Podcasts about jesse you

Mogwaa is a Seoul-based DJ, producer and multi-instrumentalist who can seemingly do no wrong. Since his debut EP in 2017, he's developed a stellar track record of releases and live performances that have made him an in-demand name across East Asia and beyond. And he's only just getting started. The South Korean artist's multi-genre palette and hardware expertise have earned him the description of boy wonder from peers and collaborators. His work is awash in bright textures and dreamy moods, whether it's electro-fused techno for Peggy Gou's Gudu Records, limber jungle for Klasse Wrecks or dubby dancehall for Sound Metaphors. At Wonderfruit festival in December, he played a thrilling live set of spacey techno and loopy acid, infusing rich sound design into elastic groove. His stamina and enjoyment of music is tangible—he could probably play all night long and still be raring to go. After learning classical piano, guitar and trumpet in his early years, he taught himself to compose and produce. He's now determined to work with South Korean producers through Walls And Pals, a label he runs alongside Jesse You. Mogwaa's RA Podcast offers a glimpse into his multi-faceted sound. It's full of club-ready heaters, from trippy house to breakbeats, that pack a serious punch. Read more at https://ra.co/podcast/922

In this episode, we discuss pieces of advice that I wish someone would have told me before keeping freshwater aquariums. Keeping fish does not have to be complicated, but if I had learned these lessons earlier, it would have probably saved fish. Many people jump into the hobby without knowing enough information to set themselves up for success. Join us for a conversation about things I wish I knew before keeping fish; learn from our mishaps so you won't make the same mistakes. Thanks for Listening!ScienceGal Aquatics and Jesse You are always invited to check out Sciencegalaquatics.com.

This episode is devoted to how and why we summer tub. Breeding fish outside is super rewarding, and the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Join us for our conversation about summer tubing and breeding fish outside. How we do it, the equipment needed, and the challenges we face, but most importantly, why we recommend you try it.Thanks for Listening!ScienceGal Aquatics- Kerri and Jesse You are always invited to check out Sciencegalaquatics.com.

JESSE YOU 04.04.23 | VISLA FM by VISLA

Welcome to Aquarium Dilemmas. This week's episode is devoted to Betta fish tank mates. For a long time, I believed there were no options compatible with Betta fish and had no choice but to keep them alone. However, this is not entirely true. If you have a smaller nano aquarium or a community aquarium and wish to have Betta fish tank mates but are unsure what to try, this is the episode for you. Join us as we discuss the best betta tank mates' ideas that we have successfully kept together, and we think you should also. Thanks for Listening,ScienceGal Aquatics Kerri and Jesse You are always invited to check out Sciencegalaquatics.com.

In this episode, we discuss the easiest freshwater fish we have kept. These easier-to-care-for freshwater fish are great for beginner fishkeepers, a fantastic choice for community aquariums, and an excellent addition for experts. Over the years of fish keeping, these are the aquarium fish that have the least amount of worry. Join us for a conversation about the easiest freshwater aquarium fish, what makes them easy, and how we keep them. Thanks for Listening. Enjoy!ScienceGal Aquatics Kerri and Jesse  You are always invited to check out Sciencegalaquatics.com.

In this week's episode of Aquarium Dilemmas, we discuss why freshwater aquarium fish are lovely pets. We often talk about issues related to freshwater aquariums and how to solve them but join us on why fish make fantastic pets—a conversation devoted to why you should be a fish keeper. Thank you for Listening. Enjoy!Sciencegal Aquatics- Kerri and Jesse You are always invited to check out Sciencegalaquatics.com.

Billy talks to Jesse Ross, a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant, executive coach, and international speaker who has delivered over 400 speaking engagements at colleges, conferences, corporate and nonprofit companies, with a large number of those being Fortune 500 companies including LinkedIn, General Mills, and the NBA.  Jesse offers trainings, workshops, evaluations, assessments, and strategy development for schools, businesses, and organizations. Jesse has been engaging his audience with his Morning Minute calls-to-action on his Instagram and LinkedIn page since before our world went into civil unrest.  He is here today to talk about his diversity and inclusion work as well as the anti-racist conversations he has with white men and white women each week, which you can sign up for here.  Billy asks Jesse: --You alternate hosting anti-racist conversations with white men and  white women each week. What differences do you hear in those conversations (if any)?--How do you get in front of people who would benefit from engaging in anti-racist dialogue in a way that doesn't activate a fight/flight/fright response from them?  Or is that just simply impossible?--You've mentioned that at times you feel like you're put in a position to answer on behalf of all of Black America during interviews/conversations around race, and my theory on why people do that is because we're oftentimes looking for just one solution to a complex issue without having to dissect the nuances of human behavior because then we can cling to an opinion that suits our narrative.  How do you help people see these nuances during your sessions/conversations?--What are some examples you've seen lately of good-intentioned white people being tone-deaf when it comes to issues within the Black community?--You've talked about “navigating white spaces.  What is that experience like for you and what is that experience like for the people of color you talk to that someone like me might take for granted.--You've talked about asking a few people of a community to get a better understanding if you're unsure about how something might sound so you don't do damage or come off as tone deaf,” so here's my question to you:  we started this podcast to normalize conversations around mental health.  Through our research, the data from the AFSP shows that middle-aged white men have the highest rate of suicide, and white males account for 70% of all suicides.  We  want to be mental health advocates and focus on this demographic because we're members of this demographic.  How would you suggest we package that messaging so that we don't come off as tone deaf?Like what you heard from Jesse Ross?  Contact him using the links above! Thank you for listening to the Mindful Midlife Crisis!Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Topics you want us to cover?Email:  mindfulmidlifecrisis@gmail.comInstagram:  @mindful_midlife_crisisTwitter:  @mindfulmidlife"Like" and "Follow" us on Facebook: The Mindful Midlife Crisis PodcastPlease leave us a 5-Star Review!  Doing so helps other people looking for a podcast like ours find it!Support the show

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.

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: 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 with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today, we're going to be talking about a recent addition to the AWS family: AWS Application Cost Profiler.Tim: But hold on for a second, Jesse, because AWS Application Cost Profiler we can get to; that's rather unremarkable. I really want to talk about how impressed I am with AWS InfiniDash. I've been benchmarking this thing, and it is fan… tastic. It's so good. And we could probably talk about for a while, but suffice to say that I am far more impressed with AWS InfiniDash than I am with AWS Application Cost Profiler.Jesse: You know, that's fair. And I feel like InfiniDash should absolutely get credit where credit is due. I want to make sure that everybody can really understand the full breadth of everything that InfiniDash is able to accomplish. So, I want to make sure that we do get to that; maybe in a future episode, we can touch on that one. But for right now, I have lots of feelings about AWS Application Cost Profiler, and what better place to share those feelings than with two of my favorite people, Amy and Tim, and then all of you listeners who are listening in to this podcast. I can't wait to dive into this. But I think we should probably start with, what is AWS Application Cost Profiler?Amy: It is [unintelligible 00:01:54] in a trench coat.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: Which is the way AWS likes to solve problems sometimes. And in this case, it's talking about separating billing costs by tenants by service, which is certainly a lot of things that people have problems with.Jesse: That is a lot of buzzwords.Amy: A lot of words there.Jesse: Yeah. Looking at the documentation, the sales page, “AWS Application Cost Profiler is a managed service that helps us separate your AWS billing and costs by the tenants of your service.” That has a lot of buzzwords.Tim: Well, to be fair, that's also a majority of the documentation about service.Jesse: Yeah, that is fair. That is a lot of what we saw, and I think we'll dive into that with documentation in a minute. But I do want to call out before we dive into our thoughts on this service—because we did kick the tires on this service and we want to share what our experience was like, but I do want to call out that this problem that AWS Application Cost Profiler is trying to solve. This idea of cost allocation of shared resources, it is a real, valid problem and it is one that is difficult to solve.Amy: And we've had clients that have had this very explicit problem and our findings have been that it's very difficult to accurately splice usage and spend against what's essentially consumption-based metrics—which is how much a user or request is using all the way along your pipeline—if they're not using dedicated resources.Jesse: Yeah, when we talk about cost allocation, generally speaking, we talk about cost allocation from the perspective of tagging resources, broadly speaking, and moving resources into linked accounts and separating spend by linked accounts, or allocating spend by linked accounts. But if you've got a shared compute cluster, a shared database, any kind of shared resources where multiple tenants are using that infrastructure, slapping one tag on it isn't going to solve the issue. Even putting all of those shared resources in a single linked account isn't going to solve that issue. So, the problem of cost allocation for shared resource is real; it is a valid problem. So, let's talk specifically about AWS Application Cost Profiler as a solution for this problem. As I mentioned, we kicked the tires on this solution earlier this week and we have some thoughts to share.Tim: I think one of the main things around this AWS Application Profiler like I said, there's some problems that can be solved there, there's some insights that people really want to gain here, but the problem is people don't want to do a lot more work or rewrite their observability stack to do it. The problem is, that's exactly what AWS Cost Profiler seems to be doing or seems to want you to do. It doesn't get data from, I think it only gets data from certain EC2 services, and it's just, it's doing things that you can already do in other tools to do aggregation. And if I'm going to do all the work to rewrite that stack, to be able to use the Profiler, am I going to want to spend that time doing something else? I mean, that kind of comes to the bottom line about it.Jesse: Yeah, the biggest thing that I ran into, or that I experienced when we were setting up the Cost Profiler, is that documentation basically said, “Okay, configure Cost Profiler and then submit your data.” And [unintelligible 00:05:54] stop, like wait, what? Wait, what do you mean, ‘submit data?' And it said, “Okay, well now that you've got Cost Profiler as a service running, you need to upload all of the data that Cost Profiler is going to profile for you.” It boggles my mind.Tim: And it has to be in this format, and it has to have these specific fields. And so if you're not already emitting data in that format with those fields, now you have to go back and do that. And it's not really solving any problems, but it offers to create more problems.Amy: And also, if you're going to have to go through the work of instrumenting and managing all that data anyway, you could send it anywhere you wanted to. You could send it to your own database to your own visualization. You don't need Profiler after that.Jesse: Yeah, I think that's a really good point, Amy. AWS Cost Profiler assumes that you already have this data somewhere. And if not, it explicitly says—in its documentation it says, to generate reports you need to submit tenant usage data of your software applications that use shared AWS resources. So, it explicitly expects you to already have this data. And if you are going to be looking for a solution that is going to help you allocate the cost of shared resources and you already have this data somewhere else, there are better solutions out there than AWS Application Cost Profiler. As Amy said, you can send that data anywhere. AWS Application Cost Profiler probably isn't going to be the first place that you think of because it probably doesn't have as many features as other solutions.Amy: If you were going to instrument things to that level, and let's say you were using third-party services, you could normalize your own data and build out your own solution, or you can send it to a better data and analytics service. There are more mature solutions out there that require you to do less work.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by ChaosSearch. You could run Elastic Search or Elastic Cloud or Open Search, as they're calling it now, or a self hosted out 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, cyber security. If you're using ElasticSearch consider not running ElasticSearch. They're also available now on the AWS market place, if you prefer not to go direct and have half of whatever you pay them count toward your EDP commitment. Discover what companies like, 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: I feel like I'd missed something, broadly speaking. I get that this is a preview, I get that this is a step on the road for this solution, and I'm hoping that ultimately AWS Application Cost Profiler can automatically pull data from resources. And also, not just from EC2 compute resources, but from other shared services as well. I would love this service to be able to automatically dynamically pull this data from multiple AWS services that I already use. But this just feels like a very minimal first step to me.Tim: And let's be honest; AWS has a history of putting out services before they're ready for primetime, even if they're GA—Jesse: Yeah.Tim: —but this seems so un-useful that I'm not sure how it made it past the six-pager or the press release. It's disappointing for a GA service from AWS.Amy: What would you both like to see, other than it just being… more natively picked up by other services?Tim: I would like to see either a UI for creating the data tables that you're going to need, or a plugin that you can automatically put with those EC2 resources: an agent you can run, or a sidecar, or a collector that you just enable to gather that data automatically. Because right now, it's not really useful at all. What it's doing is basically the same thing you can do in an Excel spreadsheet. And that's being very, very honest.Jesse: Yeah, I think that's a really good point that ultimately, a lot of this data is not streamlined and that's ultimately the thing that is the most frustrating for me right now. It is asking a lot of the customer in terms of engineering time, in terms of design work, in terms of implementation details, and I would love AWS to iterate on this service by providing that dynamically, making it easier to onboard and use this service.Amy: Personally, what I would like is some either use case, or demonstration, or tutorial that shows how to track consumption costs using non-compute resources like Kinesis especially, because you're shoving a lot of things in there and you just need to be able to track these things and have that show up in some sort of visualization that's like Cost Explorer. Or even have that wired directly to Cost Explorer so that you can, from Cost Explorer, drill down to a request and be able to see what it is actually doing, and what it's actually costing. I want a lot of things.Jesse: [laugh]. But honestly, I think that's why we're here, you know? I want to make these services better. I want people to use the services. I want people to be able to allocate costs of shared resources. But it is still a hard problem to solve, and no one solution has quite solved it cleanly and easily yet.You know what? Amy, to get back to your question, that's ultimately what I would love to see, not just specifically with an AWS Application Cost Profiler necessarily, but I would love to see better native tools in AWS to help break out the cost of shared resources, to help break out and measure how tenants are using shared resources in AWS, natively. More so than this solution.Amy: I would love that. It would make so many things so much easier.Jesse: Mm-hm. I'm definitely going to be adding that to my AWS wishlist for a future episode.Tim: How many terabytes is your AWS wishlist right now?Jesse: Oh… it is long. I, unfortunately, have made so many additions to my AWS wishlist that are qualitative things—more so than quantitative things—that just aren't going to happen.Amy: You become that kid at Christmas that, they get onto Santa's lap in the mall, and it's a roller page that just hops off the platform, and just goes down the wall, and all the other kids are staring at you and ready to punch you in the face when you get off. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh]. All right, 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'd be happy to answer that question on a future episode. 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 allocate the costs of shared resources.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.

In this episode I give a quick recap of my interview with Jesse A. Cole Jr. including: - How to find your true purpose in life and why it's important- The 5 pillars of his "Graceful Accountability" framework-  The 3 confidence barriers that cripple most people's progressAnd so much more...  Jesse A. Cole Jr. is the COO (Chief Obedience Officer) of Kingdom Mogul Coaching. He is a 6x author, speaker, coach, husband, and father. Jesse's relatable presence appeals to those who believe there is no separation between their real life and the service they provide.Using his framework of “Graceful Accountability”, he helps his clients discover, build, and monetize their Kingdom Message while showing up in the marketplace with boldness and authenticity.Go to www.kingdommogulcoaching.com connect with Jesse*************************************************************You will never maximize your potential on your own so I'm personally inviting you to come and join me in the private Extraordinary Man Facebook group so you can level up your business and your life. Just Click Here to join the Extraordinary Man private Facebook group. Iron sharpens iron and this is the #1 place for you to connect with me and other like minded men who are on a mission to maximize their potential. My goal is to help you become the man God created you to be in all areas of your life. So come and join us in the Facebook group and upgrade your business and your life.

Jesse A. Cole Jr. is the COO (Chief Obedience Officer) of Kingdom Mogul Coaching. He is a 6x author, speaker, coach, husband, and father. Jesse's relatable presence appeals to those who believe there is no separation between their real life and the service they provide.Using his framework of “Graceful Accountability”, he helps his clients discover, build, and monetize their Kingdom Message while showing up in the marketplace with boldness and authenticity.In this episode, we discuss:- How to find your true purpose in life and why it's important- The 5 pillars of his "Graceful Accountability" framework-  The 3 confidence barriers that cripple most people's progressAnd so much more...  Go to www.kingdommogulcoaching.com connect with Jesse*************************************************************You will never maximize your potential on your own so I'm personally inviting you to come and join me in the private Extraordinary Man Facebook group so you can level up your business and your life. Just Click Here to join the Extraordinary Man private Facebook group. Iron sharpens iron and this is the #1 place for you to connect with me and other like minded men who are on a mission to maximize their potential. My goal is to help you become the man God created you to be in all areas of your life. So come and join us in the Facebook group and upgrade your business and your life.

