's asking you it every hour of every day and I think you begin to understand what a lot of these especially women are going through. My girlfriend and I have been together for a little bit over a year, but because we are both around 30 years old the expectation is that we will be taking those next traditional steps very soon. So, I occasionally get a question from my family, "when are you getting married?" or "when you get married..." assuming that I will soon, she gets it every time she talks to her family. Jesse: She's still very young, too. She's in her mid-twenties if I'm not mistaken. Andrew: She is 29, turning 30 this year. But, she is old enough that she has been getting those questions for quite a while. And, everyone seems to be very, very interested in knowing when they-... When people our age are going to take their place in traditional family society, and that's becoming less and less common and popular for people our age, at least in the United States, so it creates this conflict. Jesse: Out of my friends in Vietnam, they-... Again they express this frustration about hearing this question. It's really interesting to hear that women here in the States still experience that same line of questioning. I honestly had no idea. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Episode 145: Theatre Beyond the Stage Jesse Wilson started life as an actor. Born in LA he started acting young and even went to Juilliard. But that traditional “actors” life is not the one he leads now. A one day novelty experience with at-risk teens turned into a two month monologue creation project. He frequently works with correctional facilities through arts rehabilitation programs.  How do you create theatre with non actors? What are the steps to creating a life inspired monologue? What was the end result? In this episode, we take Theatre beyond the stage. Show Notes Ted Talk Monologue Everything Scene Spurs  Emergency Lesson Plans  Episode Transcript Welcome to TFP – The Theatrefolk Podcast – the place to be for Drama teachers, Drama students, and theatre educators everywhere. I'm Lindsay Price, resident playwright for Theatrefolk. Hello! I hope you're well. Thanks for listening. This is Episode 145. You can find any links to this episode in the show notes at theatrefolk.com/episode145 and I think this is one of those episodes that we should just get right to. Suffice it to say we're talking theatre beyond the stag, beyond the entertainment value, beyond working with “actors.” How many of you have to deal with administrators who only see your class as games or fluff? How often have you had to have students or students in your class who are and will always be non-actors? You want them to have the experience; you want to include them and to get them to have a great experience with your classroom – how? We're talking about theatre, real people, real life, all together, holding hands – maybe not. But, anyway, Jesse Wilson is my guest. Let's get to it. LINDSAY: Hello, Jesse! JESSE: Hey, Lindsay! How are you? LINDSAY: Awesome. Tell everybody where you are in the world. JESSE: I'm in an amazing little planet called Colorado Springs in Colorado. LINDSAY: Conveniently enough, Colorado Springs is in Colorado. JESSE: That's right! Born and raised in LA, lived in the west coast pretty much, well, until I was eighteen, and then lived in the east coast and I've navigated my way back and forth between LA and New York and Philadelphia. Somehow, I ended up here and it's going great. LINDSAY: Awesome! So, just start by saying, what's your connection to theatre? JESSE: Well, my connection to theatre probably begins the day I was born. I don't remember ever doing anything that wasn't theatre-related. I grew up in the industry and began acting at a very early age. And so, that's just been who I am and what I've been doing for forever. I'd probably say the biggest, most pivotal experience in the theatre is when I went to Juilliard and that was right after high school and that's what really got the ball rolling. LINDSAY: Awesome. That's a whole other podcast for a whole other day because that would be interesting to, well, you know, we have a lot of listeners who have students who go, “Where should I go to school?” or “What's it like to be…?” you know, that notion of LA has a… stigma is not the right word. Well, it has a preconceived notion of what that's like. JESSE: It does, it certainly does. LINDSAY: That is very interesting that that is your background but we're going to talk about something a little bit different than that. We're going to talk about something that's different than the traditional. When we think about theatre or we think about a life in the theatre, we think about those things – we think about LA and we think about going to a theatre school – but that's not the only thing that you have in your background. JESSE: No, yeah. Well, I have a lot of pain in my background so I don't know if you could put that on a resume but… LINDSAY: Well, I think some – some you really could! JESSE: That would be great if you could, yeah. LINDSAY: “What are your special skills?” JESSE: “I suffered here in this period in my life and I really s...