Links:Unconventional Guide: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/resources/unconventional-guide-to-aws-cost-management/ 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.Pete: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. We’re back again, my name is Pete Cheslock.Jesse: I’m Jesse DeRose. So, happy to be back in the studio after our whirlwind tour of the Unconventional Guide that I feel like we’ve been on for roughly as long as the pandemic’s been going on at this point; probably a little bit less. But lots of really great content there that we were happy to talk about, and I’m happy to be moving on to some other topics.Pete: Yeah, absolutely. And the topics, we actually get to move on to some of our favorite topics, which are answering your questions. And it turns out, Jesse, there’s more than two people that listen to us. There’s a lot of you; there are dozens of you out there, and we love it.Jesse: You like me. You really like me.Pete: So, great. So, great to see. We’ve been getting tons of fantastic questions, a few of which we’re going to answer right now. You can also have your question answered by going over to the lastweekinaws.com/QA and enter in your question there. You can enter in your name, or you can leave it blank, or you could just put something funny there. Anything works. We’re happy to dive in deeper on any particular topic, again, whether it’s about this recent Unconventional Guide series or just something you’re curious about in your day-to-day in your cost management life.Jesse: Today’s questions are really great because they ultimately get at the practical side of all of our recommendations. Because I feel like every single time I subscribe to one of those self-help books or blogs and I read all these really great short, sweet tidbits, I think to myself, “This is perfect. I’ll go apply this to everything in my life.” But then doing the actual work part is so much harder. Where do you even start with that first step once you’ve got the big picture grand idea? So, today we’ve got some really, really great questions, focusing on the best ways to get started on your cloud cost management journey. So, let’s start off with these questions.First question is, “Could you cover some practical approaches to applying some of your Cost Management Guide? A lot of your suggestions sound simple on paper, but in practice, they become quite complicated.” So, true. Absolutely, absolutely a concern. “I’ve had some success pulling in a small group of subject matter experts together for short periods of time focusing on low risk, easy things to do. How have you approached actually doing this? What meetings do you set up? What do you take for notes? How do you document your savings? How do you find new opportunities?” That’s from Brian O. Brian O., That’s a really, really great question.The other one that I want to add to this: “We’re a big AWS shop, and I’ve spent some time inside the AWS beast in the past, and I still struggle with multi-account multi-region data transfer in general, but specifically analyzing cost and usage. There are examples specifically like if data transfer out goes up $25,000 last month, how do you attribute that? How do you know where to apply that? How do you know what ultimately prompted that spend? Love how you work through these types of challenges. What is relatively easy at a single account level gets exponentially more complex with every account and region we function in.” So, true. And that’s from Todd. Thank you, Todd. In both cases, absolutely true.There’s this really great idea of we can give you the really short and sweet things to think about, but taking those first steps for practically applying these ideas is tough, and it needs to scale over time. And not every practice does.Pete: Yeah, these are great questions. I, kind of, am remembering that meme that was around for a while, which was, how to draw an owl. “First, draw two circles, and then, you know, you draw the rest of the owl.”Jesse: Yeah.Pete: And honestly, oftentimes, some of the stuff even that we say, Jesse, feels that way, and it doesn’t intend to come across that way. It’s just, we could bore you all on a multi-hour long recording of some of these topics. I mean, we do this with our clients, and our clients pay for this pleasure [laugh] for us to put them to sleep with our soft tones of the cloud cost management world. But I think the reality is that it is complex and there are probably unlikely to be quick wins in a lot of these places. One thing that we found is honestly, monitoring, visibility, I think all the cool kids are calling it observability now—Jesse: [laugh].Pete: —you know, I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but CloudWatch is actually probably one of the best cloud cost reduction tools that exist out there. There are so many services within AWS that you’re probably using today, that by default, report data to CloudWatch. And those statistics are potentially a huge place to identify resources that are over-provisioned and underused, idle resources, things like that. I can’t tell you how many times that I will go into a client account, and one of the first places I go to is—after Cost Explorer—is probably CloudWatch. So, monitoring spend and monitoring what’s happening there is kind of a great way to get started on that cloud cost idea because you’re getting charged for everything that happens, so knowing what’s happening, and knowing how it’s changing over time is a great way to start understanding and reducing it.Jesse: Yeah. And I think AWS is probably also using some of those CloudWatch metrics in their optimization recommendations that they make within their own optimization tooling. And it’s probably just not clearly defined or clearly outlined for AWS customers to be able to use the same metrics. So, I feel like if my Compute Optimizer could quickly load or link to a graph that showed me low CPU utilization across a number of instances, that’s a really handy way for me to start using more of CloudWatch’s metrics.Pete: Yeah, I think Compute Optimizer is honestly, criminally underused out there. I don’t know why. Then honestly, one of the other complaints is like, “Well, you can’t get memory statistics unless you have a CloudWatch Agent.” Yes. So honestly, install the CloudWatch agent; have it report up, the, like, one or two memory metrics that Compute Optimizer needs to make a recommendation and the cost will more than pay for itself.And now you can even output those statistics to S3 and do some fun programmatic stuff with it. Put those outputs in front of the engineers that own those resources and be like, “Hey, yo. This thing says, change your i3.24xl. Could you move it to something a little bit more useful, like a t3.small?”Jesse: And these are just some practical applications for some of the specific metrics we’re talking about, but this is a practice that you might want to turn into a process, you might want to turn into an ongoing amount of work. And in a lot of cases, we’ve seen this start as one engineer who’s really interested in understanding AWS, really passionate about the bill, maybe isn’t in a leadership or management role so maybe they don’t have a direct business requirement to optimize their spend, but they’re really, really interested in this work and they grow into a role where they are taking on more and more of this work. And that’s not scalable; that engineer is going to get burned out very, very quickly if they have a day-to-day role that is focused in development and doing all of this optimization work, cost cloud management work on the side. We generally recommend at least one dedicated individual who starts building these dashboards, starts looking at some of these metrics, starts these conversations with teams, and ultimately grow that into a full team.Pete: Right. I think that’s the biggest thing that we’re seeing in the industry is actual cloud finance teams coming into existence at companies. It’s such a critical role and it’s sad to see when people are like, “Arg, spend is out of control. We’re doubling year over year on spend and no one really seems to know why.” And honestly, it’s because no one cares about it. You don’t have any ownership on it. And, you know, we see it a lot, right? It’s like, “Well, everyone owns the Amazon bill.” That’s code for, “No one owns the Amazon bill.”Jesse: Yeah.Pete: But these cloud finance teams, and even the term cloud economist, as silly as it is, it’s centered in reality, which is we create financial models to understand spend and we dive into those numbers to make the usage makes sense to folks like CFOs inside of companies. Yeah, there’s a couple of ways that we have seen some of this done at scale. In one case using kind of active monitoring, and actively monitoring the spend based on really granular budgets, and reporting it as such. So, maybe you’re breaking these budgets out to be product-specific, or team specific, or business unit, or things like that, and then basically reaching out to these engineering teams. Because you are actively monitoring the spend on a recurring basis, you can reach out to those teams, when their spend goes over a given threshold that you’ve put in place, or when you, maybe, find some optimization opportunities.You’re probably thinking to yourself, “Wow, I don’t have the time for that.” Yeah, but you need to create the time or you need to create the team for this. The companies that we work with who have a dedicated team around this are the ones that do the best. In some cases, we’ve seen having a Dedicated Cloud finance team causes the bill to actually decrease over time, which, you’re thinking to yourself, “Wow. An Amazon bill that goes down? We so rarely see that.”Even for us, our clients come to us, we help them find optimizations. They’ll make those optimizations, but then they replace that spend with other investments. Usually, it’s new projects and new spend. But actually seeing the bill go down because of a dedicated effort of a team is still, again, amazing to see. The other side is we’ve seen maybe more of a passive monitoring or something around the background of things where you have a cloud platform team that provides abstractions and guardrails to the user.So, you’re not really trying to actively stand in the way of users and what they’re able to do and reaching out to them in an ongoing way, but you’re abstracting away the kind of complexity of the cloud and letting them basically live in a safe space that you are controlling for them. And that’s another way that you can kind of build in some of this cloud financial knowledge where teams can get that visibility into what they’re spending and know, is this too high? Is it going out of a boundary? Is there a number that I need to keep inside of? I think these are important things that level of visibility around cost and that team’s actual charges get people to start thinking, “Well, hold on a second. We’re above budget.” Even though maybe it’s not a real budget, “We’re above a spend by 20%. We need to bring that down.” And you give them the tools they need and the dashboards to effect that change on their own.Jesse: This idea of passive monitoring is really all about making the right thing the easy thing to do. If you, as a member of the cloud platform team or as a member of leadership who cares about cloud spend, wants to make sure that teams are managing their spend in some capacity, maybe not actively directly, but at some level make sure that there are these guide rails in place that keep them within the boundaries of what they’re ultimately able to do, or what you ultimately want them to work on. This makes it a lot easier for them to not spin up an i3 instance that they don’t ultimately need; it makes it a lot easier for them to not deploy resources that are missing tags. Put as many guardrails in place that keep the teams independently able to work within the space that they are building, and developing, and functioning, but ultimately gives them the opportunity to continue being independent and really thrive within whatever work they’re doing.Pete: Yeah, the next thing that we recommend to everyone. And actually, we recommend it before even engaging with The Duckbill Group, you’ll get an onboarding document of things to do, and the thing we always recommend is turn on the Cost and Usage Report. If you’re listening to this and you’re like, “What’s the Cost and Usage Report?” Well, boy are you going to have a fun learning because it is a highly granular usage report of everything that you’ve ever done within Amazon, and it’s extremely powerful. The downside is that it can be hard to navigate; it takes a little time to learn.But go turn it on; the cost is minimal; it’s the cost of storing this data in S3. Preferably when you turn this on, turn it on into Parquet format because it’ll allow you to query it with tools like Athena, or Tableau, or Looker or—God forbid—SageMaker. And this tool, this Cost and Usage Report, lets you dive in at an extremely granular level, down to the resource visibility—per hour, per resource visibility. And it’s something you have to enable, but again, highly recommend it to enable that resource level usage. Because now you can go and find out, well, for SageMaker I’m seeing a growth in spend.Well, which resource is it within SageMaker? You can break that down really granularly. So, Cost and Usage Report is another place that, again, if you’re not using this today, if you don’t have at least a SageMaker dashboard, which costs basically nothing—a couple of dollars a month—pointed at your Cost and Usage Report, you’re missing out on some really great ways to understand the changes in spend over time.Announcer: If your mean time to WTF for a security alert is more than a minute, it’s time to look at Lacework. Lacework will help you get your security act together for everything from compliance service configurations to container app relationships, all without the need for PhDs in AWS to write the rules. If you’re building a secure business on AWS with compliance requirements, you don’t really have time to choose between antivirus or firewall companies to help you secure your stack. That’s why Lacework is built from the ground up for the Cloud: low effort, high visibility, and detection. To learn more, visit lacework.com.Jesse: Another couple of really great options are the AWS Cost Anomaly Detection service and AWS Budgets. Both are free, which is absolutely fantastic. I highly recommend checking them out. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection, once enabled, will actually look for anomalies in your spend across different AWS services, across different cost attribution tags, across different cost categories. There’s a lot of opportunities here for you to see anomalous spend and act on it.This can be shared with teams as soon as the anomaly occurs, through Slack notification or an email, or maybe you get email notifications on a weekly basis, or a monthly basis, or some kind of recurring basis, for all of the anomalies that you saw within a given time period. We recorded an episode about Cost Anomaly Detection a while back; highly recommend checking that episode out. It’s got a lot of really great features and recommendations for getting started.The other one I mentioned is AWS Budgets. Again, if you’re not really sure where to start, try creating some budgets for your teams. Maybe look at the last six months of spend for each team, maybe look at spend across different tags, or team units, or business units, whatever makes the most sense for the way that your organization is set up, and create some budgets for those groups. These budgets could be for specific AWS services if you are a single team running within a single AWS account, it could be as complex as multiple business units across multiple different accounts across different parts of the organization. There’s lots of great opportunities here for you to start to better understand your spend, get better visibility into your cloud spend.Pete: Yeah, absolutely. I think all of those are great tools that can really help you. And, Jesse, I know we’ve talked about this before. Even just monitoring your tagging, not like, “Oh, are we tagging 50% of our resources?” But you want to monitor for your untagged by spend. So, if 95% of your spend is tagged, you’re crushing it. That’s amazing. But that may only be 50% of your things.So, I guess, care less about how many of your resources are tagged—because some of them just can’t be tagged, or are tagged in a painful way—but focus more on the money aspect of it. And that will lead you into the ability to start creating some governance strategies. And that term governance, it just—Jesse: Oof.Pete: —makes me feel gross. Yeah. Oh god, terrible word. But the [laugh] sad state of the world is, that’s what most companies we talk to need; they just don’t have it. When the companies that we talk to who are like, “Our spend is going up, and we’re not sure why.” Or, “How do we get our engineers to care about cost savings?” And things like that. You know, having a governance strategy, a way to react to those changes in spend in a, hopefully, automated way, is critical to helping control that spend.Jesse: This really gets to the heart of why is cloud cost management important? It could be important for different reasons for different parts of the organization. Account structure, tagging, all of these different things can be important for different parts of the organization for different reasons. And that’s fine. The important thing is to socialize those reasons why to all the different parts of the company so that everybody understands what’s at stake.Everybody understands how they can collaborate and create these best practices together. This really dives into the idea of behaviors and systems. I know it sounds a little bit not within the vein of engineering work, and finance, and cloud cost management, but what kind of behaviors do you ultimately want to see within your teams? What kind of actions do you want to see your engineers taking? Do you want them to start thinking about cost in all of their architecture discussions?Do you want them to review the budgets that you’ve created for them every month? Every week? During stand-up meetings? What kind of things do you ultimately want to see them doing on a regular basis that maybe they aren’t doing right now, that maybe would ultimately help the company succeed with all of this cloud cost management work that you’re creating? And again, going back to the idea of making the right thing the easy thing to do, how can you improve the existing technical systems that you have within your organization to make the right thing the easy thing to do?How can you change your CI/CD pipelines? How can you change the tools that you’re using for cost visibility, like Looker, or Tableau, or SageMaker, or something else, such that teams can quickly and easily self-service the information that they need to make their decisions to go about their days, go about their work more easily?Pete: So, Jesse, you’re saying that it’s a mixture of software and culture? Kind of sounds like DevOps a little bit, doesn’t it? [laugh].Jesse: Yeah. Yeah, it kind of does.Pete: Yeah, it kind of does. So, you know, I think all of that is to say, it’s hard work, it’s not going to come easy, but how would we get started? Like, when we enter into an engagement with one of our clients, we’re coming in from total outsiders and we’re trying to navigate through a company with complex communication structures, and maybe teams that are entrenched in different ways. How do we get started? Well, we dive in; we start with big numbers, right?What are your top ten places your money goes, just by service? I’ll answer it for you. It’s probably EC2, S3, RDS, and then dealer’s choice for the last ones, maybe data transfer, maybe Lambda, if you’re really weird. And if Lambda is in your top five, you should absolutely give us a call because that should not be the case. [laugh].But start with those big numbers, understand where the money is going. But then go to the next level in. Okay, within EC2, where is your spend going? Or the dastardly EC2 ‘other cost’ category; okay’s the money going? Is it in regional data transfer, which is also what’s called cross-AZ data transfer? Is it in your NAT gateways? Why?That’s the next question. Why is the spend high in that area? You may not be able to understand because it may not be tagged—we find that a lot—but start asking questions. And that’s what we do: We start reaching out to technical folks within the company. We’d say, “Hey, we see you’ve got a high amount of usage on EMR, but they’re all clusters that are running 24/7. They’re not scaling up and down as the jobs are happening. Who knows more about EMR?” And we just start asking questions. And we’re asking them, “Well, are you doing anything on the cost optimization side? Have you tried to do anything cost optimization-wise to reduce it, and you haven’t been able to? How does this infrastructure scale? Does it scale linearly with the number of users? Does it scale in a different way? Who are the consumers?”And then you kind of even go another level down to see, do you find anything that just looks odd? I saw on one account for a client we were working with, VPC costs were just extremely high, much higher than I’ve ever seen before. What was interesting is that the cost was not data-transfer related; it was the pure number of endpoints that they had created that that cost far outweighed any other costs to data transfer; there was just a piece of technical debt that they were aware of, but the structure of their multi-accounts, they just couldn’t do anything about it. But again, you’re looking for things like that. And you know that you are doing a good job if, essentially, you can get to the end of this process—which could take months and it could take years depending on your scale—is if you can answer this question that if your customers, or users, or consumers of the applications on your cloud service if they increased by 200%, 500%, 1,000%. What would happen to your cloud spend? How would it change? That’s the end game you’re trying to get to. That’s the unit economics, the unit economic model and forecasting, and now you’re a superhero because now you can answer that question that not a lot of people are able to answer with their cloud usage.Jesse: I also want to add that, as you’re asking questions, you’re going to find teams that specifically will tell you, “We created this infrastructure in this way because security told us to,” or, “Because our business requirements say that we have an SLA that means we need to keep data for this amount of time at this level of availability.” And that’s totally fine. That doesn’t mean that you need to necessarily change those requirements. But now you might have a dollar amount for those business decisions. Now, you might ultimately be able to say, okay, our product SLA may say that we need to keep data for 90 days, but keeping data for 90 days, that business decision is costing us hundreds of thousands of dollars every month because of the sheer volume of data that we now have to keep. Is that something that we ultimately are okay with? And are we okay spending that much money every month to keep this business decision, or do we need to revisit that business decision? And that’s only something that you and your teams can decide for yourselves.Pete: Awesome. These are great questions. You could also send us a question lastweekinaws.com/QA. We would love to spend some time diving into it and just helping you out and helping you get through your day. That’s what we’re here for.If you 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 review on your podcast platform of choice, and tell us what is your favorite EC2 instance to turn off for your engineers.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: Thanks, everyone.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Links: Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/resources/unconventional-guide-to-aws-cost-management/ Migrate from Oracle to Amazon Aurora: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/migrate-oracle-to-amazon-aurora/ 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.Pete: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I am Pete Cheslock.Jesse: I’m Jesse DeRose.Pete: We’re coming at you again with some more listener questions from the Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management. I’m excited. People are listening to us, Jesse.Jesse: This is fantastic. I’m really excited that we have one fan. I’ve always wanted one fan.Pete: Well, two fans now. Maybe even more because we keep getting questions. And you can also be one of our Friends of the Pod by going to lastweekinaws.com/QA. And you can give us some feedback, you can give us a question and, like, will totally answer it because we like Friends of the Pod.Jesse: We may or may not enter you into a raffle to get a Members Only jacket that’s branded with ‘Friends with the Pod.’Pete: We should get some pins made, maybe.Jesse: Ohh…Pete: I think that's a good idea.Jesse: Yeah.Pete: So, what are we answering today, or attempting to answer for our listener, Jesse?Jesse: So today, we’ve got a really great question from [Godwin 00:01:20]. Thank you, Godwin, Godwin writes, “I truly believe that the system that I support is, like, a data hoarder. We do a lot of data ingestion, we recently did a lift-and-shift of the system to AWS, we use an Oracle database. The question is, how do I segregate the data and start thinking about moving it out of traditional relational databases and into other types of databases? Presently, our method is all types of data goes into a quote-unquote, ‘all-purpose database,’ and the database is growing quite fast. Where should I get started?”Pete: Well, I just want to commend you for a lift-and-shift into Amazon. That’s a Herculean feat, no matter what you’re lifting and shifting over. Hopefully, you have maybe started to decommission those original data centers and you don’t just have more data in twice as many locations.Jesse: [laugh]. But I also want to call out well done for thinking about not just the lift-and-shift, but the next step. I feel like that’s the thing that a lot of people forget about. They think about the lift-and-shift, and then they go, “Awesome. We’re hybrid. We’re in AWS, now. We’re in our data center. We’re good. Case closed.” And they forget that there’s a lot more work to do to modernize all those workloads in AWS, once you’ve lifted and shifted. And this is part of that conversation.Pete: Yeah, that’s a really good point because I know we’ve talked about this in the past, the lift-and-shift shot clock: when you don’t start migrating, start modernizing those applications to take advantage of things that are more cloud-native, the technical debt is really going to start piling up, and the folks that are going to manage that are going to get more burnt out, and it really is going to end poorly. So, the fact you’re starting to think about this now is a great thing. Also, what is available to you now that you’re on AWS is huge compared to a traditional data center.Jesse: Yeah.Pete: And that’s not just talking about the—I don’t even know if I’ve ever counted how many different databases exist on Amazon. I mean, they have a database for, at this point, every type of data. I mean, is there a type of data that they’re going to create, just so that they can create a database to put it into?Jesse: Wouldn’t surprise me at this point.Pete: They’ll find a way [laugh] to come up with that charge on your bill. But when it comes to Oracle, specifically Oracle databases, there’s obviously a big problem in not only the cost of the engine, running the database on a RDS or something to that effect, but you have licensing costs that are added into it as well. Maybe you have a bring-your-own-license or maybe you’re just using the off-the-shelf, but the off-the-shelf, kind of, ‘retail on-demand pricing’ RDS—I’m using air quotes for all these things, but you can’t see that—they will just have the licensing costs baked in as well. So, you’re paying for it—kind of—either way.Jesse: And I think this is something also to think about that we’ll dive into in a minute, but one of the things that a lot of people forget about when they move into AWS says that you’re not just paying for data sitting on a piece of hardware in a data center that’s depreciating, now. You’re paying for storage, you’re paying for I/O costs, you’re paying for data transfer, to Pete’s point, you’re also paying for some of the license as well, potentially. So, there’s lots of different costs associated with keeping an Oracle Database running in AWS. So, that’s actually probably the best place to start thinking about this next step about where to get started. Think about the usage patterns of your data.And this may be something that you need to involve engineering, maybe involve product for if they’re part of these conversations for storage of your product or your feature sets. Think about what are the usage patterns of your data?Pete: Yeah, exactly. Now, you may say to yourself, “Well, we’re on Oracle”—and I’m sure people listening are like, “Well, that’s your problem. You should just move off of Oracle.” And since you can’t go back in time and undo that decision—and the reality is, it probably was a good decision at the time. There’s a lot of businesses, including Amazon, who ran all of their systems on Oracle.And then migrated off of them. Understanding the usage patterns, what type of data is going into Oracle, I think is a big one. Because if you can understand the access patterns of the types of data that are going in, that can help you start peeling off where that data should go. Now, let’s say you’re just pushing all new data created. And we don’t even know what your data is, so we’re going to take some wild assumptions here on what you could possibly do—but more so just giving you homework, really—thinking about the type of data going in, right?If you’re just—“I’m pushing all of my data into this database because someday we might need to query it.” That’s actually a situation where you really want to start thinking of leveraging more of a data warehouse-style approach to it, where you have a large amount of data being created, you don’t know if you’re going to need to query it in the future, but you might want to glean some value out of that. Using S3, which is now available to you outside of your data center world, is going to be super valuable to just very cheaply shove data into S3, to be able to go back in later time. And then you can use things like Athena to ad hoc query that data, or leverage a lot of the ingestion services that exist to suck that data into other databases. But thinking about what’s being created, when it is going into places is a big first step to start understanding, well, how quickly does this data need to come back?Can the query be measured in many seconds? Can it be done ad hoc, like in Athena? Does it need to be measured in milliseconds? What’s the replication that needs to happen? Is this very valuable data that we need to have multiple backups on?Is it queried more than it’s created? Maybe you need to have multiple replica reader databases that are there. So, all these types of things of really understanding just what’s there to begin with, and it’s probably going to be in talking to a lot of engineering teams.Jesse: Yeah, you can think about this project in the same way that you might move from a monolith to a microservice architecture. So, if you’re moving from a monolith to a microservice architecture, you might start peeling away pieces of the monolith, one at a time. Pieces that can easily be turned into microservices that stand on their own within the cloud, even if they’re running on the same underlying infrastructure as the monolith itself within AWS. And then, as you can pull those pieces away, then start thinking about does this need to be in a relational database? Does this need to have the same amount of uptime and availability as the resources that are sitting in my Oracle Database right now?All those things that Pete just mentioned, start thinking about all of those components to figure out where best to pull off the individual components of data, and ultimately put them in different places within AWS. And to be clear, there’s lots of great guides on the internet that talk about moving from your Oracle database into, gosh, just about any database of choice. AWS even has specific instructions for this, and we’ll throw a link in the [show notes 00:09:02].They really, really want you to move this data to RDS Aurora. They go through painstaking detail to talk about using the AWS schema conversion tool to convert your schema over; they talk about the AWS database migration service to migrate the data over, and then they talk about performing post-migration activities such as running SQL queries for validating the object types, object count, things like that. I think that a lot of folks actually don’t know that the database migration service exists, and it’s something worth calling out as a really powerful tool.Pete: Yeah, the Amazon DMS service is honestly I think, a super-underrated service that people just don’t know about. It has the ability to replicate data from both on-premises databases to Amazon databases but also databases already running on Amazon. You could replicate from a database running on EC2 into Aurora. You could replicate that into S3—you know, replicate data into S3 that way, bringing things into sync—replicate that data into S3, and then maybe use it for other purposes. It can replicate data from DocumentDB into other sources.So, they’re clearly doing a big investment in there. And to Jesse’s point, yeah, Amazon really wants this data. So, talk to your account manager as you’re testing out some of these services. Do a small proof of concept, maybe, to see how well it works, if you can understand the queries, or you can point your application over at an Aurora database with some of this data migrated in; that’s a great way to understand how well this could work for your organization. But as Jesse mentioned, they do want that data in Aurora.So, if it turns out that you’re looking at your—you know, migrate some data in there, and it’s starting to work, and you’re kind of getting a feel for the engineering effort to migrate there, stop. Talk to your account manager before you spend any more money on Aurora because it’s very likely that they can put together a program—if a program doesn’t already exist—to incentivize you to move that data over; they can give you subject matter expertise; they can provide you credits to help you migrate that data over. Don’t feel like you have to do this on your own. You have an account team; you should definitely reach out to them, and they will provide you a lot of help to get that data in there. They’ve done it for many of their other clients, and they’re happy to do it for you because they know that, long term, when you move that data to Aurora, it’s going to be very sticky in Aurora.You’re probably not going to move off of there. It’s a long game for them; that’s how they play it. So, check out those services; that could be a really great way to help you get rid of your Oracle addiction.Jesse: Yeah, and if you’re able to, as we talked about earlier, if you’re able to identify workloads that don’t need to run in a relational database, or don’t need to run in, maybe, a database at all, for that matter, stick that data in S3. Call it a day. Put them on lifecycle management policies or different storage tiers, and use Athena for ad hoc queries, or maybe Redshift if you’re doing more data warehouse-style tasks. But if that data doesn’t need to live in a relational database, there are many cheaper options for that data.Pete: Exactly. But one last point I will make is don’t shove it into MongoDB just because you want to have schema-less, or—Jesse: Please.Pete: —think about what you’re going to use it for, think about what the data access patterns because there is a right place for your data. Don’t just jump into no-SQL just ‘cause because you’ll probably end up with a bigger problem. In the long run.Corey: If your mean time to WTF for a security alert is more than a minute, it's time to look at Lacework. Lacework will help you get your security act together for everything from compliance service configurations to container app relationships, all without the need for PhDs in AWS to write the rules. If you're building a secure business on AWS with compliance requirements, you don't really have time to choose between antivirus or firewall companies to help you secure your stack. That's why Lacework is built from the ground up for the Cloud: low effort, high visibility and detection. To learn more, visit lacework.com.Pete: So Jesse, I’m looking at our list of questions. And it turns out, we have another question.Jesse: Ohh.Pete: Two questions came in.Jesse: You like me, you really like me!Pete: It’s so great. Again, you can also send us a question, lastweekinaws.com/QA. You can go there, drop in a question and feel free to put your name. Or not; you can be anonymous, it’s totally fine. We’ll happily answer your question either way. So Jesse, who is our next question from? What is this one about?Jesse: This one’s from [Joseph 00:13:19]. They write in, “Hey, folks. Love the show. Longtime listener, first-time caller.” Thank you. “I would love to know how people manage their costs in AWS Batch. Jobs themselves can’t be tagged for cost allocation, which makes things a bit complicated.” Lord Almighty, yes, it does. “How best should I see if the jobs are right-sized? Are they over-provisioned in terms of memory or compute? What’s the best way to see if EC2 is my better choice, versus Fargate, versus other options? How can I tell if the batch-managed cluster itself is under-utilized?”Pete: Oof. This is a loaded question with a lot of variables.Jesse: Yeah. And so we’re going to break it down because there’s definitely a couple questions here. But I want to start off with what AWS Batch is, just really quick to make sure everybody’s on the same page here. AWS Batch, effectively, is a managed service in AWS that schedules it and runs your batch computing jobs on top of AWS compute resources. Effectively, it does a lot of the heavy lifting configuration for you so you can just focus on analyzing the results of those queries.Pete: Yeah, exactly. And Batch supports a really wide variety of tooling that can operate this, and that’s why it’s hard for us to give, specifically, how you might optimize this, but I think some of the optimizations actually mirror a lot of the optimizations we’ve done with optimizing EMR clusters and things of that nature, where you’re running these distributed jobs. And you want to make sure that if you’re running straight off of EC2 instances, then you want to make sure that they are essentially maxed out. If the CPU is anything less than 100% for an on-demand instance, then there’s wasted, or there’s opportunity for improvement. And so making sure that your jobs are sized appropriately and balancing out memory and CPU so that, effectively, you’re using all of the memory and all of the CPU, that’s a real basic first step.But honestly, a lot of folks kind of miss out on that. They just kind of run a job and go off and do their own thing. They never really go back and look at those graphs. You can go to CloudWatch, they’re all going to be there for you.Jesse: Yeah. And to this point, there’s always an opportunity to make these workloads more ephemeral. If you have the opportunity to make it more ephemeral, please, please, please, please, absolutely do so. Unless your batch job needs to run 24/7. We’ve seen that in a few cases where they have, essentially, clusters that are running 24/7, but they’re not actually utilized regularly; the workloads are only scheduled for a short amount of time.So, if you don’t need those batch jobs running 24/7, please, by all means, move to more ephemeral resources, like Fargate. Fargate on Spot, Spot Instances in general, or even Lambda, which AWS Batch now supports as well.Pete: Yeah, it has some step function support, which is pretty interesting. Yeah, this is a great opportunity to aggressively—aggressively—leverage Spots, if you’re not currently today. The reality is that check out Fargate on Spot if you don’t need, like, a custom operating system, you don’t need a custom EBS volume size. If you do, then EC2 on Spot is probably the best option that you really have. But really do not want to be running anything on on-demand instances. Even on-demand instances with a really good savings plan, you’re still leaving money on the table because Spot Instances are going to be a lot cheaper than even the best savings plan that’s out there.Jesse: And I think that’s a good point, too, Pete, which is if you do need to run these workloads on-demand, 24/7, think about if you can get away with using Spot Instances. If you can’t get away with using Spot Instances, at least purchase a savings plan if you don’t do anything else. If you take nothing else away from this, at least make sure that you have some kind of savings plan in place for these resources so that you’re not paying on-demand costs 24/7. But in most cases, you can likely make them more ephemeral, which is going to save you a lot more money in the long run.Pete: Yeah, exactly. That’s the name of the game. I mean, when we talk to folks on Amazon, the more ephemeral you can make your application—the more you can have it handle interruption—the less expensive it will be to operate. And that goes from everywhere from Spot Instances and how they’re priced, right? If you just get a normal Spot Instance, it will have a really aggressive discount on it if you need zero time in advance before interruption.So, if that instance can just go in at any second, then you’ll get the best discount on that Spot Instance. But if your app needs a little time, or runs for a defined period of time—let’s say your app runs for one hour—you can get a defined duration Spot of one hour, you’ll get a great discount still and you’ll only pay for however long you use it, but you will get that resource for one whole hour, and then you’ll lose it. If that’s still too aggressive, there’s configurable options up to six hours. Again, less discount, but more stability in that resource. So, that’s the trade-off you make when you move over to Spot Instances.Jesse: So, I also want to make sure that we get to the second part of this question, which is about attributing cost to your AWS Batch workloads. According to the AWS Batch documentation, you can tag AWS Batch compute environments, jobs, job definitions, and job queues, but you can’t propagate those tags to the underlying resources that actually run those jobs. Which to me, kind of just defeats the point.Pete: Yeah. [sigh]. Hashtag AWS wishlist here. You know, again, continuing to expand out tagging support for things that don’t support it. I know we’ve seen kind of weird inconsistencies, and just even, like, tagging ECS jobs and where you have to tag them for they’re to apply.So, I know it’s a hard problem, but obviously, it’s something that should be continually worked out on because, yeah, if you’re trying to attribute these costs, you’re left with the only option to run them in separate Amazon accounts, which solves this problem, but again, depending on your organization, could increase just the management overhead of those. But that is the ultimate way. I mean, that is the one way to ensure 100% of costs are encapsulated to a service is to have them run in a dedicated account. The downside being is that if you have a series of different jobs running across a different, maybe, business units, then obviously that’s going to break down super quick.Jesse: Yeah, and it’s also worth calling out that if there’s any batch jobs that need to send data to different places—maybe the batch job belongs to product A, but it needs to send data to product B—there’s going to be some amount of data transfer either across regionally or across accounts in order to share that data, depending on how your organization, how your products are set up. So, keep in mind that there are potentially some minor charges that may appear with this, but ultimately, if you’re talking about the best ways to really attribute costs for your AWS Batch workloads, linked accounts is the way to go.Pete: Yeah. If you need attribution down to the penny—some of our clients absolutely do. For invoicing purposes, they need attribution for business unit down to the penny. And if you’re an organization that needs that, then the only way to get that, effectively, is segmented accounts. So, keep that in mind.Again, until Amazon comes out with the ability to get a little bit more flexible tagging, but also, too, feel free to yell at your account manager—I mean, ask them nicely. They are people, too. But, you know, let them know that you want this. Amazon builds what the customers want, and if you don’t tell them that you want it, they’re not going to prioritize it. I’m not saying if you tell them, you’re going to get it in a couple of months, but you’re never going to get it if you don’t say anything. So, definitely let people know when there’s something that doesn’t work the way you expect it to.Jesse: Absolutely.Pete: Awesome. Wow. Two questions. I feel it’s like Christmas. Except—Jesse: [laugh].Pete: —it’s Christmas in almost springtime. It’s great. Well, again, you, too, can join us by being a Friend of the Pod, which Jesse really loves that one for some reason. [laugh].Jesse: Yeah. Don’t know why, but it’s going to be stuck in my brain.Pete: Exactly. You too can be a Friend of the Pod by going to lastweekinaws.com/QA and you can send us a question. We would love to spend some time in a future episode, answering them for you.If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review. Give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us why you want to be a Friend of the Pod. Thank you.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.

On this episode of the Quiet Light podcast, we have the opportunity to speak with Jesse Kaufman, the CEO and founder of Shipping Tree. Though Amazon sellers often use that company's fulfillment services, some people engage a third party. 3PL's can do everything from start to finish or they can merely be used as a prep center. Regardless of how you use a 3PL, there are ways to optimize your expenses. Tune in to hear our discussion about how to negotiate with a 3PL.   Topics: The typical Shipping Tree client. Deciphering quotes from 3PLs. The best integration models for 3PLs. How using a 3PL can save money. Commerce zones. Different types of Amazon seller accounts.   Resources: Shipping Tree Jesse@shippingtree.co Quiet Light Podcast@quietlightbrokerage.com   Transcription: Mark: So within the world of Amazon FBA, a lot of sellers rely on Amazon's fulfillment services and simply ship all the product over there but there are other sellers who utilize a 3PL either to fulfill the product and do everything from beginning to end and there are also those that use it just as a prep center before sending it off to Amazon in a way to try and save on some of the fees. And I think we can all agree Amazon's fees for fulfillment are pretty high compared with a lot of other solutions out there. Joe, I know you had somebody on who owns a 3PL and you guys talked a lot about how to negotiate the rates with that 3PL and how you can optimize some of your expenses by using a 3PL as opposed to just sending everything carte blanche over to Amazon. Joe: Yeah, these are my favorite kind of podcast guests when they go on and they talk about everything that they do and give it all away for free on podcasts like this. He's not pitching their services. He's just like, if you're negotiating with a 3PL look for this, don't do this, throw that contract away, if you have recurring revenue shipments, this is how you save on your shipping cost. If you have a 3PL located in Southern California, here's the benefit; monetary benefit by way of example of shipping from Ohio and things of that nature. It was fascinating. We've had a lot of people over the years say hey can you recommend any 3PLs and that was the point of having this person on knowing that he would give it all away for free. I think it's going to be very helpful for those that currently have 3PL, very helpful for those that ship exclusively through FBA because it's convenient, and some of the benefits of having a 3PL for kitting, for doing so fulfill Prime to avoid what happened during the pandemic where there were delays from Amazon shipping because of shipping medical supplies first; all sorts of different things that I think will really help the current e-commerce business owners and those that want to buy improve their bottom line and improve their customer experience as well. Mark: Yeah, I think this is all about control, right? I think the pandemic is a great example. Those that were 100% reliant on Amazon often saw; many of those guys saw delays and disruptions in their supply chains and also their ability to fulfill orders. Those that were using 3PLs didn't because they had that outlet for everything. So this is an interesting topic and this is where a lot of ROI is made in acquisitions, is learning how to optimize the expense profile and especially on that Amazon side so I'm excited for this one. Joe: Me too and just as a teaser it gives away one example where I, based upon the numbers you gave me, probably added a million dollars in value to the company. Obviously a very large company but if it adds $10,000 or $100,000 in value just by doing little things that make a difference, it really adds up to the overall value so let's go listen. Joe: Hey folks Joe Valley here from Quiet Light Brokerage and Quiet Light Podcast. Thanks for joining us again. Today we're going to talk about 3PLs, how to save money on shipping, all sorts of different things in that regard. And today, we've got Jesse Kaufman from Shipping Tree. Jesse, welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. Jesse: Thanks for having me. Joe: Good to have you here. As I said earlier, we don't do fancy introductions, so I don't have a big bio on you. No one knows you better than you so why don't you tell everybody listening who you are and what you do? Jesse: Yes, my name is Jesse and I'm the CEO and founder of Shipping Tree. A 3PL based in Los Angeles with facilities across the country. I'm Canadian and got my start in the fashion distribution business and quickly realized that the 3PL world wasn't where it should be, at least in North America, and that's why started Shipping Tree. Joe: And is your typical client an e-commerce client with lots of different SKUs like from your fashion background? Jesse: Yes, our typical client now are e-commerce direct to consumer-focused companies in the CPG supplement cosmetics space, actually. Joe: Wow. Okay, so lots of people picking, packing, and shipping. That's great. Jesse: Yeah. Joe: Okay, so let's jump into it. A lot of people; I've worked with 3PLs myself, I had a nutritional supplement company that I sold a decade ago if you can believe that; almost a decade ago, before I joined the Quiet Light team and I don't know if I negotiated the greatest deal with my 3PL because he was a friend of mine. Jesse: Impossible, yeah. Joe: We did recurring revenue shipments and the owner was a friend of mine and because of that probably either I got an amazing deal or I got a terrible deal; probably nothing in between. Jesse: You'll never know. Joe: I'll never know. No. And I was just going to go on the craziest side there but people do not need to hear that history. Let's talk about, first and foremost, what's the best approach to reaching out to a 3PL and not just simply accepting the boilerplate prices that you give or should they or is there a way that you can professionally negotiate so it's a really healthy deal for both parties? Jesse: Yeah, totally. So, I think most important in your 3PL search is kind of put as many feelers out there as you can, get your internal data together, and organize before you put out those feelers so you could give those prospective 3PLs the data they need to give you pricing quickly. Joe: What kind of data are we talking about? Jesse: It's really like shipment data. So like a pretty basic Shopify export of your orders that includes the dimensions and the units in the order. That should give any 3PL the ability to quote you really accurately. Then once you start getting those quotes back right away, it'll be pretty evident. Some 3PLs their quotes will have 30 line items. Others like mine and some of our closer competitors will have more in the neighborhood of three to five line items. So right away, all those 3PLs with 30 line items of potential charges throw those proposals in the garbage. There's no use even negotiating with those guys. The other ones with simple line items, three to five, maybe up to 10, those are the ones you want to focus on because, in my opinion, those are the ones that have the most merchant focused approach to the way they do business. And then areas where you can negotiate with 3PLs, in my experience, would be the initial processing fee on an order. So typically speaking, the most labor-intensive and expensive part of the work that we do are the individual picks. So 3PLs are rarely going to have margins to negotiate on the pick fees for your orders. Joe: And the pick is literally someone walking around and picking your product off the shelf and putting it on the proper conveyor belt to have the label put on. Jesse: Exactly. Joe: Okay. Jesse: Yeah, so you want to negotiate on the larger items on that list. So things like storage, processing fees, get rid of any minimums and stuff and kind of like frame your business as one that's even if you're just starting, it's ready to scale you're a smart team, you're going to scale it quickly, get rid of those minimums, focus on things like storage, processing, packaging, and you could kind of dwindle those down a little bit. Joe: Are there startup fees in most cases with 3PLs that I have to pay you $5,000 for the pleasure of doing business with you and that's just the setup fee and then it's going to be a monthly pack and ship fee? Jesse: If that comes across your desk, throw it in the garbage. Joe: Just throw it in the trash, okay. Jesse: Yeah, throw it in the trash. If you have really complex integration needs like an ERP system like NetSuite and a ton of different marketplaces, then there might be; you could expect some sort of integration fee and tech fees for that. But if you're just running like run of the mill, Amazon, Shopify, Walmart.com, maybe an accounting system; like all of that should be out of the box with the 3PL that you work with. Joe: Can you just dumb down what an integration fee is? Jesse: Yeah, so you're going to want your 3PL to plugin with whatever systems are running your business on the shopping cart side or the marketplace side of things and so you that you don't leak your sales channel. You want the 3PL to plug into there so data flows back automatically, your team has very little to do, that really is going to take the weight of shipping and fulfillment off your plate. And some companies charge for these integrations really like a setup fee, which isn't right because for Shopify, for example, we've built the integration already. We enter a couple of lines of code and the integration is done in five to 10 minutes so why would we charge you $500 for that? It's just not right. Joe: Good markup, $500 for five minutes of work. I like that. Jesse: I do like that markup, but we don't do it. Joe: Not if you want to keep the customer long term, I suppose, right? Jesse: Yeah. So, we've built out; and you want to find a 3PL that owns their tech stack. So what I mean is they kind of own their platform and they own the integrations. So we've built out these integrations so we've done the work upfront already and it's ready so we could just deploy it for the merchant. Joe: That makes a lot of sense because that's probably where the $500 charge comes from, is because they're using somebody else's software that somebody else is charging them and they're passing it on to the product owner. Jesse: Exactly, yeah. Joe: Is there a particular; I know that within Shopify, within the different websites platforms, there are different integrations for processing shipping. Is there a favorite integration that most 3PLs are comfortable with? And I cannot think for the life of me of a single one of them right now and I've used them before in the past but is there any particular integration that people like in terms of that processing of the order and having it ready to be shipped just to be shared with a 3PL or am I a little off track here? Jesse: A little off track. A little, so that's like if you just had a regular Shopify store, you would actually install the Shipping Tree app in your Shopify store. Joe: Okay, so you've got your app that you would install. Jesse: Yeah. Joe: Okay. Jesse: But you're talking about a product like Ship Station. Joe: Yes, that's the one I was trying to think of. Thank you. All right. Jesse: So Ship Station is great. We integrate with them also. Ship Station is great if you're selling on a ton of marketplaces like Etsy, Groupon; like if you're really marketplace heavy grand Ship Station is great because it brings all that in one place and then that's just one integration for us to run and manage. Joe: Okay, for people that are selling on Amazon is the largest marketplace and some of their own Shopify sales as well is there a benefit to using a 3PL to store inventory before shipping it off to Amazon, and do you provide those types of services? Jesse: Yeah, totally. So we do that a lot for our customers. We kind of run in parallel to Amazon like the verticals and the brands we serve and everyone needs to work with Amazon these days especially in CPG and cosmetics and supplements and stuff. So, yeah, our storage rates are generally cheaper than Amazon and more flexible. Joe: You can probably do kitting that  Amazon's not doing, right? Jesse: Yeah, so we could help prep your stuff to go to Amazon. So if your factory isn't putting the Amazon FNSKU barcodes on the boxes we could do all that work for you. Joe: And you happen to be in Southern California so if it's coming off a boat it just have to go very far, which is kind of a strategic location, I would imagine. Jesse: Exactly, yeah. Joe: I had a guy named Rocky Cliburn on the podcast in the last, I don't know, maybe it was a year ago and Rocky was just this great buyer in his 60s. He was a general manager of car dealerships, if you can imagine, for his entire life and then he bought a jewelry business; an e-commerce jewelry business from Amanda here on the team. And Rocky and his daughter ran the business and within months improved the margins by like $8,000 to $10,000 a month by working with their fulfillment center in terms of shipping rates and packaging and things of that nature. You and I chatted prerecording here about saving on postage in terms of improving the value of a business and so you understand we always talk about the value of a business and it's really based upon profit, which is actually called seller's discretionary earnings. It's not about topline revenue. It's about what you get to keep. And a lot of folks don't focus on the 3PL potential savings as they prepare an eventual exit of their business. So how do you end up saving thousands of dollars on your shipping and postage like Rocky did if you're working with a 3PL, what kind of recommendations have you implemented for clients of yours? Jesse: That's a great point; a great question. So there's two things there. One is choosing the right shipping methods and another is the packaging that you're choosing. So I'll start with the packaging and for example, a jewelry company they might have one standard box size for all their orders just to they think it's a good solution that's like a catch-all. Every order ships in the same box so it either might be too big or it might be too small. If you optimize that, especially for smaller weight items, every ounce is almost 20 cents with the Postal Service. So if you could figure out a way to ship in a smaller box, maybe a more efficiently sized box, even though you think it might be it's a bigger inconvenience to have to source two different sized boxes or whatever it may be, you're going to knock 5%, 10% off your postage just right there optimizing for box size especially for orders under a pound. Joe: How much do boxes really weigh I mean if we're talking about the size of a shoebox? Jesse: So a shoebox is quite like half; almost half a pound, I would say. Joe: Okay, so if you can save a couple of ounces, you might be saving $400 or $500 a month if you're shipping a thousand orders a month or something like that. Jesse: Easy, yeah. Joe: Back in the day, when I was doing what most folks do that are listening, we had a fulfillment center up in Maine, which is just crazy because I was shipping all over the country but that's where I was from at the time. But they had a subcarrier. It wasn't the US Postal Service. They had somebody else that was sort of a cheaper version of that that would take it to the US Postal Service and then the US Postal Service would deliver it for that last mile or so. I forget what that's called but is that something that a lot of 3PLs can utilize and how do you find out about it if you're working with a 3PL now? Jesse: Yeah, so those are called shipping aggregators or an aggregator service. A lot of the major carriers offer that these days. The FedEx one is called Smart Post, and then there's a DHL product called DHL E-commerce. So those guys would pick up from your 3PL, bring it as close as they can kind of to the customer, then USPS finishes it. So those are good and bad. They're great for saving money. They're bad for making first impressions. Joe: So they take a little longer to ship, right? Jesse: Yeah, exactly because there's more touchpoints. But I think what we spoke about was; like we have a lot of subscription-based companies. Joe: I think we did that. I think that's what we did, is did it on the recurring revenue aspect of it where it didn't need to be there in two days, you could get it in five. Jesse: Exactly. Yeah, so we could set it up. And always look for this in a 3PL to have flexibility with mapping your shipping methods. It's really important that they don't just like put all your orders like this is it, this is what you have to use because we work with all the carriers. We probably have over 100 available methods and we work with our customers to make sure they're using the best ones. So for a subscription-based company, that first-order should go out with like a fairly premium single carrier option like USPS Priority Mail or FedEx Ground or whatever it may be so that is quick and the tracking is seamless. And then once they get into that subscription funnel; the customer, you could set it up programmatically so that instead of the order shipping on the anniversary date, you ship the order like three days in advance and you use one of these slower and cheaper methods. So that way the order is going to arrive within one or two days of the correct window for the subscription renewal, you're going to save easily 30%, 40% on your postage that way, and yeah, everyone is happy. Joe: That could certainly add up, that's for sure. That subcarrier method, is there tracking with it as well or not? Jesse: There is tracking, but it's known to go dark the tracking sometimes. Joe: Okay. Jesse: It's not as reliable as a single carrier because yeah. Joe: Okay, do you have; actually location, does it really matter? As I just said a few minutes ago, my fulfillment center was up in Maine. I was shipping all over the country. Jesse: That might be the worst place, Sanford Fulfillment Center. Joe: Oh really? Okay [INAUDIBLE 00:19:30.4]. Why would that be the worst? Is it just zone wise is the best place inside of the country or is the best place in Southern California where you are? Jesse: Okay, so if you could only choose one fulfillment center or one location, middle of the country is best unless obviously, all your customers are west. Like, if you're a surf brand and all your customers are on the West Coast choose a West Coast 3PL. But if you're just a normal run of the mill brand and you could only have one facility choose something in the middle, that way shipments are never really going to go to the outer edges of the zone map. So if you just Google search a zone map, the country will be split up into kind of columns like a heat map with the further you go, the further the zone and it goes up to nine zones. If you're in the middle of the country, the furthest zone is like six or seven possibly. And so with Maine, the reason why Maine is not so great is New York, historically one of the biggest population centers in terms of e-commerce orders going to that area, that's a zone two or three for Maine. So you're not even getting the benefit of being that close to New York geographically and then everything in L.A. is a zone nine. Joe: Let's talk dollars, though. Jesse: Yeah. Joe: And you've seen this with clients that you've brought in. How much are we talking about? If somebody is; and I know it's hard to quantify, so maybe we're only talking percentages but… Jesse: I could give you an example. Joe: Please. Yeah. Thank you. Jesse: Yeah. So we opened our facility in Ohio last year and we had a customer; one of our better customers, the supplements company, they were shipping everything out of our L.A. warehouse, obviously. Right away they probably spent close to $100,000 a month on postage. Joe: Okay. Jesse: Or they did when we were; they still do it [INAUDIBLE 00:21:34.4]. Right away when we started shipping out of Columbus and Los Angeles; so now you cut it down to furthest the package is going is zone four. Right away they started saving $15,000, $20,000 a month. Joe: Holy cow. Jesse: Not changing anything and the shipping speed… Joe: I hope everybody is listening to this far just because in that situation, $100,000 a month, even if all you spend is $10,000 a month on shipping, you're saving 15% to 20%. Jesse: Yeah. Joe: Go ahead. Jesse: And your customers are getting their orders quicker. Joe: So they're happier too; you're getting no return rates, higher customer satisfaction. Jesse: Yeah. Joe: The value that adds to the company in terms of customer satisfaction is huge but the value in terms of the sellability of the list price of the company for that one spending $100,000 and it drops to $80,000 a month, that's $240,000 of real cash saved on an annual basis. Jesse: Yeah. Joe: The size of that business, I'm going to guess maybe it's at a four-time multiple. They just added nearly a million dollars to the value of their company by saving $240,000 a year. That's that net worth. It's pretty incredible. So as whatever, it's just shipping, I'm going to focus on revenue, just stop focusing on revenue alone and look at some of these other things, because it's just math and logic saves a tremendous amount of money. That's awesome. What other tips and tricks do you have here Jesse? Come on, keep throwing them at us. Jesse: Yeah, so splitting up inventory; that's a big one. So using multiple facilities and find a company that has a few facilities and if you could afford it, there's a lot of fulfillment consultants out there who aren't terribly expensive at all. But it could be a really daunting process for brands going through their whatever they use Excel or the ERP or their inventory systems and be like, how am I going to split up the inventory between two warehouses? I don't know where demand is, all that stuff. There's people out there and software tools out there that could help figure that out for you. Joe: It's not something that a 3PL will do when they've got multiple centers or you'd refer them on to these consultants? Jesse: Yeah, we could do it. For inventory planning, we're building tools for that. It's really complicated to do and to do properly. It's not our core competency. And it's a big responsibility to do that properly. We could totally look at your shipping data and tell you how much you would be saving by using Facility A, Facility B, or them in conjunction. Joe: Okay, so splitting up inventory to the right fulfillment centers you're saving like your client did 15% to 20%. Jesse: Yeah. Joe: Any other sort of immediate thoughts come to mind in terms of somebody that either let's assume that they don't even have a 3PL now what should they; I know obviously you want them to go to ShippingTree.co and work with you but if they're already in a relationship with somebody, how do they improve that relationship and any other tips that you can think of? Jesse: So always think of your 3PL partner not just as another vendor, but really as a partner and part of your business and kind of put yourself in their shoes when it comes to the way you send them inventory, the way you keep them in the loop on sales or promotions you're running. Like really consider them like an outsource or your shipping department that's just outsourced. So if you were doing your fulfillment, you wouldn't run like a flash sale and then call down to the warehouse 20 minutes after the flash sale launch and be like, hey, buddy you have 15,000 orders coming down the pipe. You would tell your people in your own company a few days in advance. So do that with your 3PL, help make their jobs a little easier, send them stuff that's barcoded, clearly divided. We deal with a couple of hundred customers and you could imagine how many different items we have in the warehouse. All our merchants are really passionate, but like, I can't tell the difference between print like bandana print 1 and bandana print 2 you know? Joe: Yeah, we always hear stories of Amazon messing products up. I'm sure it happens in 3PLs as well. It's not you. Jesse: It happens but there's things you could do to mitigate that. Like work with them as a true partner and if you sense any pushback in trying to improve the relationship, I would look elsewhere. Joe: Yeah. Can 3PLs do fulfill by merchant with Amazon Prime? Jesse: Yeah. Joe: And are you in that situation or is it not a 3PL, in general, it's more of the product at the 3PL, how does that work? Jesse: Okay, so fulfilled by merchants we could do no problem. And then there's Seller Fulfilled Prime, which is that is actually on the merchants. They have to get their accounts authorized for Seller Fulfilled Prime. Joe: Even if they're using a 3PL? Jesse: Yeah, so their specific Amazon seller account has to be authorized for Seller Fulfilled Prime. Joe: Is that a daunting task or something? Jesse: Yeah, it's at least 90 days, and yeah. Joe: And what's the benefit to that in your opinion? Jesse: So the benefit there is you get the prime badge on your Amazon listings, you kind of get all the benefits of winning the buy box that you'd get with using FBA but the package could be sent out in your own custom packaging. You control the whole process and generally, it's a little cheaper than Amazon; storage wise and stuff like that. Joe: You still have to abide by the terms of services I would imagine. You still don't own the customer, even though you've got all the customer data minus the phone number, I suppose. Is there any advantage to doing Seller Fulfilled Prime using a 3PL in terms of customer data that you get to keep versus just using FBA? Jesse: I don't think so. It's more like a flexibility piece. Joe: Okay. Jesse: So those sellers that were set up with Seller Fulfilled Prime when COVID hit and FBA stopped allowing shipments in, they didn't skip a beat, they kept their Prime badge, all that stuff. Joe: Yeah, okay. Jesse: It's a little bit more secure. Joe: Having control as opposed to letting Amazon have full control of it, yeah. Okay. This has been great. We're up against the clock here, but this is fantastic stuff. I think that anybody out there listening needs to dig deeper into their expenses on the 3PL side. If all you're doing is fulfilled by Amazon, you might want to look at at least a 3PL like Shipping Tree to do kitting and prepping and getting it shipped off to Amazon so you're not paying exorbitant storage fees at Amazon and then as your offline Amazon sales grow running a Shopify side so on and so forth, I think is great to do. So any last-minute thoughts in terms of other things that people could do to benefit themselves with 3PL negotiations and working with them before we wrap this up? Jesse: No. Just be aware of this. Like I said I think the biggest red flag are those proposals you get back that are like two or three pages long with a ton of line items. That's going to be a headache of a relationship for you to manage. Find someone that keeps it simple for you. It's a complicated process. It's my job to simplify that for our merchant customers and find someone that will do that for you. Joe: I got you. Okay, how do folks reach you and your firm, Jesse? Jesse: If you're going to reach out you could email me directly Jesse@ShippingTree.co or go to our website and fill out the form there. Joe: Awesome. I appreciate your time. We'll look forward to a lot of folks reaching out to you as well. Jesse: Cool. Thanks, man. Take it easy.

Andrew and Jesse connect on this weeks episode to discuss their connect to Santeria and the Orishas. We see how these traditions influence us, our world, and our magick. If you're enjoying the podcast so far why not check out our Patreon. For just a few dollars an episode you'll get special perks and Patreon only episodes! You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. Check out Jesse's store "Wolf and Goat" here, his podcast here, and his theatre work here.  Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew ANDREW: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Hermit's Lamp podcast. I'm here today with Jesse Hathaway, who . . . I have a hard time describing exactly who Jesse is. Jesse does all sorts of traditional magical traditions in [00:00:15] the ATR, as well as, you know, being an author and creator of magical products and a participator in a whole bunch of other traditions as well. So, I'm just going to hand it over to Jesse and say hey, how [00:00:30] how would you introduce yourself here?  JESSE: Hi. Wow. I think . . . You know, I'm not, I'm not a big fan of magical CVs as it is, but you know, I, summary-wise, [00:00:45] I guess, I'm an Olocha. I made Obatalá in the Cuban Lukumí Santería tradition. I am a Tata Quimbanda, which . . . I'm a practitioner of Brazilian . . . It's [00:01:00] an Afro-Brazilian sorcerers' tradition that is sometimes paired with Umbanda, or Candomblé. Sometimes people let it stand on its own. It's a Congolese-derived practice, and traditional [00:01:15] witchcraft has always been there for, you know, as long as I can consciously remember, into early teens and things like that.  But I study whatever interests me. It doesn't mean I'm initiated in all those things; it doesn't mean I'm practicing [00:01:30] all those things, but I have a passion for magical traditions, folk magic, folklore. I have a huge love of Mexican curanderismo, which is a familial background, although I did not go into that as a [00:01:45] practitioner. And I think also just . . . I'm a babbler, is probably important for my CV as well, that, you know, some of these things, like curanderismo, culturally, you never called yourself [00:02:00] that thing; that was something the community called you. So, I guess in some ways whatever people call me is whatever they call me, and they can come to me for what they come to me. And the main thing is that I'm just trying to do as much training with elders and keep things going as I can. But yeah. [00:02:16]  ANDREW: I think that's a really interesting point. You know? And maybe we can start with that. We . . . I mean, we were talking before we got on the line, right? And we were talking about, you know, these sort of questions of authority and [00:02:31] who gets to call oneself authority, you know, who's an expert in these traditions or an elder or even just, you know, an acknowledged practitioner, you know? And I think that this question of where [00:02:46] does the authority come from? And how does that happen sort of inside and outside of traditional practices is a really interesting point, right?  JESSE: Yeah. ANDREW: You know, for example, you're talking about, you know, being a curandero, [00:03:01] like, that's not a thing that you call yourself. That's what other people would call you if they're going to call you that, right?  JESSE: Yes.  ANDREW: I think that that's really fascinating, and I think that we see a lot of change [00:03:16] around that, where traditionally everybody lived in the same place, right? Everybody generally didn't move around that much and people probably saw a person in that practice grow [00:03:31] up, experience their training, they saw that they got the nod from other people who are acknowledged as that, and at some point, they started taking on their own, you know, practice, right? But in the Internet age, right, [00:03:47] that looks more like a good Instagram account, maybe? JESSE: (laughing) ANDREW: You know, maybe a nice website.  JESSE: Yeah.  ANDREW: You know, what . . . like, I'm curious what you think about those evolutions and those changes that are going [00:04:02] on around that.  JESSE: Yeah. I mean, the apprenticeship model, which . . . It's not a certificate model, right? It's something different, where you are under an apprenticeship, you are with the elder and [00:04:17] their clients see you training with their elder. You know, they . . . it's . . .The visibility is a very different thing. It's not just classes. It's not just, you know, herb walks, occasionally. You are the right hand [00:04:32] of that elder for a very long time. And they see you go from incompetence to competence to fluency, and you know, that kind of replacement for that elder if and when they pass is there. And [00:04:47] it's a very different model than what is done now.  But even within, I think, the kind of Internet age, of, you know, teachers have dozens and dozens and dozens of students. I look at the Brazilian model of a tahero, where [00:05:02] there is going to be one pai de the santo, who is the head, doing everything. They're doing all the initiating, thousands of people, but each person has a yake baba care [spelling?] that's taking care of their needs that is more individualized in that way. But still, it's . . . [00:05:17] you lose your individuality when you train, and that part is, that sacrifice is very difficult, I think, for a lot of our very Western Internet-friendly minds about promoting individuality. How different you are, how a certain . . . [00:05:32] You know, "I'm studying this tradition," and the tradition is studying you, is part of the thing that we forget too.  ANDREW: Well, and I think that it's part of the . . . part of the good training, you know, is learning how [00:05:47] to get out of the way and do the work, right?  JESSE: Yeah. ANDREW: You know? Like the . . . you know, I think about the elder Olochas that I trained with and spent time with, or am at ceremonies with, right? And certainly, if there's a [00:06:02] junior person there to put, to open in the coconuts or whatever, they're going to do that, they're going to be like, "Hey, go do that, go mop the floor, go whatever."  JESSE: Yeah. ANDREW: But also, if there's not, they're just going to grab the hammer and go, right? And, [00:06:17] you know, there are these funny things that come from that training and that experience. And, you know, opening coconuts is one of them. You know, I watched the people who are new, you know, in my house come and open coconuts, and, you know, I'm like, I always [00:06:32] look over like, "Oh, they're taking forever!" You know, not in a mean way, but just in a like, you know . . . And then, and that feeling of like, I can open a coconut in no time because I've done hundreds and hundreds of them now.  JESSE: Yep. ANDREW: And, those subtle things that you would, [00:06:47] you know, you would see being in the space with somebody else . . .  JESSE: Yes. ANDREW: Make that big difference, right?  JESSE: Mm-hmm. Even the way the way that we mopped the way that . . . we call it watering your elders, you know, just [00:07:02] the, you have to . . . in a good way, not . . . I don't mean that in a . . . But the idea of culturally, like, I'm . . . Those of us that are more on the introverted side, you know, it's a lot to go and say hello to everyone. It's a lot to enter a room and to each person say hello. [00:07:17] It can be exhausting before the ritual even starts. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: You know, you learn shorthands. Or you find ways to be able to enter into the social language that is needed to be able to access things. But, going around and asking everyone who's older [00:07:32] than you: "Do you want something to drink? Can I get you a coffee? Can I get you a water? Can I get you something?" Even if they say no, it's a lot, for whatever reason, that service-oriented side of things leaves . . . It works both ways in the sense that it allows people to introduce themselves to each other, in [00:07:47] a way that's not just small talk. But also, people see that you are trying to take care of people in the room, and make sure that everyone is comfortable.  And it's an interesting side of things that you know . . . That's [00:08:02] not a critique; it is a critique, but of the Internet culture basis or the book-learned culture of not realizing that the book is still your teacher and it's a one-sided conversation that you don't get to necessarily appeal to the author and ask for clarification, but you didn't [00:08:17] teach yourself. You learned from a book. You didn't teach yourself, because there's a language that you are relying on that is built on clichés and allegories and metaphors and things like that. So, there's, there's . . .  This idea of picking yourself up by your [00:08:32] bootstraps into a magical tradition is not quite necessarily the case even when you're doing it by yourself. And, and, if we believe that spirit is intervening, then spirit is also teaching us as well. And [00:08:47] how well we can refine that, our own inner ear, to listen to that, is also something there. In a community, you know, a community setting, people often ask in online groups, like what books can I read? Read the room, first, like [00:09:02] take the temperature of the room and listen, because, I mean, the best conversations happen at 2 a.m. after all the things are done for the day and the cook finally gets to sit down because the kitchen is shut. ANDREW: Sure. Or they're in there and you're talking to them instead of you know, rushing around. [00:09:17]  JESSE: Yeah.  ANDREW: And then they go, "Hey, come look at this thing that I'm going to do here," right? And even, even in the simplest of things like, you know, cooking the inyales right? Like just cooking the parts of the animals that go to the Orishas. There's all sorts [00:09:32] of stuff to learn about just even a simple thing like that, you know, and if you're engaged with the people and talking to them and have a relationship with them, then they're going to invite you in and be like, "Hey, you know, if you're looking for this, do this this way, or here's a good way to do it," [00:09:47] you know?  Otherwise, you're just, you know, you can do it and it will serve the job but you're missing big swaths of the teaching, right? It's always the thing that I'm really aware of in my, you know, in my position as somebody in Toronto, far [00:10:02] away from regular practice, right? My . . . my knowledge is good. You know, my . . . I mean, there's always things to work on, but my fluency and some of those little details, I'm well aware that it's not as strong [00:10:17] as it would be if I was living somewhere where I got to just work more often, you know, because you can never learn those things from a book. Nobody ever thinks to talk about that. You know? Right? Unless you're in the room with the person and then you're watching them, like, "Hey, what was that? Why'd you put that in there? I didn't see [00:10:32] anybody do this before,” you know?  JESSE: You know, you can read a book about running a marathon, but it's a very different thing to do it.  ANDREW: Right? JESSE: And we talk about that all the time, of like, you know, watching, if someone doesn't know how to mop, and they say they're an active santero. You're like "Hmm, maybe not." But [00:10:48] there's this side of it, of, there's so much, there's different types of knowledge and the modern age promotes one type of knowledge, which is the facts of the, the history of that type of thing that can be transmitted via literature [00:11:03] in that way, in the written word and it's an interesting side of things, but it's very different when the body knows it, when the, when the ways of learning in the body are different from the head. And even . . . [00:11:18]  So, it's an interesting side of, you know, really making sure if someone doesn't know how to do certain things, you train them and even, even, for example, my early years [00:11:33] as an Olocha. I come from a house of a lot of old elders. Like physically, they are more aged. And so even though I could be doing other things, they needed someone to lift the big water buckets and up [00:11:48] and down the stairs and do the heavy lifting and open the coconuts. So even though there were other tasks that I could be doing, I was doing the manual labor, because I was younger . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: And able to do certain things that my amazing elder ladies could not. [00:12:03] And that's an interesting side of things too, because then they sent me out and like, you know, “Go to this house, and start studying with them a little bit here, and then come back and branch out,” so that I could get different experiences.  And I think one of the things that's very interesting with . . . In the history of Santería, [00:12:19] is just because the houses started working with each other, things got very homogenized very quickly, through public opinion, both in a good and a bad way. There are variances to the way things are done, but the variances between the houses are actually pretty small. [00:12:34] You know, there's kind of a liturgized homogenized way to do things that is acceptable. And when you vary too much from that, both out of tradition or vary too much from that out of lack of tradition or lack of knowledge, you kind of get [00:12:49] pulled back into what is the acceptable practice . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: And that's an interesting side of it. So, it's actually preserved a lot through public opinion through the fact that there's seven different lineages represented in a room because you invite [00:13:04] those people to work because in the early days you didn't get a choice on who was coming to work cause you needed people. So, you got anybody, any santero that was in New York City.  ANDREW: Yeah. JESSE: "Come, work this thing!" And so, new traditions kind of, or at least parallel traditions start aligning, they start [00:13:19] coming into a common practice and adaptations have to happen for the modern age. You can't do certain things the way that was done in Cuba or in Nigeria. So, it's . . . Those modifications happen, and elders make those decisions. [00:13:34] When one person makes those decisions, it can get a little crazy. But when a community comes together and says, "How do we resolve this problem? How do we take care of this? Then there's more options, I think. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. For sure. Well, and I think that goes [00:13:49] back to . . . It goes back to kind of a couple questions around that. One is for me, I think that where there are differences in lineage, it's important to know what they are. Even if they're small. It's interesting, where there are lineage [00:14:34] differences, that I think it's really important to become aware of those and know what they are, right? You know, I mean, we are initiated into a lineage, and therefore if our lineage does it a certain way, we should do it that way. And you know, [00:14:49] in these different times, where you go, might go to different houses and do things in different ways, I think that it's important to respect, you know, the way other people do it and also know that when you're in your home, you do it a different way, right? Or when it's your event. But [00:15:04] I think it also creates a lot of unnecessary dialogue and drama, and I think that we see this in all the magical communities, right? At least every one that I've ever been in, which is more than a few. It's this thing of "Well, [00:15:19] we don't do it this way. Therefore, it must be wrong," right?  JESSE: Yes. ANDREW: You know, "This is . . . this is not . . . I've never seen this; therefore, it must be wrong." And I think that, you know, it's such a such a sticky [00:15:34] topic, right? How do we understand what is tradition? What is traditional variance? How do we understand what is, what comes from experience, and what might be other groups' experience that we could integrate?  JESSE: Mm-hmm.  ANDREW: And how do [00:15:49] we . . . And how do we judge what is just, you know, manufactured garbage, right? JESSE: (laughs) ANDREW: To make a few bucks, you know? So. I don't know. What do you think? Give us, give us a guide here, give us some solid rules we can live by. JESSE: Because I'm the authority? (laughs) Authority of [00:16:04] that.  ANDREW: Yeah, I'm giving you all the authority right here. Community of one gives it to you, Jesse! JESSE: Yeah, yeah. I think, obviously reliable or people that you can [00:16:19] confide in and ask opinions on that . . . The chain of eldership is really important and it's not just for this. You know, I don't, I don't support the complete submission to elder guru style where it allows for physical abuse or emotional abuse and that way . . . That is a [00:16:34] model that does exist and has existed but there is a possibility of an elder and mentor elder and minor model that allows for accessing [00:16:49] opinions that can contextualize things based in the knowledge that they have that is more than your own. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: How do you, how do you modify? I think there's the side of it too, that's always interesting, [00:17:04] of when you don't recognize something, if you're secure in what you have, you don't attack the thing you don't know, you just look at it and cook. That's interesting. Let me see where this goes, and you have to wait. Gauge the point of when it seems off and [00:17:19] what is your agenda in making sure that it's correct or incorrect. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: And that personal side of it, the, you know, this idea that there's objective . . . one tradition that was passed down from Adam and Eve, it gets a really, it doesn't serve us. And I . . . Certainly [00:17:34] within the ATRs, I mean, the differences between traditions, houses, the differences between Santería and Candomblé and different Orisha practices are huge. And at the same time, the [00:17:49] Orisha are very flexible in what they, what they say and do, and they're not going to sit there and nitpick, but there are ways, specifically, that the tradition has evolved, to make sure that Orisha comes, that Orisha is there, that is unique to each lineage, unique to each house, it has similarities [00:18:04] and commonalities and landmarks, you know, to . . . that are recognizable. But at the same time there's . . . I don't see elders get as upset about something that's off. [00:18:19] Just minorly off. They'll be like, "Oh, we don't do that," and don't worry about it because "come do it, we do it this way." ANDREW: Yeah. JESSE: I see a lot of people who are younger, get really pissed off about keeping tradition intact. ANDREW: And I've talked to elders who talk about that's [00:18:34] how they felt when they were younger. Right? And be like, "Oh, when I was like 18, I was so mad about all these things. But now I'm like, well, I can see both sides, you know."  JESSE: Yeah. And it's the question of like, do you spend all the time stamping the thing out that you don't like [00:18:49] or do you spend time investing into the model that you feel is more correct and more profitable for people to follow? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: And, you know, fighting for what you want to see as opposed to what you don't want to see. And there's merits on both sides. I think, personally. [00:19:04] You know, when is it that we don't . . . We try not to innovate a lot of times in ATRs, right? Of like, you innovate through necessity only.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: And, a temporary thing that you're still asking clarification on from elders or spirits [00:19:19] or things like this, but you try to innovate as little because otherwise it's not necessarily what you're practicing anymore. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: It's not recognizable. It's not recognizable. And has its own thing. Certainly. [00:19:35] Opinions change as you get older too, and you . . . More experience, it's not just older. What is the Chinua Achebe quote of "Old age is respected and wisdom is revered"? The same thing is similar in our models here of, like, you know, someone who has worked the room for [00:19:50] five years consistently at the foot of an elder is going to know more than someone who's 20 years old and has never worked the room, as much, or worked it once a year. Someone who births a lot of Orisha constantly or is taking a lot of clients is going to have a different opinion of how things function because they realize, [00:20:05] "I don't do it this way because it gets in the way of blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah." ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: Versus, if it's your first time giving, it's like a first-time child. You're going to make a bunch of mistakes. You're going to realize you might put a lot of effort into things that you won't necessarily do on the fourth child down . . . ANDREW: Yeah. JESSE: Because important . . . and that practical [00:20:20] experience, you know, sometimes we just have to suffer through our own inexperience and be humble and keep going to elders and asking opinions and seeing, keeping our eyes open as to what is being done. And if we're in a solitary tradition where it's [00:20:35] less likely that we're going to have an elder who's going to speak to our direct needs, then learn from other things around you that you can, that you admire and can pull in. You know, it's really hard to reinvent the wheel constantly.  ANDREW: Well, I think it's . . . You know, I think it's really interesting because [00:20:50] when I . . . The first store that I read out of have a predominantly Afro-Caribbean clientele. JESSE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And, you know, so I was . . . Although I was getting involved in [00:21:05] the Orisha traditions and stuff at that point, I didn't have a ton of experience at all and, and I wasn't initiated as a priest, so it was just mostly my own development that I was focused on. But I, you know, I had done a ton of ceremonial work and you know, initiations [00:21:20] along all those lines, and one of the things that was really interesting was, I would end up having these conversations with you know, spiritual Baptist priests and, you know, other people, and they're like, "You really understand," you know, [00:21:35] whatever it was that they were doing, right? They would always say, "You really understand our tradition. You really understand this. You really understand the African mindset," or whatever, and I understand that they felt that that was true. But I think that what I knew was, what I [00:21:50] actually really understand is magic and I understand that there are generally fundamental things that are kind of true across the board if you're really engaged at a deep level and not, not sort of in the "there's only one faith" [00:22:06] or "there's only one source" or any of that kind of like, you know, Victorian colonial nonsense, right? JESSE: Yeah. ANDREW: But in the sense that when you understand that spirits are real, and you have the capacity to genuinely speak with spirits and [00:22:21] you're going to work with materials, nature, candles, whatever, offerings. Then, then though the surface of those things, or the tradition and lineage piece changes those, there is a fundamental mindset [00:22:36] that, that's there, kind of around the world around those kinds of things. And once you get that, then you can relate at that place, right? Which is completely different than sort of going in and sort of saying, you know, as I've certainly seen other people do, "Well, [00:22:51] yeah, exactly, I know this tradition and the spirits gave it to me and therefore I am able to do this and that and whatever, it's like, no no, no. I know how to talk to spirits. And in fact, often even people, spirits of other people's traditions might lean in a bit through a reading and nudge me in [00:23:06] a given direction. But that's not the same as understanding their traditions or whatever, right?  JESSE: Yeah. Absolutely. The . . . I think that when we're talking about fluency, and magical fluency, we're talking about a practicality, as far as how [00:23:21] to utilize those things in everyday life, and that, that is something that is, I think, palpable when someone knows and can give practical advice, practical actions to achieve certain things, no matter the, no matter the tradition. And [00:23:36] certainly, when it's still theory in someone's head and less pragmatic, you can tell that too. There can be a struggle to articulate something. What are the next steps? And where do you go from here? And we can [00:23:51] talk about cosmology and philosophy which differ from person to person, let alone town to town, or tradition to tradition.  ANDREW: Yeah. JESSE: And those finer points, but the practicality of it, that is, that's something different. You have to be somewhat fluent in order to give [00:24:06] good practical advice on how to move forward, and parroting something is, you know, you first learned by saying what you know, and going off of what you've seen, but the more you can expose yourself to, the more people's styles, you'll start to learn different ways of approaching things. [00:24:21] And certainly, I'm being reminded of a computer search parameter [00:24:36] recently. That was . . . The issue with diagnostic tools from computers or trying to diagnose illness and things like this, is that they're not programmed to look for something that isn't there.  ANDREW: Hmm. JESSE: And this is something that humans can still do very well in that . . . not [00:24:51] just looking for the problem out of the common, of the sets of things are there, but to have a revelation of what could still be needed by the person, not necessarily . . . You know, when someone comes for a reading, there, it's not just their conscious problems we're talking about. We're trying to look and [00:25:06] bring those things that are unconscious to the surface too, to see what is actually the root of something that needs to be addressed, and those things come from having a good foundation in the basics, in order to . . . You [00:25:21] know, you have to do primary colors before you start doing secondary colors and understanding what those things are. You can't mix secondary colors trying to get primary colors. You still have to know what that, that order is, and I think it's very similar in magic. You know, there's basic advice on things and [00:25:36] some people will give out the basic like, you know, here's an uncrossing. Here's a, here's a love drawing, here's a bend over type of working, and those are, those are set vocabularies and other people [00:25:51] might tell you to go light a candle at the base of this tree and the spirit is going to take care of it. And that's the model that they were using, and both are pragmatic in this sense, but I . . .  I wonder how much materialism [00:26:06] still enters in, the kind of Scientific Revolution atheist materialism that sneaks in because that is the paradigm as Westerners that we are raised in, you know, there's some variance in that and based on familial upbringing and religious upbringing. But the idea that spirit [00:26:23] is not necessarily tangible in the same way and it is actually affecting the materia to do the thing is a less popular model. And it's interesting now, like once you get introduced to the concept [00:26:38] of a charged statue or something like that, people want to put loads and everything in. They don't necessarily know what goes in it. They want to know, "Why, why do I put these things there? Am I putting this there to symbolize this?" Whereas in spirit-based traditions the spirit might possess someone, and it could put [00:26:53] anything it wants in that statue and breathe on it or splash it with whatever and now it's charged. It doesn't necessarily have a logic that we can understand as to why it picked that item to represent that thing because it's not representation. It's [having?] something and that is a battery of power that is being used. [00:27:08] Not, did you have all 732 exact ingredients . . .  ANDREW: Exactly. JESSE: To put in. That spirit could go for a walk and pull a clump of herbs and give you one of the most powerful baths you've ever had. Whereas if you try and duplicate it with those same herbs, it's not going to be the same, because you're not . . . ANDREW: Yeah. I was [00:27:23] talking with somebody in the store recently about . . . they were asking me where I get the crystals that I buy, and about the mining practices, you know, and I think that those, those are really important questions, you know, and the short answer is about [00:27:38] half of what I have, what I sell, I know, I know pretty clearly where it comes from, and short of, you know, hopping on a plane and going to the mine, I feel like the people I'm buying from, who are buying directly from the miners, [00:27:53] you know, I believe them, you know. It's the best we can do in this in this day and age, you know.  A bunch of the other stuff, I'm far less clear about where that comes from and, and you know, I would like to reduce that [00:28:08] amount, you know, to be clearer that there's no human rights violations and horrible environmental destruction and so on. But it's, but it's complicated and it's difficult and you know in this industry for sure, and in tons of industries. They [00:28:23] were asking me about the magical influence of where, of where something comes from and how it's handled along the way and all of these kinds of things, right? Is the stone that you know where and how it was [00:28:38] mined different than the stone where you don't?  And, and when I was talking with them about it, I mean, certainly I have my own political and social view on that stuff, which is, I think that the stuff that is harvested [00:28:53] with respect is always, is always better whenever we can manage it. You know, whenever I harvest things, I always harvest them with a lot of respect. And I think that that's a great thing. But I think that there's kind of a, also another question mixed in that, [00:29:08] which is, where does the actual magic of what you're doing reside, right? And in the context of a stone, right? Is it concretely in the minerals and the energy of that? And [00:29:23] I think that that's, that's part of it, you know, there there's really interesting crystal books that talk about the, you know, how the crystals form and how that magic, how the energy of that relates to their sort of fundamental crystalline structure that varies from different stones [00:29:38] and you know, you've got color and you've got different participations and all that kind of stuff. And what other things activate this, right?  JESSE:  Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And you know, there's the power of the thing in and of itself, but kind of as you're saying, there's also what the spirit might want, right?  JESSE: Yes. ANDREW: Like, you know, if I'm working with, you [00:31:37] know, one of my guides, and my guide says, you know, grab me, grab me a piece of iron pyrite and let's do this with it. JESSE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: Certainly the . . . certainly the element is important, but the activation of that particular spirit through that element is [00:31:52] way more important in that equation, probably. You know, the actual force through which the spirit makes the change or consecrates that thing, you know, and consecrating a statue is a good example of that, right? You know. That is the force of the spirit making [00:32:07] something and putting it together and anchoring it. And then we get into . . .  And then sort of the third thing that I see which is related but not exactly the same which is you know, especially with things like plants and stuff like that, right? There is also the [00:32:22] living entity which is that plant in and of itself right and not necessarily just the specific one that you're working with, but the sort of deeper energy of a given, you know, a given plant in the world, you know, like [00:32:37] ayahuasca or other things. You know, people, you know often talk about that as an entity that wants to return to the world, but I think that that's actually fundamentally true of the bow trees in the front of my shop and, you know my crown [00:32:52] of thorns plant, and all of those things, and it knows I'm definitely, in the way that I'm working with them in the space, connecting with the collective entity of that plant, you know? And so, I think that this [00:33:07] this idea of how are we working and what are we doing is so interesting and I think it's something that people don't really see those distinctions. I don't hear them talked about, you know? JESSE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: So, I'm curious what you think about them. JESSE: Yeah, [00:33:23] I . . . something that comes to mind. I have, as long as I've been crowned actually, so a dozen years, been working with an experimental Theater Company here in New York City called Dzieci. And it's [00:33:38] using theater as a tool to investigate something else. But that's [lost audio at 33:45?] is unique to each person. But we're talking about investigating the sacred through the tool Le Théâtre. Through the means of theater. [00:33:53] And this intentionality, this question of intentionality is quite interesting to explore. And a question that gets posed a lot by the director, and then as we start something, is when does [00:34:08] the ritual begin? ANDREW: Mm. JESSE: And, is it when you have the audience fully there and in a theater context and the play starts? Well, no, it started long before that with the rehearsal process and then again, when did it start before that? And the question is when you bring [00:34:23] it . . . You know, for me, the answer and it seems to be a common thought on this, is when you bring awareness to it. ANDREW: Mm. JESSE: And so, if I know that I'm doing an important ritual next week and every day I'm waking up going, "I'm doing this next week. What can I do today to manifest that more [00:34:38] smoothly and make sure?" Then making sure all your bills are paid and you know, the bag lunches are done for the day and everything, that becomes part of the ritual.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: And there's this interesting question of intentionality, when you know that something is ethically harvested [00:34:53] and you're going to the store but you're in a tizzy and distracted going to the store and you're not present when you're picking up the crystal and you're putting it on the thing and you know, talking on the cell phone and looking at things. What are you doing to destroy the intentionality of that good harvest act?  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: I mean there's that side of it too, that's always interesting to me, of, [00:35:08] you know, you can have good ingredients prepared by bad chefs. ANDREW: Yep. JESSE: And you can get shitty ingredients prepared by expert chefs that still taste better. You can have ingredients, you can have a horrible angry chef prepare something masterfully because they know how to treat the [00:35:23] food and maybe they're compartmentalizing their emotion. Maybe they're not. They're . . . that missing ingredient of grandmother love that goes into the cookies: Does it make it taste better? Does it not? And you know, it is, I think for all of us, the question of intentionality is an interesting side of it [00:35:38] of what are we bringing to it? And how we contributing to these seeds? You know, I think, I like to look at things as seeds of potential . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: And certain things allow them to mature and grow. The side of [00:35:53] it of looking at: What is it that that makes something work? What is it that allows something to happen? [00:36:08] I think anybody that can say definitively is selling something . . . ANDREW: (chuckles) And they probably have a great brand name trademark . . .  JESSE: Absolutely! ANDREW: Attached to it. Right?  JESSE: Yeah, I think the [00:36:23] exploration of that and the curiosity of that is what, for me at least, drives me to constantly keep practicing that you know that you can . . . Like you were saying earlier, that sometimes, you know, if there's someone there that can mop [00:36:38] the floor, open the coconut, there's a way to enter into that, where sometimes the task just has to get done and that person is learning it and they're going to make their mistakes. There's other times. I remember recently . . . We were short staffed at an Ocha ritual and I was the one on my hands and knees mopping, because normally would be someone else [00:36:53] and that's fine, because I'm usually assisting someone. But the . . . I had such pure joy in mopping the floor of just, like it was such an interesting thing of caretaking and, and kind of going into the trance of mopping, which was an interesting thing too, of still remaining present enough to know what [00:37:08] else was going on in the room, so that I'm not mopping something carelessly. ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  JESSE: But also, this balance of, I guess it is a little bit of Zen and the art of peeling potatoes. But also for those of us that get lost in our heads, to be present enough and aware [00:37:23] enough of what else is going on, so that if you know the something escapes, you know, whether it's a child, a chicken, or a potato rolling down the hallway, that you're able to notice it and catch it, not that the chick, child is rolling down the hallway, but I [00:37:38] . . . hopefully that metaphor still makes sense.  ANDREW: Yeah. Well, it's one of those things too. For me, I think one of the big differences between before making Ocha and after making Ocha. Or maybe [00:37:53] before receiving Orishas and after receiving Orishas is, when I work the tradition, whatever that is, I can feel the joy of the Orishas themselves, you know? JESSE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: Like [00:38:08] when I tell them, like well I'm going to feed him something, and you know, I mean, that might be a sacrifice, but it might just be like, "I'm just gonna, you know, hey, I'm going to cook you this. I'm going to toast up all this corn for you," and you know, whatever. You can feel that energy, right? [00:38:23]  JESSE: Yeah.  ANDREW: And I feel like that energy extends to mopping the floor to you know, like all of these kinds of things, right? To, you know, even some of the less pleasant things like plucking, you know, plucking the chickens [00:38:38] after, or, you know wrestling with a ram that got out in the rain, or you know, whatever right? It's just like, it doesn't really matter, from my experience, you know, and maybe this is just me, but I think that it's part of this thing, because that, that service [00:38:53] to the spirits and their pleasure in it, you know, lifts up everything else. Right?  JESSE: Well, I think it's an interesting parallel too, of a . . .It would seem to me, at least the way that I understood [00:39:08] Greek myths and Norse myths presented to me as a child, even reading like Edith Hamilton. . .  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: They were very anthropomorphized, the gods. So, anthropomorphized that there wasn't . . . it was hard to imagine that they were appearing in nature. They just owned [00:39:23] nature. And it seems that, you know, as my understanding of these things matures that perhaps that is a kind of modern revamping of a lot of pagan ideology and pagan theology . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: But I'm [00:39:38] in one of Matthery's books, I believe, he's interviewing a priestess of Yemayá, in Nigeria, and talks to her and, and she talks about other [00:39:53] people worship their deities. We do our deities. And that when she interacts with water in any conscious level, she is participating in Yemayá. That Yemayá is an act of mopping or washing a body or washing the self or cooking and that water itself has a respect [00:40:08] and a consciousness and that consciousness, for her, was named Yemayá.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: So, it was this concept and we talk about this, and the Spanish verb hacer does this very well, hacer tonto, you're doing something, you're making Santo, that when we participate in these [00:40:23] activities, we're actually participating in Orisha. Orisha is not a human. Orishas have incarnated as humans. But Orisha is as much the sound that the drum makes and gives us pleasure. Orisha is the flash of insight of a new idea. [00:40:38] Orisha is the feeling that we should go left and not right at this intersection, you know, there's things that are in the body that is not just in the head. The head leads it, of course, but it is broader and more experiential [00:40:53] and then the body becomes an extension of the head and the head grows because it is experiencing the world and I think there's something different.  You know, mopping, you are, you are participating in an Orisha act that is yes, you're finding the joy. But it was also that the deities of [00:41:08] water that are there, that bathing can become a sacred act again. Like when does the ritual begin; when you bring attention to it. And you could make everything about the spirits that you're serving, or you could make very little and only be like a Sunday religionist, as you know, we talk [00:41:23] about. You know, it's a controversial thing to talk about the lack of ability to have separation of church and state but religion is there to justify politic, it always has been, the concept of religion. Karen Armstrong goes into that and I promote her all the time, just [00:41:38] because I find her such a fascinating . . . She's an ex-nun that writes on religion and her book, Fields of Blood, looks at religion and violence. And she talks about that that individual religion and spirituality is a very different thing than organized religion that is sitting there trying [00:41:53] to justify the actions of people in power. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: Whereas the concept of religiosity or spirituality and those things . . . But what we do in our day-to-day is up to is each of us, but it's not just about going to church on Sunday, [00:42:08] promoting the separation of that, thinking that going to church on Sunday makes you a good person because you went . . . it's part of it. But how do you treat your family? How do you treat your co-workers? How do you treat the people around you? You know, how do you treat the land you're on? And this is a . . . It's not for everyone, because [00:42:23] it's very difficult to constantly be on in that mode. It takes practice. It's a muscle that you have to build and stretch. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: And I do think that mopping, and carrying buckets of groceries up and down stairs, is a way of stretching [00:42:38] that muscle, or at least it can be when you present it in that way. If you're just bossing someone around, and say, "Go do this, go do this, go do this," they may not see that they're stretching a muscle.  ANDREW: Yeah. JESSE: That's, you know, that's the thing too, is responsible training. You have to say, why are you doing this? Because if [00:42:53] we all stop to take out the trash, we can't do prepare for the ritual that has to happen. But if you, who cannot be on that side of the curtain or do and be in that room at that time, can take out the trash, then you've helped us do that ritual. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: It is [00:43:08] part of it. It's that way of, what was the thing where the man was . . . A president was going to look at the space program and asked the janitor who he was and what he did, and he said, "This is my name and I'm [00:43:23] helping build to send men into space," you know, that it was the responsibility or the contextualized importance of every single task in a temple.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: Very real thing. And if that person doesn't know, someone else is going to have to do it and hopefully take away [00:43:38] from that person balancing the books that day, but that's . . . it's an interesting thing. You see it in different religious communities. I'm friends with some nuns in Connecticut, at the Benedictine Abbey there, and it's so interesting to see, because they follow the Liturgy [00:43:53] of the Hours, their work spurts are two hours. They work really really hard for two hours, and they stop, change, and sing for a half hour to an hour depending on which what the liturgy is that day and then go back to work again. Though there's no warm-up [00:44:08] to working. They know they only have two hours, but they also don't rush. Which is like, "You're gonna do it, you're gonna get to work," and that's great. ANDREW: I think that that, also that dedication, right? Like they're gonna, they're gonna stop and sing, you know? It's like before [00:44:24] before I got married, my spirits, you know, my ancestors, in a mass, and a misa, were basically like, "We want you to go to church before you get married. We know you're not getting it in church. That's fine. But we want [00:44:39] you to go to a mass." And we were like, "All right," and so I went, and it was it was me and my partner and one other person in this massive, like, Anglican Church at 5 p.m. on a Friday night. And [00:44:54] I remember being there and it was very obvious that like, all the people in the congregation actually had no idea what to do because the priest was like, "Is anybody actually going to come up and take communion or should we just carry on," right? Like, oh, I didn't know this was the point, right? [00:45:09] Which is amusing, but it was also very obvious to me that if nobody had been there, he would have just done the mass.  JESSE: Yeah.  ANDREW: You know? And that like, that sort of devotion of, "We're going to stop and sing, [00:45:24] we're going to do this, we're going to do this thing." I think that kind of devotion is just astounding, you know, it's so wonderful.  JESSE: you're speaking to me very true to Dzieci. We do a piece every year around this time. We [00:45:39] just had our first performances of it, but, called Fool's Mass, which is based on the kind of feast of fools idea from the, from the early modern and medieval period. But it's a [00:45:54] bunch of fools who are have to do the Christmas Mass, even though the priest just died. The exploration. It's a buffoonery piece and it's, there are extreme elements of humor and tragedy in it. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: But the idea that this choir [00:46:09] comes together to sing and normally, you know, we play characters of different ability and, and function and, and responsibilities and some of us are troublemakers and other people are rule followers and what that chaos ensues, but [00:46:24] we know that there's songs that we sing and come together and there's something that's profound there in the in the silence and listening to each other as well. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: And the chaos breaks out again, and how do you do this? How do you . . . how do you continue? In what you know, even [00:46:39] if there's no leader, how do you . . . I always find it interesting, like the dynamic of a classroom when the teacher has to leave to take, to go to the bathroom or something like that? Like, does it function as the same? It depends on the . . . how the teacher has run faster a lot of times. But [00:46:55] it's a, it's an interesting side of things. Doing what you know, when you know to do it is still, lots of times we're like, "Oh, the authority figure's not here, I don't have to do it this way. I could do it this other way."  ANDREW: Exactly, right?   JESSE: And [00:47:10] you go, okay, what did I just lose and what did I gain from that? What was the actual benefit from not doing it the exact way I know how? And so many times I think that, you know, it can come up in our systems [00:47:25] of divination, right? That you have the tools, you know exactly what the problem is, and you're not using them.  ANDREW: Yeah.  JESSE: You know? There's nothing new here. There's no new problems. You know what, you know, every problem that comes up, you know exactly why it's there and you have the tools to fix it, but you're not doing it. So, what do you what [00:47:40] are you looking for here? You know, that's, that's an interesting thing too.  ANDREW: Yeah, I think it's such an interesting question, you know? Again, as somebody who's sort of far away from regular practice, you know, not having not having an extended community here, [00:47:55] you know, I've definitely, I've definitely run into this sort of angsty emotional piece. And I'm like, "Ah, I got nothing to do. I don't know what to work on. I got nothing to practice," or whatever, and this desire to learn more, right? And, and, [00:48:10] what I noticed at one point was, I was like, "Well, that's cool if there's more to learn and there's always more to learn," but also, how solid's your singing of Osain, [00:48:25] right? How solid is this piece? How about you, like, you know, make sure that you can, like, say the prayer for each of the Orishas, you know, the Oríkì, or learn a song for . . . There's often so much [00:48:40] in our immediate vicinity that we can tend to, and if we take that agency back to ourselves, right?  JESSE: Yeah. ANDREW: And that way of like, you know, well, what do we, what do we do when there is nobody else watching? Right. JESSE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: I think it's . . . I think that that [00:48:55] is . . . That's where the real work is, right?  JESSE: Yeah. ANDREW: I mean, the rest of it is a bunch of work too and you know, not to dismiss it. But at least for me that real work is: I'm here. I'm doing this thing, whether it's, you [00:49:10] know, Orisha stuff or other stuff with my guides or you know, working on the cards or other projects. It's always that question of like: Okay, what do I need to do? How do I make myself do it? How do I do the stuff that doesn't seem glamorous but moves it all forward, [00:49:25] you know, and how do you find the joy with that, so you can sort of continue with devotion around it, you know, or faith, or those kind of old-fashionedy words, right?  JESSE: Yeah, and also the benefit of when you approach things in [00:49:40] that way, it only informs the other things you're doing. ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  JESSE: So, meaning, you know, you're going back to basics and finding new interesting things in them. Then it means that the possibility of you finding new ways and new depths to everything you're doing, because again, it's that muscle that you're stretching that is [00:49:55] developing a way of looking at the world, and, and aligning your feet to a new path. Perhaps it's the same path and you're learning it better, you know, it's nice to return to the things we know sometimes and realize that, oh gosh, there's a lot more here to examine. That [00:50:10] side of it. I know that's wonderful to be able to really examine what it [00:50:25] is that we know and develop the questions of ourselves of like okay, you think you know this for sure, and that's great, but what happens when you do it again? Do it one more time! ANDREW: mm-hmm. JESSE: I guess, for me, my background's, undergrad, is in theater [00:50:40] and doing things again is not a problem.  ANDREW: Yeah. JESSE: Over and over and over. There is something of benefit when you have something so memorized. It allows for a new freedom in finding things [00:50:55] out. And it's not the same as reading the prayer, you know, there's a difference there. And what is it to do this and how you say it and what it opens your mind up to. It's like Catholic parallel of the rosary, that saying the prayers is just the bare minimum. Saying [00:51:10] the prayers of the rosary is the minimum. The visualization that is supposed to happen, because the prayers are by rote and coming out of your mouth, and your hand knows to feel for what beads it's saying. That you're actually envisioning mysteries as you're going through the rosary, is, that's level 2 and above, but [00:51:25] you know, if all you know is the prayers and that's what you do . . . ANDREW: Yeah. Well, and it's like, you know, watching, you know watching elders conduct ceremony, right? They're singing a song, they're doing a thing. They see somebody doing something they [00:51:40] shouldn't be and they don't even lose a beat and they're like, "Put the bucket of water down, blah blah blah blah," and they go right back to it, you know? And sometimes they even just sing it in the tune of what's going on, right? Which is always amusing. JESSE: Yes. Yeah, it is! (laughing) ANDREW: And, and that kind of fluency is just [00:51:55] you know, it's so profound. And it comes from that showing up and being present and having walked it so many times and all of that kind of stuff. Yeah. It's such a, such a fascinating thing to see in practice. And it comes out of this, [00:52:10] so much experience with it, right?  JESSE: Yeah. ANDREW: Like being on theater, you know, on stage, when the person you're across from like, says the wrong line, what do you do, right? JESSE: You don't shoot them the right line. You've got to . . . and successful theater something that is [00:52:25] a wonderful exploration is, making each other look good. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JESSE: You know, in ritual there's so much correction in the way that things can happen. But how can you correct the person so that they are empowered to embrace this correction you're giving them because you get [00:52:40] flustered. And everybody's gonna respond to that differently. But you know, how can you make the person look good still and explain to them, "Hey, there's this better way, try it like this." ANDREW: Yeah. JESSE: And, and, and really, because then they're open to the critique. They're open to the correction. And they don't feel ashamed. But, there's [00:52:55] also, we have to get over our shame, too. Especially in the oral traditions, because you're going to be corrected in front of other people. ANDREW: All the time! JESSE: And, you know, there's, I remember thinking about the profundity of . . . you know, we talk about our attitudes when were younger and [00:53:10] things, and enter member serving Egun before a ritual once, and everybody's talking and really only the people up at the front right at the shrine are actually paying attention to what's going on, and it was frustrating, and "I can't believe people aren't paying attention!" And realizing like, I am so not present because I'm [00:53:25] so concerned with everybody not paying attention that I'm not paying attention either, and it was just the like, oh my God, it all works if one person is focused up front, the whole thing, the whole ceremony is approved if one person, one conscious act makes [00:53:40] it happen. And then it's like it's great if the whole room is aligned, it's great if everybody will be quiet and focus. Its great of what that is, but it also is humbling to realize how much profound change or acceptance or of a new trajectory can happen with [00:53:55] just one person focusing. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. For sure. JESSE: And being on point and on task and that's really beautiful.  ANDREW: Yeah. Well, maybe that's a good place to leave it. Go out there, folks. Be present! Listen, learn, and be kind to yourself and others, [00:54:10] you know, so we can all grow and expand and get wherever it is we're going to go with all of our magical practices. Yeah. Thanks for hanging out with me today, Jesse and being on here. I deeply appreciate it.  JESSE: My pleasure.  ANDREW: You've got all sorts of great [00:54:25] stuff going on online. People want to check it out. Where should they come and find you?  JESSE: The store I run is Wolf and Goat, so wolf-and-goat.com. You can type it without the dashes as well. We're on [00:54:40] Facebook as well. I do a podcast with Dr. Al Cummins, called Radio Free Golgotha intermittently. We're on Facebook as well. But RadioFreeGolgotha.com. If you're interested in Para theater and want to do some strange [00:54:55] explorations of self and the world around you through theater. DzieciTheatre.org DzieciTheatre with an R, E, dot org. ANDREW: Spelled just like it sounds. JESSE: Yeah. (laughs) It means [00:55:10] children in Polish. And, I'm sure there's many other things I'm forgetting. But generally, I'm around a lot online, and even more so, in the back alleys of New York, I suppose, so, it's, [00:55:25] it's a pleasure and thanks for having me on, Andrew.  ANDREW: Oh, thank you.      

With over a hundred episodes, Business Done Differently has reached the end of its first season. Today, Emily and Jesse Cole take a trip down memory lane and reminisce on some of the best lessons they've had throughout the journey."Be you. Be authentic. Be real." - Jesse Cole on a lesson from Business Done DifferentlyEmily and Jesse Cole - Doing and LearningJesse went into podcasting without really knowing what he wanted out of it. But it's one of the many concepts that he, his wife, and their team believe in. To do and then to learn, to be at peace with jumping in to see what happens.But this is only the first of the many other lessons they gained from doing Business Done Differently.Creating Unforgettable StoriesSome of the best things in life are memorable, but only a select few can become truly unforgettable. Making such stories the very foundation of one's endeavors is a tested and proven way of standing out in business and in life. And these stories will stick with the people you meet and share moments with."Nobody's gonna memorize somebody else's mission statement or core beliefs but they will remember your stories if they were meaningful." - Emily ColeFinal Four1. What makes you stand out?"Your hunger and your drive." - Emily on Jesse"You will never put yourself first." - Jesse on Emily2. Best advice to stand out."Look at the world differently. Challenge the status quo." - Jesse3. Best advice you've ever received."Think about everything as if it's not that big of a deal. Be positive. Have that outlook in life and it changes everything." - Jesse4. How do you want to be remembered?"When it comes down to it—did you make a difference in people's lives? Did you make an impact, were you there for people, and did you make them happier?" - Jesse"I want to make sure that we leave the world a better place." - EmilyTo hear more lessons that stood out through BDD's first season from Emily and Jesse Cole, make sure to download and listen to the episode!Jesse loves connecting and hearing from his listeners:  Like him on Facebook  Find Your Yellow Tux  Book - Find Your Yellow Tux  Jesse Cole is a passionate and engaging business leader sharing other leaders messages, tips and fresh ideas on Business Done Differently. Subscribe to hear more front runners doing it differently and remember to leave him a rating and review on iTunes. Thanks to Podcast Pilot for the editing, show notes and publication. They take care of it all!

Airbear comes through with a summer-inspired mix. Airbear is Aaron Choe, a California-born, Seoul-based DJ and record collector, and one half of Downtown (alongside Jesse You). We're pretty sure he's distilled summer down to its essence here. FP DJ Harmony towels us off in the second half. *Intro* Andy Mac - Secret Version [Idle Hands] *Airbear* --No Tracklist-- *Harmony* Larry Chernicoff - Woodstock, New York [Muse/Art Records/Optimo] Alan Hawkshaw - Terrestrial Fanfare [Bruton Music] Chris Evans-Ironside - Star System [Music De Wolfe] Tornado Wallace - Today ft. Sui Zhen [Running Back] Mori Ra - Candy Flow [Tracy Island] Sun Palace - Soul Vibes [BBE] Alan Hawkshaw - The Speed Of Sound [Bruton Music] The Seven Seas Players - Spasticus Autisticus (Version) [Polydor] Newcleus - Cyborg Dance [Sunnyview] Krootchey - Whatazzy [Casablanca/Dark Entries] @airtothebear @mrgoodrock

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Andrew explains what microbrew beers are, and why we enjoy them so much. Jesse and Andrew also talk about nanobrews and homebrews, which are beers that we can make at home on our own, and our favorite microbeer store/bar called Chucks! 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: You just came back from Vancouver BC in Canada. Andrew: I did, yes. Jesse: And during that time, it sounded like you had your fair share of microbrews. Andrew: I did, actually, which is good news for me because I'm a huge fan of beers that are made in a style that is not the common Budweiser, light lager style of the type that you can buy in almost every country. Jesse: One of the things I want to talk about in this episode is microbrews because microbrews is something that you and I really enjoy. Andrew: Yes, and I think people in our city, in Seattle, are actually very fond of this style of beer in general. Jesse: So, let's start with what is a microbrew. How would you define a microbrew? Andrew: Sure. I will start by defining a macrobrew, which is to say large companies like InBev, Anheuser-Busch, SABMiller, etc., who make very popular beers that are made in very large batches and distributed very widely. You might have heard of Budweiser, or Heineken, or Miller, or Corona; these are beers that are made by very large companies, they are made to taste the same wherever you go, wherever you get them, and they're very popular. But, they are also very plain to taste because they have to appeal to a lot of different people. Think about, like, for example, Coca-Cola, which is made everywhere, and always stays the same, and everyone likes it. If you like unique flavors or different flavors of soda, you might have to look for a smaller company that makes a more interesting soda, but doesn't sell it everywhere; and, microbrews are the same idea with beer. They are small companies--or even people doing this is as a hobby--that are making beers that have interesting and new flavors, that don't follow the same recipe rules that a Budweiser or a Corona might, and it gives you many different and interesting options to try when you go to a restaurant or to a bar in a place that carries them. And, the Pacific Northwest, which includes Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada, and also Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon in the United States, are all cities that have been very supportive of microbrews coming up and being sold right alongside the big names like Budweiser. Jesse: "Macro" means "big," "micro" means "small," and the word "brew" is another word for "beer." Andrew: Ah, "brewing" is the process that is used to make beer, much like "baking" is the process used to make bread. Jesse: So, microbrews are pretty popular in Vancouver BC, Seattle, Washington, Portland, Oregon in the Pacific Northwest, and also parts of California, as well. Andrew: Oh, yes. Definitely. The entire west coast of North America tends to make very flavorful, very hoppy beers that are not the normal style that is made in the big companies. Other towns have taken this up; Austin, Texas is known for it, Denver and Boulder Colorado make a lot of beers, and also many cities on the East Coast, although I have not been to them to try their own local flavors. Jesse: What are the main ingredients in a beer? When you think about making your own beer, and you, Andrew, have actually made your own beer before... Andrew: Yes. Jesse: ...What are the main ingredients that you can control in a beer? Andrew: Beer is actually very simple in terms of the number of ingredients. All you need is grain, and water, and hops. And, hops are a flowering vine whose bud, the flower part of the plant, contains a lot of very strongly flavored oils that almost make a kind of tea with the water and the grain. Most beers are made with barley, but you can also find them made with corn and rice; so if you buy a Budweiser, it is made mostly with rice as the grain. All you're doing is extracting the sugars from the grain and then using yeast to process the sugar into alcohol. And, what makes the flavor of a beer unique is the combination of the type of yeast, the type of grain, and the number and types of hop that you put into the mash, which is the yeast and grain mixture. Jesse: Now, the word "extraction" means "to take out," right? Andrew: Yes. Jesse: So, you're trying to take out the sugar from the rice, or the corn, or the... Andrew: Barley. Jesse: ...or the barley. Andrew: Or wheat, sometimes. Jesse: Now, isn't the water also really important? The quality of the water? Andrew: It is definitely true that some places have more flavorful water than others. So, depending on where your water is from, it might have more sulfur in it, it might be more clear, or in some places like big cities such as Los Angeles, California the water is very processed and cleaned and doesn't have a very crisp or clear flavor, and that definitely impacts the flavor of the beer, unless you treat the water or clean it; and, so it depends on what the brewery does to prepare the water before the beer is made. Jesse: When I went to Vietnam a couple of months ago, one of the things I was really excited about was that in Ho Chi Minh City they have a microbrewery. Andrew: One... Jesse: One, which is a big step for many reasons. One, it means that there are more people in Vietnam who are exploring different tastes. The popular beers in Vietnam are Heineken, Tiger, Saigon Beer, Hanoi Beer, and these are macrobrews, right? Andrew: Yes. Jesse: They're made in large quantities and sold throughout the country, if not the entire region of Southeast Asia. Andrew: Right, and they also have the same characteristics of most of those more popular, more broadly distributed beers, and that is that they are very mild in flavor and in taste, and so there is a lot of room to make things more interesting with a microbrew where you can use more specific ingredients to get something interesting. Jesse: There was a small microbrew bar in District 2 that I went to. Now, their selection was very small--that's fine. They had about 10 or 12 different kinds of microbrew, and I had the chance to try about three. I was really excited because, again, you and I really appreciate microbrews. I think the biggest challenge that microbrews have in Vietnam, especially at a bar, is being able to serve them cold. Now it's of course very hot in Vietnam, and you want your beers to remain as cold as possible. Andrew: Yes. Jesse: However, when you order a pint of a microbrew in Vietnam, it gets warm really quickly... Andrew: Right. Jesse: ...and the common practice in Vietnam is to put ice in your beer... Andrew: Oh no... Jesse: But, you don't do that with microbrews; that ruins everything about how the beer was made and the flavor, right? Andrew: It definitely changes the balance and makes the flavor weaker. And, much like watering down tea or watering down coffee makes it taste less rich and less full, the same thing happens with beer. And, especially beer because beer is carbonated--they're the fizzy bubbles in it--and when you put the ice in it removes most of that carbonation, and the bubbles actually have a flavor to them. The carbon dioxide tastes a bit bitter, and it adds to the overall taste, and when you put the ice in, it gets more watery, less flavorful, and less bitter, all at the same time, which never works out well. Jesse: One of the things I really love about our city is that we can legally make our own beer. Andrew: Yes. Jesse: We can't sell it, right? But, we can make it and share it with friends. Andrew: Right, it's called "home brewing" or "homebrew." Jesse: Right, so we have macrobrew, microbrew, we also have nanobrew, and then we have homebrew. Andrew: Right. Jesse: Again, the homebrew cannot be sold to anybody. Macro, micro, and nano can. Andrew: And, nanobrew..."nano" just means "very small," whereas "micro" means "small," so it's an even smaller brewery. And, really the only difference between a nano brewery and a home brewery is that they have gotten the permission to sell the beer that they make, as well as be making it in a small establishment, or even a kitchen. Jesse: How many times have you make beer at your house? Andrew: Oh gosh. Probably 10-20 times. Jesse: And, what is your favorite style of beer that you make at your house? Andrew: I almost always make IPAs, which stands for India Pale Ale. It is a type of recipe for beer that uses a lot of very strong hops in it. And the reason for that is that originally the hops were added to the beer because it keeps the beer safe to drink even if the water has gone bad. So, on long ship voyages, the British would bring beer along for the trip, but it would go bad unless they added extra hops. And, so this style of beer was sent on the ships that were going all the way across the world to India, the very long trips where the normal beer would go bad. That style has been taken over by the western United States and western Canada, and they have made it even more strong and even more flavorful, and the hops they use are even richer and have even more interesting tastes to them. And, that has become the main style that is made here and then my very favorite style, as well. Jesse: In Seattle, we have a lot of microbreweries, and we even have a few nanobreweries, as well. Andrew: Oh, many. Yes. Jesse: Our favorite store to go to is a place called Chucks. Andrew: Yes. Jesse: And at Chucks they have fifty different kinds of microbrews on tap. Andrew: Right, and they're different every time because they bring one batch in, and as soon as it's empty they bring another one to replace it. So, there's always something new to try. Jesse: Right. If you ever visit Seattle, and for the listening audience I hope you do, when you come to Seattle, if you like beer, or even if you're curious about different kinds of beer, talk to us. We will happily take you to Chucks. Andrew: I can't wait to see you. 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.

“There are a million paths to motherhood and there is no right way or wrong way. It is just your way.”Jesse Truelove with @movewithtruelove joins us on the podcast today and drops some serious truth bombs about birth, fitness, social media, and motherhood. We couldn't be happier to have her with us and for you to hear the important messages she has to share! Our mission at The VBAC Link is to empower ALL women in their birthing choices, whatever they may be. We applaud all women for choosing the birth path that is best for THEM. There is no right or wrong way to give birth! Additional linksInstagram Live with Jesse and TVLBirth Words: Language For a Better Birth PodcastVBAC vs Repeat C-Section BlogMove with Truelove: Jesse's websiteAB Rehab courseMove Your BumpFull transcriptNote: All transcripts are edited to correct grammar, false starts, and filler words. Meagan: Happy Wednesday, everybody. You are listening to The VBAC Link. This is Meagan. Julie is on with us and we have a special guest. Her name is Jesse Truelove. We are excited to talk about her episode today because this is something that is actually a first for The VBAC Link. We were just chatting a little bit before. We were like, “Why haven't we had this happen?” because this is totally what we talk about, what we teach about in our courses, and this episode is where she had an emergency C-section, ended up recovering from a really difficult delivery and had very little support. And really, for her next child, when all was said and done, she decided to have a repeat C-section.And I love this. I love this because as The VBAC Link, as Meagan and Julie-- yes, I am talking for you, Julie. We are all about everybody making the best choice for them. That may not be a VBAC. Some people may not choose to have a VBAC. One of my best friends has had three C-sections. The first one was unexpected, two were scheduled. I love and support her in that even though that is not what I chose to do. I chose to VBAC. I support her in that and I am so grateful that she had that opportunity.So we are really excited to dive into this episode today and hear her story. She has done so much good in the world. After her births, she decided to dedicate her focus to helping moms recover fully from their pregnancy and delivery. We are going to talk all about that in the end because she has got some pretty cool stuff that she is in charge of.Review of the WeekMeagan: But of course, we have a Review of the Week before we dive right into it.Julie: All right, yes. The Review of the Week. This is kind of a long one, but I really feel like it goes in line with this episode. I'm going to tell you about how I shamelessly stalked Jesse after this. But this review was actually an email. We got an email from Christina T. We really love getting emails from people who we have helped along the way, and so if you want to reach out to us through Messenger, or email, or Instagram Messages, or leave a review on Apple Podcasts, or Google, or Facebook, or wherever you want. We reply to all of the email messages and DM's that we do get. We love talking to people and hearing their stories. This is a long one, so bear with me, but I really like it. She says: “I wanted to tell you about my repeat C-section. On the podcast, I have heard that term so many times. ‘Hold space.' For me, that's what you ladies have been preparing me for these nine months without me knowing it. For holding space. “For nine months, I prepped for the VBAC of my dreams. I listened to every podcast, was a member of the Facebook group, did ‘all of the things to prepare for the birth I thought I so desperately needed. I was ready to have an unmedicated birth and to roar my baby into this world. At 32 weeks, we found out baby was breech. I had been going to the chiropractor twice a week and felt confident he would flip. He did not flip. I then started to kick on my Spinning Babies®, got acupuncture, did everything online I could come up with and he still would not flip. “Around this time was the week you guys had your repeat C-section podcast and for me, it was a sign to start mentally preparing for what might not be. I spent the next few weeks switching my mindset from feeling sorry for myself and switching it to feeling strong. It was during those weeks I thought to myself, ‘What am I missing? All of this education and research can't have been for nothing.' “That's when it clicked for me. I had been preparing to hold space for what won't be and I have the tools to do that. We scheduled my C-section and when March 8th came, I was as ready as I was going to be. The anesthesiologist came to the room and I knew it was going to be a wonderful experience. Prior to this baby, we had suffered two losses in a row. We needed to have a D&C for the second loss and all day, different staff members asked me to state in my own words what procedure I was having. Each time I would break into tears as it was a very difficult thing.“My doctor came into pre-op and instead of asking the same questions, he simply said, ‘I am sorry you are here for this procedure. Are you doing okay?' The same kind, genuine man was going to be my anesthesiologist now. When I first walked into the OR, my stomach dropped. It was bright, cold, and sterile just like last time. My doctor must have sensed my heightened awareness and said, ‘Your baby is coming.' And with that, I was ready. “We were able to drop the drapes, watch our son come into the world, and have skin-to-skin right away. It was night-and-day from our first experience. It was joyful and blissful, and I left a feeling like a mom and not a patient. I left feeling confident and like a bad-ass. I left holding space for my experience and for our story, and I will be forever grateful for that gift from you ladies. “Birth doesn't always go as planned. Sometimes it is better.”And now, that gives me chills at the end. “Birth doesn't always go as planned. Sometimes it's better.”Meagan: I love that. Sometimes it's better.Julie: I'm going to make that into an image.Meagan: Yes. Let's make that an image and quote her because that same thing. I just got the chills.Julie: I know. I have goosebumps.Meagan: I was like, “Yes.” Sometimes it doesn't go as planned, but it's better. Yeah. I feel like I can connect to that even with my second C-section. I didn't want that second C-section, but guess what? It was such an amazing experience and it healed my first birth experience.Julie: Yeah. I love that.Meagan: I love it. Awesome.Julie: All right. Well, let me tell a little bit of a funny story and then I promise I won't take up much more time. Jesse, we did an Instagram Live with her on her Instagram page.Jesse: It's still there.Julie: Yeah, @movewithtruelove, right? That's what it's called? It was really fun. This was a long time ago. We followed her and I just love her content. She has great content. Super fun. Her reels are amazing. I just love seeing her bright, beautiful face as I scroll through our feed and everything. I just have really enjoyed following along with her Instagram. I knew that she had a Cesarean and that she was pregnant again. I don't even know this whole story, but at some point along the way, Jesse decided that she was going to have a repeat Cesarean instead of attempting a VBAC. I was like, “Oh my gosh. Okay, this is really cool. I need to follow along and see how this all ends up,” because we haven't ever had a story on our podcast about somebody who had decided to have a repeat Cesarean.Meagan: Even though there are tons of people out there.Julie: Even though there are lots of people that do all the time.Meagan: Tons, yeah.Julie: All of our C-section stories--Meagan: In fact, a large chunk of people, the majority do.Julie: Yes. Yes, and we have had three VBAC stories where people have tried for a TOLAC and then ended in a repeat Cesarean, but we have never had somebody that has decided during their pregnancy that a Cesarean was the right way for them to go. And so I was so excited. I am like, “Oh my gosh. I need to follow up with this. I need to make sure she's on my radar,” and then she announced her cute little birth story was on a little reel on her Instagram page. You need to go find it. It is the cutest thing ever. I knew that she had her baby and she had a C-section, and then I was like, “Oh my gosh. I want her to share her story on the podcast, but I don't know if she will be open to it,” because I know, from what I picked up from the reels, it wasn't an easy decision to make. I didn't want to overstep my boundaries. She is super cool and way bigger than us on Instagram. I feel so small and tiny, but one day, I am like, “Okay. I'm just going to reach out, and I'm just going to say how much I love her, and how excited I am that she had a really good birth experience and that I would love to share her story on the podcast if she would like to.” And she said, “Yes.”Jesse: Oh my gosh. I only got good vibes from our last conversation and I literally wanted you guys to do my VBAC. That's what I wanted.Julie: Yeah.Jesse: It was a big change for me. It was definitely a mind shift, but it wasn't as big of a deal as I realized it was once I put it out there on social media.Julie: Well, and I'm sure you got a lot of support. I don't know. Maybe there were some people, but I mean social media. As we are getting bigger, there are people that argue with us and disagree with us all the time. But I just love that you were confident in your decision. You just radiated that security and that confidence. I think that that's what we all want going to birth is just being confident and feeling supported. That's the vibe I got from you when you were talking about it and sharing your birth story and things like that.Julie: Without taking up too much more time, first of all, thank you so much. I'm so excited to have you share your story and to listen to you share about that decision that you made. Then we are going to talk a little bit afterwards about when it might be a good idea to choose a repeat C-section, and then Jesse is going to share some of her really awesome resources.Meagan: Awesome stuff. Yeah.Jesse's storyJulie: Yes. She has lots of really cool stuff. So hang in there with us because this is a really really good story and you want to hear what she has to say at the end. All right, Jesse, you've got it.Jesse: Okay, thanks so much, guys, for having me. I am actually really, really honored to be on your podcast. I had such a good experience chatting with you guys. It felt so, so natural the first time we did it, so it was a very easy “yes” for me.So I guess I will start out with my first C-section which really has paved the way for everything that I am doing now. Really, everything about motherhood has shaped everything that I do now. With my first pregnancy, I was working out really hard. I have been a personal trainer since 2014 specializing in women's fitness. I have taught in multiple states boot camp, and circuit classes, and personal training for abs, and all kinds of stuff, but it wasn't until my own delivery really, because I had a fairly easy pregnancy in respects to working out. I was very active, and so I thought in my head, I had this very clear picture of what my birth story was going to look like. It just seemed really, really easy to picture what it was going to be. I thought if anybody could, this is a really weird thought to have, but if anybody could have a natural birth and if anybody could do it successfully-- it didn't even cross my mind that a C-section could be in my future. Meanwhile, I am the oldest of six kids and my mom has had four kids via C-section. So pretty interesting that I never thought it was going to cross my path.I went Into my delivery, like I said, with a very clear picture of what my birth story was going to look like and it quite literally went the exact opposite. I was in labor for 26 hours. I was bleeding. I got a uterine infection. I had a fever. My placenta was failing. Heart rate was dropping for the baby. They broke my water. I got Pitocin. It was literally my worst nightmare and I was so, so exhausted by the time that my doctor-- well, I couldn't have my midwife anymore who had been with me the entire time. By the end of the 26 hours, I had the OB come in. He was checking me for dilation and I just wasn't dilating. They gave me Pitocin and they broke my water. I think I got to maybe an 8 or a 9 and it just wasn't happening. And then contractions slowed down and I really was so exhausted. He came in. He was checking me for dilation and he asked me to push. I was just so out of it. I didn't even know how to push. I feel like if it's such a medical experience, you go in and you are hooked up to these monitors, it just doesn't feel natural. It feels really really medical.Julie: Yeah.Jesse: Especially when doctors are coming in and nurses are coming in checking your blood pressure, and you've got those monitors, and beeping, and honking, and all of the stuff going on. You don't even know what's actually happening with your own body and then I had an epidural by that point as well, and so you know how an epidural feels. You could kind of feel the contractions coming and going but it's not even close. So your doctor asks you to push and you have no idea what he's talking about. Push what? Most women don't even know what the pelvic floor is and I was one of those women. Before my pregnancy, I was lifting and pushing some heavy weight. I was deadlifting 255. I am a five-foot person. That is a lot of weight for a tiny person and I didn't have the mindset of function.I had one picture of what fit looked like, one picture of what strength looked like, and it was not anything of what strength really is. Motherhood taught me that. He asked me to push and I didn't know what he was talking about. He goes, “Oh. You can't do this. You are going to need a C-section.”Julie: What?Jesse: “It's going to be C-sections from now on.”Meagan: Whoa.Jesse: I laid there completely drugged out of my mind. I look at my husband and tears are just welling up in my face. I could cry just thinking about it. My husband is-- you know, we think that we are the strongest people we know. We love each other so much. He wanted to take that whole experience on himself and it was killing him that he couldn't. He put on a brave face. It is hard for husbands too. They go through this with you and it is so much. He looked at me and he was like, “It's going to be okay. We just have to do what we have to do.” In my head, I am already thinking of the future. I'm like, “What do you mean? All my next pregnancies are going to be a C-section?” I feel like it was the worst possible time to lay that on me and it's just the standard of care. It's just not there for moms. So the OR doctor left. He was assembling his team and the anesthesiologist had to be called in. We are in the middle of nowhere out here in the Oklahoma Panhandle so they have to call the team in. They're not just there waiting for you if something goes wrong. So we are waiting for the team. I am laying there and all I could think was, “I have totally and completely failed before I even got to start. My body has totally failed me and I don't even know. I am supposed to be able to do this. This is what I was made to do and he just told me I can't now and I'm never going to be able to.”That stuck with me forever. And then, we are getting ready for the C-section. I have never had any kind of surgery ever. Never, ever, ever, and so I am terrified. I was already terrified to give birth and now I am terrified to go be cut open. And so they had me hunched over-- oh no, this was after I had my epidural. So they changed it over to where they just have to keep pumping the epidural in, so it wasn't a spinal tap. They put me onto the new table. They strapped me down to the table, which was another thing I didn't expect to happen either. It is all such a mental hurdle to get over. You're like, “Wait. They don't tell you any of this going in.”Julie: Yeah.Jesse: But that just all adds to the mental trauma of, “You have no control in this. We are strapping you down. You are numb. You can't have your baby the way you wanted to. You are getting wheeled out of the room you just got comfortable in. Your husband has to wait out here.” It was hard. It was so hard.And so, anyways. We get rolled into the OR room. Just like your mama said previously in that story you were sharing, it was cold. It was sterile. A bunch of people that you don't know are in there. Your husband is not in there. You get placed onto the table. You get strapped down. You get the blue sheet at your neck and it's an emergency situation because the heart rate is dropping. I had a fever of 103 because they had checked me so many times.Meagan: Wow. Wow.Jesse: I had gotten an infection literally while I was there within 24 hours in my uterus and that's why I was on antibiotics for probably-- I was in the hospital for five days. I was on antibiotics the whole time which, you know. Antibiotics, just the additional medicine. I'm not one to even pop an Advil for a headache, so it was just a lot.So they are doing the surgery. It was all very fast. It was a ton of pressure. A ton of pressure, relief when they took the baby out. They sewed me up pretty quick. Again, I had no idea what was happening afterwards, so they took Radley out and I could hear her screaming. In that moment, it is all totally worth it. It is all worth it because even at the end of your emergency, traumatic, C-section, you still get a baby. The baby that you have been dreaming about for nine months, the baby I've been dreaming about-- for me, it was since I was a teenager. Me and my husband have been together for 12 years, since high school, and we had been talking about our kids forever. So in that moment, I am like, “Oh. I could do it again. I could do it 1000 times the same exact way. I would go through everything the same because at the end of your really shitty experience if it is shitty-- which mine was-- it's still worth it.So they brought the baby over to Shane. Shane just put her on my face because that's the only skin I had accessible. They didn't tell me about skin-to-skin. They didn't drop the curtain. I didn't get to see anything and I felt like I missed out. I felt like I got gypped in my birthing experience, which I did. I think that's okay for moms to feel. I feel like there's so much judgment around feeling what you feel about your birth. I feel like a lot of moms, and myself included-- I didn't talk about my first C-section for a long time and I didn't feel comfortable in sharing the fact that I wasn't just grateful for my baby being alive, but I was really pissed. I was mad about my C-section. I was mad about how I was spoken to. I was mad that I felt like my body had failed me.Nobody made that feel valid for me. Nobody asked how I was really doing. Because after pregnancy, I feel like a lot of moms can attest to this, it stops being about you and it goes all to the baby. You get one check-up postpartum and then that's it. At my six-week check-up, they didn't even check me internally. I got the magic check at six weeks like, “You are good to go to back to whatever you were doing before you got pregnant,” and so I went back to doing those things. I realized quickly that my idea of strength and my idea of being fit was so terribly wrong.I had never felt like more of a stranger in my own body. I got home with this new baby that was beautiful and perfect and I had a brutal recovery from being in labor for so long, and the infection, and all of that, and then recovering from a C-section and major surgery. They don't really explain that to you in the respects that you should be getting rehab postpartum to be rebuilding connections with those muscles, and movement patterns, and muscle recruitment patterns, and all of those things. And so I went into my recovery pretty blind. I realized quickly that moms don't get much support at all through anything postpartum.And then I got really educated and I built courses for moms to rehab their own bodies postpartum, everything that they need. I realized that moms don't need a six-pack, even though if you want one, it's totally possible. What we need to be able to do is sneeze without peeing our pants and nobody could have told me how to do that. There wasn't that information really out there. It was really just Kegels and if Kegels don't work, get a surgery. Another surgery. There's just a lot of room for improvement out there for the standard of care for moms and that's what I get to do now. And so I love that.And then in my interim between my next pregnancy, I had a lot of focus in my mind and talking with my family, and talking to you guys that I wanted to have a VBAC, that I was confident that was just a one-off thing, and that I was going to be able to have a VBAC, and it was going to be successful, and that's what I was going to try for, and all of those things. And then once I actually got pregnant, we did experience one loss after my first baby and we had a miscarriage. I got pregnant pretty quickly afterwards. I was discussing with my husband what we are going to do because you just don't know what you're going to do until you are there.So once I was pregnant and thinking about where we were going to deliver, who was going to do the surgery because the OB that did my C-section the first time didn't live here anymore, which probably was better because this doctor that I got this time is just amazing. And then after I met him, I felt a lot more comfortable with choosing another C-section. After going over my options with him-- which I think is super important. If you want to choose a C-section just because you want to choose one, you have those reasons in your mind about why that is a better choice for you and that should be okay. Those should be valid reasons. But I did ask him some things trying to get his medical opinion on what was the best choice for me even though in my head after I was sitting in the hospital, I was like, “I really don't want to be stuck in the same position that I was last time. I don't want to be in labor for 26 hours to get stuck again and to have to go through another labor, the C-section, and a surgery, and then have to go home and take care of two babies.” And that, in my head, was really important to me to still be able to do everything I needed to do and not have such a tough recovery because I remember my recovery being so, so hard from basically going through two deliveries. The 26 hours of labor and feeling all of that, and then going through my emergency C-section.So when I was talking to him, he basically gave me some options. He did mention uterine rupture. I know the odds are very low, but like I said, we are in the middle of nowhere. He personally had seen some uterine ruptures happen and you just don't know that they are happening until baby's heart rate is dropping and for us, that risk of not having a team on staff because the hospital is so small, that risk of having to call a team just wasn't worth it to me. I had to weigh the options and weigh the risks between a repeat Cesarean, which there are risks and the risks of trying to labor and then ending up in the same position that I was in last time.And so we ended up choosing a repeat Cesarean and I felt really comfortable with that knowing that I was going to be scheduled, knowing that my mom was going to be in town, and being able to watch my other daughter. That was really important to me. My daughter's experience through us being gone because we have never left her with anybody before. I just had a ton of stress surrounding that. Not to say that the second C-section didn't bring me a lot of stress too. I don't know why I had this irrational fear, and moms are really good at this, that I was going to die. I had this irrational fear that I was going to go into surgery and not come out for my toddler.You don't have that fear going into the first one of not getting back to somebody, so that was really hard for me. I was shaking like a leaf laying on the table going in for our scheduled C-section for River, my second daughter. It's funny because just like the mom that you mentioned earlier in the beginning of this show, you can get really lucky with the staff that you have for your experience and I totally lucked out. My anesthesiologist felt like family. It's funny to say because you meet them, and they come in and tell you the risks and stuff for the spinal block and all that, and they talk to you, and you are like, “Gosh, I am so scared but for some reason, you just are calming those nerves.” I think it is so important to have that type of support team. You can just tell this guy had daughters. I went into the OR room. They were in there. I'm leaning over my nurse's shoulder and she is just holding me. They are putting in the spinal tap and they laid me down. Again, you're in there without your husband. The lights are all on, cold, sterile, they are strapping you down, and I just had this fear that I was going to die.They are working and they get her out. I hear her screaming and again, it was the most beautiful noise and sound I had ever heard. They bring her over and in that moment, it was just peace. It was so much peace and again, it was just all worth it. They clean her up and they sewed me up. My doctor was really, really careful with my C-section scar which was really important to me too for adhesions and making sure that everything was sewed up very carefully. They took dad and baby out. I went to recovery and it was probably 30 minutes. I feel like that's something they don't tell moms either that you are going to be in recovery by yourself which is always a little bit sad. It was for me. I had both situations where I was in the recovery room by myself, but the feelings that I had surrounding my second C-section were not failure, were not that my body had failed. I had so much power in the choice that I had to be able to know my outcome and it did heal me from my first experience as well because I mourned that delivery. I mourned that experience that I felt like I missed out on. Even though I didn't get to have a vaginal delivery, I didn't get to have that experience, I still got to experience something beautiful and everybody came out okay.Birth words matterThat's not always the most important thing to bring up to a mom too. She is proud of her baby. She is proud that her baby is happy and healthy, but it is also really, really important to let her feel everything else. I feel like that's what this world needs more of. Instead of-- well, I didn't realize how much judgment there was around choosing a repeat C-section until I put it out there. And I was, oh my gosh. I got shamed so hard by a doula. She told me that I was saying I was too good for labor.Julie: Oh my gosh.Jesse: That labor was beneath me.Meagan: Whoa.Jesse: I thought that this was such a dangerous position for that lady to be in as a women's birth support person and her personal feelings around C-sections to a person that she does not know. She is a mother herself and to shame a mom-- I literally was trying to rationalize in my head during my own time of choosing a C-section that this was really the best thing for me and for my family. We don't have family here in town that can come and take care of our house and our baby, so we needed our family to fly in. That was a really big thing for us. We needed to make sure our toddler was taken care of. That alone could have been my only reason to choose a C-section and it should be okay because I do have other kids to take care of.Regardless, I have my own mental health to take care of and my first experience was crippling. There's nothing like looking at your body after you have this beautiful baby in your arms and thinking, “Gosh. I feel like a failure. I feel like my body failed. I feel like I can't do the one thing a woman is supposed to be able to do. I don't recognize the body that I am in.” I am supposed to be this strong fitness person. I put all this pressure on myself to bounce back. I didn't know how to do that. There's so much pressure. It is so much pressure from not only ourselves because moms do that. Women do that. But especially with social media, it can be a blessing, but it can definitely be a curse with how easy it is to access people and access very vulnerable parts of people's lives. This whole C-section conversation that I have become so passionate about talking about really stemmed from that doula's comment to me because I didn't realize that women were getting so much shame from this. It wasn't until I put my own experience out there that women were like, “You know, yes. That is me. I got shamed by my own mom. I got shamed by my best friend.” People telling me that I didn't really birth my baby. That stings as a mom. Our words quite literally carry weight to the people that we say them to whether it's a stranger, or a friend, or somebody on social media, or somebody in your family, sister-in-law, mother-in-law, all the things. There just has to be more support all around because at the end of the day, we are just moms trying to get home with our healthy baby.Julie: Yes.Jesse: And there's no shame in that no matter how you do it.Meagan: Right. We are honestly-- yeah. A healthy baby and we are wanting to stay healthy, but we are also wanting a good experience for us.Jesse: Yeah.Meagan: When I was choosing to do VBAC, I also got the backlash of, “Just schedule a C-section. Why would you do that? Why would you chance it?” I mean, it goes both ways.Jesse: You just can't win.Meagan: Literally, it doesn't have to be about birth. Vaccines, masks, no masks for COVID--Jesse: Totally.Meagan: No matter what it is, it is this battle. I wish so badly to this day that people could just take a step back, take a deep breath and say, “Okay. I know where I stand. I support where you stand whether it is the same or not.”Jesse: Yeah, totally.Meagan: Because if we could just be validated in our own choice and not be questioned and put down for making the choice that we feel is best, this world would be so much happier and less battley and snarky, right? I chose to VBAC. You chose not to VBAC. Do I think you are any less of a person? Do I think you birthed your baby any less? Hell no. That's the answer.Julie: Meagan just said “hell” on the podcast. It's the first time.Jesse: I was going to say something worse, but I didn't know if that was acceptable.Meagan: I know.Jesse: Yeah, I know. It can get a little raw in motherhood, okay guys? It's pretty crazy. There are a million paths to motherhood and there is no right way or wrong way. It is just your way.Meagan: Exactly.Julie: I love that. There are a million paths to motherhood. Hold on. I need to make some notes for some social media posts later. Hold on.Jesse: Write it down, Julie. It's pretty crazy. We are the largest population. There are so much more that connects us than what divides us. We let those, they are really just subtle and big differences, but we let them divide us. If moms would just come together, like you said, it would just be so much nicer because there is already so much pressure from other moms. We say that we want to support. We said we want to be validated, but it is usually moms that are so vicious to other moms and it's mind-blowing to me.Meagan: Which breaks my heart.Jesse: Yeah. It really is heartbreaking because we have all got the same goal and that is to raise these little people with love. Everybody has a different way to either get to motherhood, because that is a journey all in itself and one to be very cognizant of, again, with the comments. When you are going to have another baby, you really don't know the lengths that either a couple is going to be having to have a second baby or even to have their first baby.Meagan: Exactly, yeah.Jesse: Even a birth experience can really change the way if you want to have another baby or not, and recovery. If you don't feel supported for the first one, it's going to be really hard to feel supported in the second one unless something changes. I think that's what we in this field are trying to do. We are trying to change that. We are trying to change and raise the standard of care for moms because we are the population that raises the next generation, that keeps the world going. If you help moms, you help the future and that's what we are trying to do. That's what every mom deserves.Meagan: Wow. Yeah. I'm going to roll back even to what your provider said. He was like, “Oh, you're going to have to have a C-section because you're not doing this and you're always going to have to have a C-section.” My doctor said, “You were going to for sure rupture. I'm glad you didn't do it.” Right? Those things stick with us and they impact us, and they do impact the decisions that we make and the ways that we view things. This is totally not a sponsor of ours, but Sarah Pixton has a podcast called Birth Words. It is called Birth Words: Language For a Better Birth and just like you have been talking about, these words stick with us. Even though you, as a person, may be sharing something with someone based off of how you feel or whatever, remember that that might stick with them and impact them substantially in either a positive or a negative way. And so when we as people are speaking, we need to be aware of what we are saying, how we are saying it, who we are saying it to and be respectful of everybody's decisions, and choices, and views, and like you said, what they have been through. There are a lot of people with infertility stuff who don't even talk about it because they don't feel like they can.Jesse: Yeah. Everything pretty much about motherhood, I feel like, if you don't feel like you're going to be supported, you're not going to share, and then that creates a situation where you are not going to reach out to the right people and get the support that you need--Meagan: Right.Jesse: -- which creates more unsupported moms, which creates more chances of not getting the experience you wanted because you didn't have the knowledge, and the information, and the support that you needed to possibly have the situation that you wanted to happen actually happen for you. I feel like like you said with the words that he said to me, that pushed me into this prideful position of, “Okay. I am for sure having a VBAC next time.” You know? Like, “I'm going to show you I can have a VBAC.” And then once I got there, I was like, “I don't know.”Meagan: That's actually not what I want.Jesse: That's not actually-- I don't really want to try this again because of this, this, and this. Part of that was the mental space it put me in, the mental position that I put my husband in. It's just, and now we have another baby to take care of, so that was something else to take into consideration. So yeah. Your words carry weight, so be mindful of them even if you are a stranger.Meagan: Yeah. And remember there doesn't always have to be a “because”.Jesse: Yeah.Julie: Yes.Meagan: You don't always have to say, “Well, because this.“Julie: And you don't have to justify it.Meagan: “Well, because I want it because this or I don't want to because of this.” There doesn't have to be a “because”. Because is because. Do you know what I mean?Jesse: Right.Meagan: That is the reason and it's okay and you're confident in that. So yeah. I feel like a lot of people feel like they have to defend their reasons and it's like, no. You shouldn't have to defend your reason. If you're making a choice that is best for you, that's all that matters. That's all that matters.Jesse: Yeah. If you make a mom question her decisions, question her parenthood, question her ability or reasons as a mom, that's not support. That's not advice. It's just mean. It's just mean and it's unwanted, unsolicited, not advice, but just unsolicited speaking.Meagan: I love it.Jesse: Yeah. Moms need support.Maternal mental healthJulie: Yeah. It's important. Well and not only that, but I want to take it off on a little tangent. We have a serious maternal mental health crisis in our country, especially for women one to two years postpartum. When we create this environment where women are scared to share their feelings because they feel judged and they see these comments flying around on social media or wherever about which way is the right way to give birth or all those different things, it makes them more afraid to show their feelings. It also makes them feel like their feelings are wrong. When you are in a mental state where you feel guilty about your thoughts and you feel like you can't share them without being judged, then they are going to sit inside your head and your mind, and fester, and grow.It can lead to really long-term complications. I think we all know that mental health affects our physical health as well, and so we are having moms that are literally getting sick because they are not supported in their decisions. I am sure you have seen this too, Jesse. You have a big social media presence. Our social media presence is getting bigger all the time. I find the bigger that we get the more we get these people that seem like they just want to argue with whatever we say, or they take one little thing and pick it apart, right? I know I have texted Meagan a couple of times because I have anxiety over here. I'm working on it, but sometimes some things really upset me. I will text Meagan and I will be like, “What do you think about this?” Meagan calms me down and lets me know that there are 500 positive comments and one negative one.Jesse: Right.Julie: But I really still even get worked up about those types of things. It's something that I have to actively work on and I'm still learning coping strategies and stuff for, but my anxiety did not start until after I had my VBAC baby which is really interesting because I had what I would describe as a perfect, textbook VBAC. It was a perfect birth and everything was as I wanted it to be, and I had really severe postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety. It was my worst mental health after any of my pregnancies. I had this beautiful birth, but I had all of these expectations I set myself up as a mother based on what other people thought and what I perceived to be the right way to be a mom. And because I could not fit this mold that I had set for myself and because I felt like I didn't have a group of people I could talk to because all of my people were in this little mold, or so I thought, right? I kept it inside and it really did a lot of damage to my mental health. I know I'm not the only one that feels like that. That's why we share stories from all different types of people in all different types of births, in all different types of decisions, from all over the world even, because we want people to know that they are not alone. It's always okay to share your feelings. It is always okay to get help and it's never okay to judge somebody else based on their decision. It's never okay.Jesse: Yeah. I can totally relate to the comment stuff. I honestly can't even go to my comments. I've got a really strong group of moms here and, like you said, it's usually not even from people that are following you. They're not even coming to your page because they like your content.Julie: Oh yeah. They see one post.Jesse: Yeah. They're not coming because they like you. They're coming because you're triggering them. Because the people that I do see, I end up blocking them because I don't want anything negative that they say to affect a mom on my page.Julie: We do that too.Jesse: Or to read the comments or see it, so I will block them. But they are not even following me and I find it so intriguing, like, “Why are you here?”Julie: Yes.Jesse: Why are you here? What are you looking to get? It's usually because just they don't feel supported in their choices in their life, so they are attacking you for your choices or whatever. But yeah. The comment section is a dangerous place to be especially if the post has been up for a while. So every once in a while, I will go back and then I'm like, “Why did I do that?” Because you know? It's just toxic. But I think if I had one piece of advice for a new mom, it would be just to not read every book,  not ask everybody what they did because moms have an intuition and they just need to feed into that a little bit more. Just trust your gut. If you have got a stomachache about something, it's your second brain trying to be like, “Your first brain is not listening to you. I am going to make you throw up over it and I'm telling you, something is wrong here. Something is not right.” If it doesn't sit well with you, the mom, you get to be the deciding factor and if somebody is giving you advice and it doesn't feel quite right, it's not good advice for you.Meagan: For you. Yes, exactly.Jesse: For you, yeah. And that's exactly it. Just because you're getting advice from your mom, just because you're getting advice from your best friend who also has a kid, you're probably also going to get advice from your friend that doesn't have a kid that's imagining how they would be as a parent-- which that always is great-- just because you're getting all that advice, it doesn't mean it is the right advice for you, and your situation, and your kids, and you as a mom. So my advice is to take what you need and ditch what you don't. If you like something that somebody is doing if you like something that your mom told you, or your friend, or your grandma, or whoever, take it. And if the other parts of it don't align with your vision of how you see yourself being a mom, or how you plan on birthing kids or all of the things, just ditch that. It is going to feel so much better if you have that confidence to just put your foot down and be like, “No. I am the mom. This is how it's going to be.” I feel like we need to support moms in those decisions also. Because for some reason, we feel like, “I don't want to be rude, so I'm just going to let this happen.” But it's either your feelings or their feelings and I don't think the mom should have to sacrifice her feelings around her kids, around her birth experience, around everything else because, at the end of the day, it's your experience. It's your journey. It looks a little bit different for everybody else.Julie: And if you see some content on social media that you don't agree with, just scroll along. It's okay.Jesse: You do not have to comment. You don't. I promise. I promise you don't have to leave your opinion.Julie: Well, we hate to cut it off short. I feel like this is something we could talk about forever. But I did want to say that sometimes it is a hard thing to decide whether to try for a vaginal birth after a Cesarean or to schedule a repeat Cesarean. Neither choice is a bad choice, but we did write a blog about how to decide if an elective C-section is best for you and your baby. Jesse, you said, “Don't read all the books,” but you can read this one blog. We are going to drop a link for that blog in our bio or you can just go to our website, to thevbaclink.com, and just search for “elective C-section” and it will be a link there. It will list medical reasons for repeat C-sections and also reasons why people might choose to have an elective Cesarean. There is no right answer for you and like Jesse said, there are a million ways to motherhood.Meagan: There's no wrong answer.Move with TrueloveJulie: There's no wrong answer. But before we go, we do want Jesse to share a little bit more about some of the stuff that she does and how you can find and follow her, because we know you love her by now just as much as we do.Jesse: Aw, thanks, guys.Meagan: Well, and I think that this information that you are going to share is so powerful because it really isn't paid attention to enough. So tell us all about what you have got your toes and hands dipped into.Jesse: Okay, perfect. Yeah, so I have got my own page. It's Move with Truelove. You guys got plugged into that at the beginning of this, but I am also very deeply connected to Nancy Anderson and if you are in the prenatal/postpartum field or realm or if you are a mom, you need to know what we are doing over here. So I am the Program Director and Head Coach for the Move Your Bump app and that is our prenatal and postnatal fitness and nutrition app. We've got over 400 on-demand coached follow-along workouts of every style, every fitness level. We have got multiple, multiple expert coaches that always have your bump in mind. We focus on minimizing excessive diastasis which is the ab separation, which became this really hot topic on social media, but there are about a thousand ways you can get it. We really focus on the prevention of that during pregnancy to help you have a more comfortable pregnancy, but more importantly, we are training you for labor because it is the hardest workout of your life. Whether you are a vaginal delivery mom or a C-section mom, it is going to be a fight and you want to make sure that you are training properly.We also prepare you for a faster recovery and we do that through the Move Your Bump app through workouts, through breathwork routines, through focusing on posture, troubleshooting issues that we see most commonly in prenatal mamas. We also have challenges throughout our app with private Facebook group communities, with thousands of other moms throughout the world that are connected through their sharing bump pics and checking in for progress, and then also the ability to win prizes there. So it is super fun.Meagan: And there's something starting on the third, right? You guys are doing a challenge starting on the third. Is that right?Jesse: Yes. Yeah. We have a bump challenge.Julie: The third of what?Meagan: It's the third of May.Jesse: Of May.Julie: Well, this episode isn't going to air until June.Meagan: But do you do those often?Jesse: We do. We do them every single month, the first Monday of every month. We do multiple challenges. We have a Before Your Bump challenge, which is our trying-to-conceive challenge and we have got all kinds of information on stress management, fertility, hormones, nutrition to optimize your fertility, as well as fitness. We want to make sure that we are staying nice and strong and focusing on the things that are most important to not only support a pregnancy but also recover from your delivery.We also do through the Birth Recovery Center, which is our umbrella company that is going to be having multiple courses including things like sleep support, lactation consultants, mental health, all kinds of stuff that moms are going to need through their journey. So the hero product there is the AB Rehab course. That's our 12-week postpartum recovery course. It helps you to recover and heal fully from your delivery whether you are a C-section mom or a vaginal mom, whether you delivered 10 weeks, 10 months, or 10 years ago. This program is basically for everybody with a pelvic floor, so that's everybody.We focus on the foundational work, on the reasons why diastasis happens in the first place. Pregnancy is definitely something to recover from as well as your delivery because so much is changing in such a short amount of time. Birth is basically a lot of trauma to the body which takes a lot of rehab and a lot of specific coaching, specific protocols to make sure that we are addressing everything that happens during pregnancy and during delivery. So we will focus on postural imbalances, posture habits that happen during pregnancy, and then even pre-pregnancy, probably a lot of these muscle imbalances you have had before you were even pregnant. Pregnancy just has a really good job of showing us where our weaknesses are because we are trying to support a big bump growing out in front of us and our balance changes. Pressure changes, so imbalance, and muscle weaknesses, and compensations tend to really present themselves in the forefront during pregnancy and then stick around postpartum if we are not actively working to correct them. So through the 12-week course, we focus on posture. We focus on breathing patterns which are huge. We focus on the pelvic floor, not only function but the ability to connect with the pelvic floor and lower abs, which we really don't have a lot of access to during pregnancy if you are not actively working to keep that connection. That's why a lot of moms are left with a lower belly pooch or feeling like you can never really turn on your lower abs. That's muscle dysfunction.We have thousands of moms. We probably have about 5-8000 moms join our course every single month, every single challenge. We coach all of them through video communication, through our course, through video assessments. We have a whole entire team of course specialists that help customize the 12-week course to specific needs because like we said, there are a million roads to motherhood, there are a million roads to recovery too and that can't be done with a one-size-fits-all course, which is why we are so passionate about the ability to customize this course with troubleshooting videos if you have a hypertonic or hypotonic pelvic floor or whether you have developed prolapse. There's a lot of things that are happening postpartum and we address a lot of them. We also have an in-house DPT on our staff who can work to coach you through some more difficult things that need a higher level of expertise. So we really are just helping to raise the standard of care for moms postpartum. Moms deserve all of the support and it really does take a village to do that, and so that is why we have got our hands in all the cookie jars with lactation, and sleep, and birth path, and mental health, and of course, our 12-week AB Rehab, as well as nutrition. We have a little bit of everything and we are working to be the top providers for that since we are already doing that with AB Rehab.Meagan: Love it.Jesse: Yeah. We are really proud of it.Meagan: Oh my gosh. So much goodness in there. So awesome. Oh, well thank you so much for sharing your story, and your wisdom, and, obviously, that awesome course, courses. So we really appreciate you. We love your face and we just can't wait to continue our relationship.Jesse: Right back at ya. Thank you so much for having me.Julie: Absolutely. Thank you.ClosingWould you like to be a guest on the podcast? Head over to thevbaclink.com/share and submit your story. For all things VBAC, including online and in-person VBAC classes, The VBAC Link blog, and Julie and Meagan's bios, head over to thevbaclink.com. Congratulations on starting your journey of learning and discovery with The VBAC Link.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy