Podcast appearances and mentions of jim barksdale

 Luis Garcia - The Journey Story of a Learning Technologist Kicking off this episode with Luis Garcia by sharing a memorable quote by Jim Barksdale. "If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine.” How true is that? Our lives are now measured consistently by data. How many clicks, impressions, shares, comments, open rate, and more. What does the data reveal about human behavior? People also have opinions and those matter because they reflect so much insight. Different ways of thinking, knowledge, experience, wisdom, problems and solutions. Luis kicked off the show by sharing that his love of learning started at an early age. He began learning how to program when he was 7 years old. His parents wanted him to focus on that as a career path. As he got older he discovered his real passion for music - FYI, he plays the guitar and keyboard. He and his twin brother came to the US with his parents visiting colleges with a focus on computer programming. The family visited top tier Ivey League schools and decided to visit Orlando on the way back. That is when Luis and his brother toured Full Sail. Now another twist in the career roller coaster happened. FS launched a new degree in digital media. This was a combination of music, graphics with a dash of virtual reality technology.  To hear more about Luis career story, thoughts about 2030 and AI, listen to the WHOLE show. This one is an exciting story.  #iHeartRadio #ApplePodcasts #GooglePlay #Spotify #Stitcher #Podbean #YouTube #Employers4Change #E4C #internships #radio #podcast #innovation #employers #smallbusiness #business #FutureOfWork #ValenciaCollegeRadio  

Join us as we welcome internet marketing titan, Perry Belcher, to the AM/PM Podcast! Listen in as we journey through Perry's remarkable career path - from humble beginnings before turning to digital marketing. Perry's illustrious career even saw him get a personal call from none other than Jeff Bezos himself, a short story you don't want to miss!   The conversation continues with Perry reflecting on the rise and fall of his business and partnerships. His journey, marked by selling health supplements to launching a digital marketing business, and finally starting the Driven Mastermind and the War Room, is an insightful one for any entrepreneur. Our chat also covers the importance of joining a mastermind group, the benefits it can bring, and how it can help you gain a broad perspective of different industries.   Lastly, Perry shares fascinating insights about the role of AI in business, specifically in copywriting. From reducing labor costs to crafting compelling headlines and stories, the potential applications of AI are far-reaching. He also discusses misconceptions people have about AI and the opportunities it presents. Tune in for a riveting discussion about the intersection of AI, E-commerce, and internet marketing. In episode 365 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Perry discuss: 09:22 - Success in Real Estate and Selling 16:45 - Running Successful Events 23:30 - The Value of Networking and Collaboration 29:55 - Selling Event Recordings for Profit 34:19 - Cash Prize Incentives for Speakers 39:00 - Leveraging Email Lists for Business Success 42:06 - Artificial Intelligence And Its Impact On Internet Marketing 53:21 - Other Mindblowing AI Capabilities 57:27 - AI's Role in Various Industries 1:07:38 - Follow Perry on Facebook for Updates 1:09:46 - Kevin's Words Of Wisdom Kevin King: Welcome to episode 365 of the AEM PM podcast. My guest this week is none other than the famous Perry Belcher. If you don't know who Perry is, perry is one of the top internet marketers, probably one of the top copywriters in the world today. He's got his hands in all kinds of stuff, from newsletters to AI, to print on demand to funnels, to you name it. In marketing, Perry's either got tremendous amount of experience in it or he's heavily involved in it right now. We talked some shop today and just go kind of all over the place on some really cool, interesting topics. I think you're getting a lot from this episode, so I hope you enjoy it. And don't forget, if you haven't yet, be sure to sign up for the Billion Dollar Sellers Newsletter. It's at billiondollarsellerswithaness.com. It's totally free. New issue every Monday and Thursday. It's getting rave reviews from people in the industry and some of the top people in the industry as well as people just getting started. So it's got a little bit different take on it and just a lot of information. Plus, we have a little bit of fun as well in the newsletter. So hopefully you can join us at billiondollarsellers.com. Enjoy today's episode with Perry. Perry Belcher, welcome to the AM/PM Podcast. It's an honor to have you on here. How's?   Perry: it going, man, Dr King, esquire at all. I'm doing great, buddy, I'm doing great. I'm just trying to survive this hot, hot, hot summer that we're all having, you know.   Kevin King: Well, you're out there in Vegas. Y'all had floods, right. I was seeing some stuff on TikTok, like some of the casino garages and stuff were flooding.   Perry: Yeah, there were some floods out here, so it's been. We got like years worth of rain in two days or something like that, they said, which we could stand. It didn't hurt. But the hot weather out here is just the way that it is. You get used to it after a little while.   Kevin King: Yeah, it's the same in Austin. It's like 108, I think today, and I know you know, football season just recently started and everybody's complaining that they're doing a game. One of the first games was in the middle of the afternoon, like 2.30 in the afternoon and like man, half these people are going to be dying out there, you better have some extra medical. You know supposed to do these things at night in Texas during September.   Perry: My kid did in the middle of the day and he had some days that they were kids passing out, you know. So I don't miss the heat in Austin. I'll take the heat in Vegas instead. It's different kind of heat to me.   Kevin King: Yeah, it's not. It's more of a dry heat, not that, not that human heat that we have here. I'll take it so for those. There's some probably some people listening that don't know. They're like who's this? Perry Belcher character? I never heard of this Perry Belcher guy and if you haven't, you've probably been living on a rock in internet marketing, because Perry Belcher is one of the living legends out there and when it comes to internet marketing, it's not just he dabbles on Amazon, but it's Amazon's just a little piece of what he does. He does a ton of other stuff. So, and you've been doing this since you're like, you've been an entrepreneur since you're like I don't know, three years old. I heard you selling hot dogs. I mean, you've pretty much done, everything from run from selling hot dogs to running, I don't know jewelry, pear shops or something, to having little kiosk in the mall, to crazy kind of stuff. I mean, just for those that don't know who the heck you are, just give a little bit about your background.   Perry: Sure, I'm world famous in Kazakhstan. I started out, you know, I grew up really poor in little town in Kentucky, paducah. It's a sound of dead body makes when it hits the floor. And I'll as soon as I could. I stayed there until I could drive. I could drive a car. I got the heck out of there and went to the big city, nashville, you know, and I got into, you know, early on I got into retail and I owned 42 jewelry stores. At one time when I was really, really young, before I was old enough to buy beer, I owned 42 jewelry stores. Isn't that crazy? That's crazy. Not that I didn't buy beer, but as long as I was legally buying beer Exactly. You know. So I was in retail. I went out of, you know, eventually I made three different runs and retailed it, Okay, and then I got into manufacturing. I found I really enjoyed manufacturing Great deal. I still do a lot of manufacturing, as you know and then along, I guess about 1997, for those young whippersnappers that were born about then that are on in your Amazon crowd right In 1997, they invented this thing called the interwebs and Jeff Bezos started a store called Amazon and I sort of got. I sort of got all caught up in the web thing. And you probably don't know this story. It was a true story, Kevin. I got a call from Jeff Bezos when I owned craftstorecom, so this was in probably 1998 or 1999. I got a personal call from Jeff Bezos wanting to talk to me about buying craftstorecom and rolling it into the Amazon family. And then they were only selling books, they were bleeding I don't even know $100 million, a quarter, or some crazy number. And I'm like dude, you're, I'm reading about you, you're losing money, I'm making money. You know, I think you got this reversed. I probably should buy you. I swear to God, I said that. Yeah yeah, I said that that was about best I can figure about a $750 million mistake.   Kevin King: Well, it's funny you say that, because I mean we go back, we're old school when it comes to way, before you know all this internet marketing craze. We were doing old school marketing, you know, by by putting a postage stamp on an envelope and sending it out. And I remember I have a couple of similar stories back around that same time, early late 90s, early 2000s. The guy at MySpace had just started somewhere around in there and those guys reached out to me. I had a newsletter, an online newsletter going at the time, and they reached out to me to do something and I turned. I just ignored them. I was like what's this MySpace thing? I never heard of it.   Perry: I did the same thing with Jim Barksdale. You know who that was. Yeah, yeah, barksdale wanted to buy one of my companies and I blew them off, and he was Netscape you know they also used to do back you might remember this back.   Kevin King: I had several different websites and to get traffic back before there was Google and all these. You know, this SEO and all this stuff is basically as Alta Vista and you know, I love that, I love that Yahoo and all these guys and you could just just by putting stuff in the meta tags, you'd rank, you know on top of the crap out of yeah. You put a text down at the bottom and all the good, all the good, all the good all the good, all that kind of stuff. But I one of the things, what you might remember this there is what's called ring sites. So in order to get traffic, you go to some guy would figure out how to get people to his site and then it would be like next or previous, and you'd hit a button and it would go to the next, previous, and then we had a newsletter that was doing about 250,000 emails a day back before can spam and all that stuff and to get traffic to it. You know, we were getting on Howard Stern Show when he was on terrestrial radio and we were doing all kinds of crazy stuff. But I was working with a site called BOMAS B-O-M-I-S and they had one of these ring sites and we they were like one of our top sources of traffic and I just remember there's two guys there running out of their apartment or something. I talked to one of them. This is like probably around 2000 or so, ish, 2001. He said, hey, you're going to be dealing with me from now on. My buddy is moving on. I'm like all right. I said James is moving on. I said, ok, cool, what's he going to do? He said I don't know, some sort of encyclopedia or something. I'm not sure what he's going to do. He's got some some crazy idea. Turns out it was Jimmy Wells from Wikipedia. I was actually working with Jimmy Wells from Wikipedia before he was Jimmy Wells from Wikipedia. Isn't that crazy? It's crazy, I mean the stories that we can tell from the early days of the Internet.   Perry: When I look back, I just can't. You know my buddy's favorite saying, and I've adopted this I can't believe how stupid I was two weeks ago.   You know like you. Just you just realize you know just the boneheaded stuff that you did when there was so much opportunity. The first domain I ever bought this was like just when domain registrations came out I bought formulas, the number four you oh wow com, the most worthless domain anyone could ever own, when I could have probably bought internet.com Pretend to buy anything and I bought the most boneheaded stuff. You know.   Kevin King: Well, you remember the guy that he got in early he bought was at sex.com or something for, like you know, 10 bucks or whatever it cost to register it back then before there was a go daddy, yeah, and remember the fight like 20 years ago over that domain because it became like the most valuable domain on the entire Internet or something. Remember that huge fight about that.   Perry: It was. It was crazy, but I know there's been a bunch of those stories. Man, I've got some friends that really did well buying domain real estate early on. I bought a lot. I mean I've, over time, I still think domains are a bargain. I really do Most. For the most part, I own stuff like sewing.com and makeuptutorials.com and diyprojects.com. I still own some big stuff that we operate and I own a bunch of other big stuff that we don't operate and you know I'm buying after markets.   Now I bought conventions.com for a little over $400,000 two weeks before COVID Boy. That timing was extraordinary. You know what could go wrong. Conventions are impervious to depression and so anyway, yeah, so I started buying. You know I got a manufacturing and I immediately saw the benefit of online selling because you could cut out all the different layers of middlemen in the in between the consumer and the manufacturer. So I've been a manufacturer selling direct to consumer for a long time. And then I got. I got in business with Ryan Dice. After I got in a lot of trouble, almost went to jail in the supplement business scares me to death to this day. You know I lost everything I had, almost went to the clink, and when that all got settled out I went to business with Ryan Dice and we he turned me on really to the information selling world.   Kevin King: How'd you guys meet up? Was it at some events, or did you just meet up? Yeah, we met up.   Perry: Yeah, I'll tell you, the story is pretty funny story. So we met at a Yonix Silver event. We went to dinner with, you know, all these millionaires, you know in the room, the millionaire mastermind people, and we went to this big dinner and we had like 20 people at the dinner and when the check came it was like, well, I only had a salad, well, I only had the soup, and you know they're all dividing up checks and crap. And I'm like, come on and Ryan looked at me and I looked at him. He said do you just want to pay this bill and get the hell out of here? And I said, yeah, so we split the bill. And that's how we became friends, how we met. And then, you know, when I we knew each other through Yonix and then when I got in trouble in the supplement business, I mean, I had loads of friends when you're, when you're now and when you're when you're netting out half million dollars a month and you're flying all your friends on private jets, the Thomas and crap on the weekends, boy, you got lots of friends, you know. And as soon as the money ran out, well, guess what? The friends ran out. You know, you know everything was, you know. Nobody knew who I was. Then, you know, and Ryan called me and said hey, man, I got this business in Austin. It's doing a couple million dollars a year. If you'll come help me run it, I'll give you half of it. Oh, wow, and we did $9 million in the first seven months.   Kevin King: And that was a digital marketer. For those of you that don't know, that's correct.   Perry: Yeah, it was called touch tone publishing then, but eventually we rebranded it became digital marketer and then out of digital marketer came traffic and conversion summit and out of traffic and conversion summit came the war room mastermind and we ran all three of those for years. And digital we sold a TNC to a Claire and Blackstone Blackstone group about four years ago, I guess. Then I sold my interest in digital marketer to Ryan and Ryan, roland, richard about two years ago and then we dissolved war room about a year ago I guess they were going a different direction and and Kossim Islam and Jason Flylon I started driven mastermind so but yeah, it was a great, great run with. Those guys are super good, guys are super, super smart and we were business partners for 14 years long time. It's a long. That's a you know outlast a long time.   Kevin King: That's a long time in this business longer than all my marriages, almost divine, you know. So going just down. We'll talk about some of those in just a second, but just down that back what? What got you in trouble in the supplement business was it claims that you just didn't realize you couldn't be. Yeah, what was the it?   Perry: was kind of a combination. I was. I was legitimately a pharmaceutical manufacturer. We were an FDA pharmaceutical manufacturer. I got all the licensure and all that I got in trouble with the state had nothing to do with the federal. They called in federal, they called in DA, they called in everybody, like guys. Everything he's doing is correct. But the state took issue to some claims and what ended up happening? They realized that they had not. The thing is, once the state gets their tentacles into you and have your money, you know it's really hard to get rid of them, right? They're like a tick. But. But at the end of the day, the only thing that that that they actually that stuck was something called ways and measures. So that meant that my equipment wasn't precise enough to put the exact amount of product per bottle. So let's say it says it's two ounces right, mine might be 2.1 or 1.9 ounces right, and that's there's. There are state laws about that. They're called ways and measures laws. They're governed by the people who manage gas pumps, if you could believe it. But out of everything that they originally said that I was doing, they dropped everything else and that was the only thing that actually, at the end of the day, was it? But I had to settle it and they got all my money and all my stuff and left me three million dollars in debt. And when, when I went to Austin and we hustled hard, you know, for a couple of years, and I paid all that off, I didn't file bankruptcy on it and it was hilarious because I threw a Perry's broke party. Yeah, about two years in, when I got to zero, I got back to just broke. I wasn't three million dollars, right. I threw a giant Perry's broke party as maybe one of the most fun parties we've ever had. It was a little you're in.   Kevin King: Austin's, you do that out at Willie Nelson's ranch. Because, I was tapes, remember he did that when he got in trouble for seven million bucks and he did some sort of big ass fundraising party out. He has this like old ranch out West of Texas, west of Austin that's. It's got a studio lot on it, basically an old.   Perry: House. Then I just had it right over the house and we had a big pool party and, oh my Lord, so many drunk people. It was a lot of fun, it was good time, so I got a lot of friends at Austin and you'll talk digital marketer.   Kevin King: the conference from like. I think the first one's a few hundred people to what the? Now it's five, six thousand people, or yeah, we get the biggest internet for if you're an internet marketing, yeah, just in in general, it's not just Amazon, it's like across the board, it's the biggest one out there, I think.   Perry: Yeah, before the year before COVID, I think we had the biggest year was seventy two hundred. Oh wow, seventy two hundred, seventy eight hundred, I can't remember. They thought we were going to ten thousand the next year and they rented the Coliseum in San Diego instead of the hotels. And then, of course, covid yeah, and it was just a you know, two or three years we had sold just prior to that. So have we not have sold that first year of COVID? I think was probably around a five million dollar loss, but they had clear and had insurance for it, fortunately. So I don't think they. I don't. I don't know the exact damage, but I know it would have probably wiped us out and we've been because we had a refund. Tickets with In the venue would not have soft to hook and I was a big bunch of crap when it comes to running conferences.   Kevin King: I mean, I do my billion dollar solar summit. You do your events now, like you do. You've done the couple AI summits, you've done the Perry's weird event or whatever. You do quite a different things. You have the Whatever, whatever, whatever. You done like three of those which are fascinating. You do, you know, you have the driven mastermind and you're involved with digital market and our space. There's a ton of people it's almost gotten through Events for Amazon sellers, like everybody. Everybody in their dog wants to have an event and the vast majority of them suck. There's like seven people there they can't sell tickets that are losing their shirt. Very few of them actually make money. What is the key actually, if you want to do an event or you're thinking about that to actually making these things work, is it the long term play you gotta have? The upsell is at the.   Perry: Well, events, events are very, very much an uphill battle. That's the reason. When you go to sell one, they have a lot of value. If you go to, if you build an event to a thousand, two thousand people, it has a lot of value in the exit market because once an event hits a certain inflection point, they're insanely profitable. So you're so, like digital market, we lost money On TNC for probably the first four years that we did it. But the way we made up for it, we filmed all of the sessions and we sold them as individual products. So we built all of our. We had a thing that really made that thing magical, because every session had to be good enough to sell as a product. So it made the event itself, you know, great because you had to have executable do this, do this, do this, do this. It couldn't just be a fluffy talk, right. Every talk had to be good enough to sell as a product when Ryan and I were doing them. So for the first three or four years we didn't make hardly any money, but we generated a lot of product out of that. We sold throughout the year. So we, you know, we did make money a couple million dollars a year From the product sales and then over time, as the attendance goes up, the ticket prices tend to go up. You start at really low ticket prices and you ratchet ticket prices up as the event gets bigger and bigger, bigger, and you start taking on sponsors and we basically got to the point by the time that we sold. You don't really want to sell right, because the sponsors were paying for 80 90% of the cost to put on the event. Tickets were you then over a thousand dollars a ticket? We were selling 7000 tickets. You didn't really need to sell, you know, because you the event was paid for by the sponsors. The ticket sales money was just free money. And then whatever you do at the event, you know in sales is even more free money. But when you look at companies like Clary on the by these things, they don't care about the product creation, they don't care about selling at the event, they only care about tickets and they make a lot of money on hotel rooms. So they so in when, when they're promoting they got a lot of cash, so they'll buy all the hotel rooms in downtown San Diego a year before we, right before we, now we announced the dates, they buy all the rooms and then when you're buying your room from bookingcom or American Express or whatever, you're actually buying that ticket from Clary on, because Clary on in a lot of cases bought all the rooms in the city for $120 a night and then a year later you're paying 350 on AmEx and they just pay AmEx a commission, a 20% commission.   Kevin King: That's different than the way when I do like for a billion dollar so much in order to not have to pay you know, $3,000 to turn the Internet on in the ballroom, or to have to per day, or from not having to pay for the ballrooms or this or that. We have to do guarantees. Rather than buying the rooms up front, we have to guarantee that we're going to put 50 butts in the in these beds or whatever. If we don't, we get penalized, you know, yeah, right.   Perry: We did a little bit different model. Yeah, we did, we did too. You still have room blocks, you know, and the killer and the killer in the convention businesses contract negotiation and room blocks. You know, if you can get room blocks down, we did one recently at the ARIA and I didn't have a room block anywhere because the ARIA surrounded by like eight hotels within walking distance, so there's no reason to book a room block. Everybody could stay where they wanted within that complex and the room blocks Everybody could stay where they wanted within that complex. And then we got together and it didn't. It didn't create the problem, but you know they get you. Would they charge you more for F&B? So they, they're going to get you right. So I've got my own event center now I've got a 50 person event center. I think we're going to expand to 100 people and and I really prefer having smaller workshops anyway, they're they're more intimate, they're more effective and if you're going to sell something else to the attendees, the smaller the room, the higher your conversion rates will always be if you're offering something to the attendees.   Kevin King: That's true, yeah, so then you took it from there to the mastermind you did the war room for a long time and I know my buddies, Manny  and Guillermo, at Helium 10. They joined the war room about two years into working on helium 10. They said that was the number one life changing thing that they did.   Perry: They killed it to that.   Kevin King: I don't know the numbers, but I know it's. I see what he's spending and what he's doing, so I'm like it's some serious numbers. But they they attribute that to war room, because there was some. Y'all did one event and I think it was in Austin, actually around 2018 ish, and it was all about system. Whatever the talk was on that one, because they're quarterly, they were quarterly deals. I think it was all about systemizing and getting out your way and like cutting all the riffraff. I don't, but they said that was. It was game changing for them and made them tens of millions of dollars. So, but to join a war room was what 30 grand, I know driven was what you have now which I've been driven 30 grand.   Perry: Yeah, I've been to.   Kevin King: I've been to driven. I went to the one back in July which was excellent out in LA and and I love going to these. Those of you are listening. You know this is not an Amazon conference. A lot of us go to Amazon conferences, but I think the best conferences for me are actually the non Amazon conferences, because I go into something like a driven where there's yeah, there's a handful of Amazon people there, but there's also a bunch of Facebook people. There's also a bunch of domain people, there's SEO people, there's people that you know just have some sort of a shop in Baltimore that you know do internet marketing and you, you meet this range of people and for me it's brainstorming sessions. I'm uninterrupted. You know if I'm watching stuff online, even the recording of that, you know I got phone calls coming in, the dogs barking. You know wife's nagging, whatever it may be. You're interrupted. But you're sitting in a room from nine to five, obviously not in the room. You're sitting in a room From nine to five listening to people, these people talking a lot of it. You might already know, some of it may be new to you, but you're just in there. One guy says something, perry says something, and then Kazim says something, and then Jason says something, and whoever else the speaker says something, you start going. If I put all these things together and I can do this for my business, holy shit, this is freaking incredible. And so that's. These people look at me. And why the heck would I pay 25 or 30 grand to be in some sort of event? And if in the Amazon space, I personally wouldn't, because I'm going to be the one delivering most of the value in a lot of cases. And so why would I pay to join something? They should be paying me to come to it. But when you go to something where it's a cross section of people in the marketing world that all think like you but they do different things, I think that's the most valuable thing, would you? Would you agree?   Perry: I think honestly, I think in a good mastermind and that there's that good being in parenthesis and a good mastermind. I don't think you can lose money. I think it's almost impossible. I've made money in every mastermind I've ever been in you just, I like the idea of the diversity, right. I might learn something from a guy in the funeral industry that can be applied to somebody that's selling weight loss, right. You never know. And you know my benefit. I guess I've been around a long time, like you, kevin, I've been around the block a bunch and I've been fortunate enough to work with like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of businesses Pretty intimately in the, in the, the war room and now driven setting, and you know I get to see what's working and what's not working from like a 10,000 foot view inside all these businesses. So for me personally it's a great benefit that I get to learn something from really diverse. You know I learned the other day I was talking to a friend of mine, a client, that that they're in the, they sell online, that you book an appointment, you know they call you in, whatever, and they're in an industry that I have no interest in, no knowledge of, right. But they figured out that if they once somebody's booked an appointment, if they put a zoom, a live zoom, on the thank you page with somebody sitting there going hey, kevin, so glad you booked your appointment. By the way, jimmy can take you right now if you want, right. That one thing those, those people are coming in that way, or converting nine times higher than the people who book a normal sales call. And the beautiful thing now is.   Kevin King: You can do that with AI. There's tools with AI where you could actually, when they fill in that form I'm registered, I'm Kevin air dot AI and all that yeah, several and one that you could actually and you could put in you upload a spreadsheet or tie it into. You know, through an API to your, your cell system, that Jenny is available and it can actually, as I'm typing in, kevin King it's in the background recording a video with with Perry saying hey, hi, kevin, this is Perry. I glad you just signed up. Jenny's available right now. It's all automated and all like holy cow how to help her is just sitting around it and you know the conversions on that go through the roof.   Perry: Oh, they're nutty and but that's something I learned from a person who's in the like the the trauma they. They serve trauma psychiatrists, that's their market and I'm like I would never know that in a million years. Right, but but how many other businesses or clients of mine could that one tactic be applicable to? The answers? A lot, right, so you. So, when you go into those rooms where you know to be in driven, you got to be doing at least a million a year, but I think our average is around seven million a year gross and, and some you know up to, you know there's there's some hundred million dollar Folks and big players in there. There's some big players there, but you but nobody's stupid, right? You're in a room full of really, really smart people when they're basically telling you what they're doing. I joke about. I get paid for people to tell me. I get paid for really smart people to tell me what they're doing. That's really working and what I right, what a great gig I got right. But, yeah, we've been doing it for a really long time there. Those groups masterminds are hard to keep together and Keep happy and all that there because they are, because they're intimate, people share a lot of details and sometimes you have personality, kind of little things. This is crazy nutty stuff. That happens that you, the only problem with those things are just, they're a, they're a bit to, they're a bit to manage and you know that, as far as the 30 grand goes, or 50 grand, or 70. I know a lot of people charge. I know a buddy mine charge is 70,000 a year. You know we act like that's a lot of money but everybody's got an idiot on their payroll that there's a more than 30 grand to, I promise you. Everybody does. Everybody has a dodo on their payroll that they should have fired a long time ago but he brings the doughnuts or something and you don't farm that. Would you rather have that dodo licking stamps four hours a day or would you rather, you know, have access to some of the smartest people and your peers and you know really Really that? Keep you accountable, keep you on your toes and keep you up to date, because we do a call every week along with the meeting. So I I'm not pitching it down, I don't. This is sound like I'm hey, go buy my thing, but no matter what the industry you're in, get into a mastermind group. If you can, it'll one that you can afford.   Kevin King: You know ours is out of reach for most people because they're they're not because it's they can afford it, because they just don't meet the minimum sales, like you said, like you know, if you're at a one million and you said the average is around seven, you know, for 30 grand a year, all you need is one, one little idea, one thing, just you, just the ROI could be immense on just one thing.   Perry: I've heard a hundred times and I got all my value for the year within the first two hours. The first meeting yeah, you know, I've heard that so many times because this Kevin King gets up and talks and says something really smart and you go. Well, that was worth it, right, I got. I learned a thing that I didn't know and and, like you said, when you're doing, the beauty is the reason we don't take people that aren't doing a lot of money yet. It's hard to ROI. But if you're already doing let's say you're doing seven million a year and you get an idea that gives you a 5% bump, right, let's 350 grand, yeah for an idea. And you, you know, you're in for a year. You're in for 52 calls and four live meetings and Intensives and networks and private calls and all kinds of stuff. It's you know and I'm not saying for us, just for any man mind if you get a good mastermind, you can't lose money if you, if you have a good enough business already that you can ROI.   Kevin King: One of the things that you do that's really cool too is, like you said. You know, with digital market and I agree that you know you're recording it, turning it into content you do that now. Well, you'll do a Like that, the weird event you you straight up say, hey, come out to this thing. Yeah, it's gonna be a hundred of you here, but I'm recording this. I'm gonna turn this into a product. Yeah, you turn it into six products. You know, and I didn't with my billion dollar seller summit. I didn't used to record those, but now that's half the prop. That's where the actual the profit is. It's actually in recording it and then selling it to the people that didn't come. But one of the cool things that you do, like it driven and some of your other events your AI event you did this. I think you do it. Probably pretty much everyone I've ever been to is at the end you say get the kick the cameras out of the room, turn everything off. Let's grab a bottle of wine. You sit up with the stage. You might bring a couple other your partners or the couple other speakers and it's just two hours, three hours. They're just shooting the shit of Q&A and, yeah, stuff that comes out of that Alone pays for the entire event.   Perry: Yeah, the unplugged we've we've been doing unplugged forever because at the end of most events, you know, you still have unanswered questions and I don't want people to have unanswered questions. But also some people just don't want to talk about, they don't feel comfortable talking about the particulars of their business on camera. Yeah, so you know, if they because you know, sometimes a lot of my students are also Gurus, right, and you know how gurus are they don't want to tell you that. Well, they don't want to tell you that they're having a hard time making the lease payment on Because they're pretty ill, hurt their image, right, I talk about all of my screw ups and Almost going to jail and going broke and all it, because you know it's real, that's the real of people. But but a lot of the guru guy, well, I can't say that because it was just destroying my image. So I like doing unplugged sessions a lot of times because they people feel a little more comfortable talking about their challenges and Without feeling like it changes their position. And I think sometimes, just, you know, people don't want to ask their question on a microphone in front of a thousand people for fear of embarrassment. And what if my questions? A dumb question. So when you're just sitting down Slugging back a beer and you know chatting they feel more comfortable asking the questions. They probably should be asking it we I've done that as a policy for a really long time. We do wicked smart and we do unplugged, and those are the two. You know we always ask for the best idea in the room, and that that was a funny story.   Wicked smart was invented the first year that Ryan and I did Traffin conversion summit. We programmed three days worth of content for a three-day event and At 11 o'clock on the third day we were out. We'd have anything else to talk about. We actually we had miscalculated our time and we have anything else to talk about. So we went to lunch and we said man, we got to fill all afternoon. What are we gonna do? And and and I don't know if Ryan or I are together, I think we pretty much together we came up with the idea let's just challenge people to come up and tell us the smartest thing They've learned in the last six months and how it affected their business, and let's give whoever gives the best idea. And I think the first person that came up, ryan or I won Jeff Mulligan's, a good friend of ours and he's from as a former boss tonight lives in New Hampshire and he always says wicked smart, that's wicked smart, you know. And yeah, and the first person came up and they did their thing was whoo, that's wicked smart and that's stuck. And that's how wicked smart got started. But we never did unplugged. I used to do unplugged with Andy Jenkins at Stompernet years ago when I would. I used to go speak for them every now and then and one of the things that I did was really, really cool was called unplugged and we just Andy and I, would sit down on the edge of the stage. I don't, andy was brilliant. I don't know if you ever knew him or not. He was absolutely a really really brilliant guy and he and I would sit on the edge of the stage and talk to people for hours. You know it was a lot of fun. So I kind of picked that up from Andy.   Kevin King: Yeah, I do that at the billion dollar source. I'm not do a hat contest, so the last day, what well? I do two things. I incentivize the speakers to bring it, so I put a cash prize on the speakers. So, because I don't want them doing the same presentation they just did it three other conferences or same thing they talked about on podcast I want them to bring their a game, so I put a five thousand dollar cash prize on the first and twenty five hundred on second. It's voted on the last day. I'm ineligible. I always speak last, so I'm ineligible.   But all the other speakers that I invite after the last one spoke, everybody votes On who they thought was the best speaker, deliver the best value, and then that person gets five grand. So it's become like an honor to do that and then, as a result, everybody is bringing next level stuff that they normally wouldn't talk about. Because, and then I publish the list of the and you know, if there's 15 speakers I Public, I start at number 10. I don't show number 11 through 15. I want to embarrass somebody totally, but I start at number 10 and go backwards and announce them up like it's. You know, like it's a billboard top 100 or something, casey casem or whatever and it works really really well because Everybody's. If you're not in the top 10 of a speaker, you're like you know you didn't do so well, you didn't resonate, and then you're not coming back if you need a spelling of my name for the check. You've been involved in AI for like seven years before. It was the cool thing to do, I think probably six yeah, probably six years.   Perry: I got. I spoke on AI at the largest TNC, that one before COVID. I spoke on AI and showed Jarvis and Well said labs and a bunch of those before Anybody or anything, and and everybody in the room was just blown away by it and I feel certain they didn't do anything at all when the dog, you know. But I was using it for copywriting and we were building services For and like this AI bot that were it'll be after this Heirs, but but this AI bot, you know, we're really concentrating more on the business models that you can apply AI to. So the first AI bot summit was all about Opening people's minds up to it, so they understood what it was, understanding how to use the tools and and really just grasping this. One thought of If you had 10,000 really smart people willing to work for you 24 hours a day for free, what would you have them do? That's always my question, because with AI and a little bit of robotics, that's what you have. You have an unlimited amount of Robotic slaves to do your bidding right, whatever you want, and they don't take breaks and they don't break up with a boyfriend and they don't sue you for, you know, workplace compliance issues and all that stuff and, and you're gonna see, I think it's already happening. It's just people aren't exposed to it in mainstream yet, but Corporate is projecting like huge profits over the next few years as they Diminish the amount of workers, physical workers they haven't replaced with AI Elon Musk whether you like him or not, you know, cut the workforce at Twitter by 90% and arguably, the experience for the end user hasn't changed.   Kevin King: Yeah right, yeah, it's, it's your event back in just to tell a quick little story. Then we'll go into this. But your event back in April. You're showing some business uses. You know you're talking about the army of 10,000. You showed something about a. You know here's a building, the payroll of this building and use AI and the payroll goes from I don't know some crazy number of a million dollars a month to 86 dollars a month or what some exaggerate there.   Perry: It's the Empire State Building and the payroll. The daily payroll in the Empire State Building is about I I'm gonna paraphrase, I don't remember the numbers, but it's about a million dollars or more a day and the average worker output 750 words of text a day in white collar America. So if you translate that into the cost of open AI to generate the same 750 words, it's about 42 bucks, I think yeah, it's like you know it's it's in 42 I mean for all of them, not for one of all of you know 42 bucks or 92, but it wasn't much.   Kevin King: It was less than less than 200 dollars, I think, to generate the same amount of work product one of the things that you talked about there were newsletters and like how AI can automate a lot of newsletters and and I'm a I'm gonna disagree with you a little bit there on where you can actually have. I think at that time you may have changed your tune now I'm not sure. But you're like let AI do all the writing, do everything. You can just put these things on autopilot and I think that's definitely possible, but the quality sucks and for the most part, unless you're just assembling links. But if, but, but. What you said there actually about newsletters got me thinking. It's backed on that same thing we're talking about earlier bringing this all together. Here is where, about going to events. It's like you know what I used to run a newsletter in the late 90s and early 2000s that we that had 250,000 daily subscribers. We crushed it as using that as a lead magnet to sell memberships, to sell physical products, to sell everything. What, if you know? And this Amazon product space, everybody's always trying to build audiences and they're always like go build a Facebook group, go Create a blog post and you, as you know, the most valuable asset in any business as your customer list, your email list, your Custom list and be able to use that when you want, as you please. And you can't do that on social media. You have no control with algorithms on Facebook, you know, have no control over how many people see your LinkedIn post or or anything. But with an email list or a customer base database, you do. I was like, wait a second, what if we took newsletters and did this with physical products and actually to build audiences? So if I'm selling a dog products and I happen to have sustainable dog products, I'm like what if I build an audience? A dog, the dog markets half of America. That's too big. Well, if I niche that down to some people who ends dogs and sustainability, create a newsletter for them. I'm not trying to sell them anything. This is not a promotional email from my company saying, hey, look at our latest product, here's our new things. But it's more of a about the dogs, about dog training, dog tips, food tips, whatever. And then occasionally spreeking on some affiliate links To test things or you maybe even get a sponsorship. So make this thing self-sustaining and when you're ready to launch a product, you have an avid, rabid, loyal fan base to launch that product to as like this is the way to actually build things. So we I started looking into it Devoured everything you you showed about newsletters. You even set up a special tele I think it was telegram Newsletter channel, devoured everything in there. I went out, devoured everything in the newsletter space for three months, like everything is like. I already know this stuff, but I want to re educate myself on the latest tools, the latest strategies, and I just launched one In August, august 14th for the Amazon space. That's that I already have an audience there. Let me figure this out. Let me, like, figure out what are the best tools, the best systems, and then I can spread this to across multiple industries, multiple things, and that's what we're doing now and it's hugely Successful so far. And and AI is a part of that. But I'm not letting AI write it. AI is more of the, the creative side. It's how it it will rewrite something. If I'm trying to think of a headline, I'm like what's a better way to say X, y, z? I'll type in what's a better way, you know, to say we're ten ways that there are funny and catchy, in the tone of Perry Belcher, whatever it may be, to say this you know, give me all these cool ideas and then I mix and match, or sometimes it nails it, or I'll write a. I do a six you, you talked about this and one of your things the six second video, and so the beginning of every one of my newsletters is a six second, basic six second story. It's a personal story About me. It's something about me meeting Michael Jordan, spending a night with him in a sweet and Atlantic City the day before the night before he first retired, and you know it's crazy. Stories are about my divorce or about you know, so you're a naked girl on the balcony. I know it's, it's edgy, crazy story. But then I tie that back into the physical products and I'll use AI sometimes, maybe to help tweak that. Or if we got it some scientific document from Amazon about how the algorithm works, I'll use it to read the document, summarize it and then, you know, rewrite it with a human touch and add personality to it. So that's where using AI in other industries. I think it is brilliant. Most people aren't getting that right now. Most people just think of it as this is a threat to my job, this is a threat to you, this is the terminators coming to kill me and take over the world.   Perry: So what about? Everything's a conspiracy theory.   Kevin King: Yeah, I mean AI. I was just had just had a chat in August, so it's my father's 82nd birthday and I was sitting there for an hour explaining AI to you know, an 82 year old and a 79 year old in their mind was just, they're just was blown. They're like how do you know all this? This is, this is like science fiction movies or something, and like this is what you can do with it. And most people don't understand that. What are your thoughts on on AI right now and how people are misunderstanding or misusing and what are the best opportunities out there?   Perry: Well, circling back to your newsletter thing that the AI sucks for newsletters, it depends on the kind of newsletter you're writing.   Kevin King: That's what I said. If it's a link, newsletter or something, you can do it.   Perry: If it's a, if it's an aggregated or what you call a link newsletter, what I call a curated newsletter, they add as a really good job at writing basically a tweet and then linking to the article, and you do that like eight or nine times and you got a newsletter. But did you see the one?   Kevin King: the hustle, I think it's. They did a study. Like people are saying that. I don't know if you saw this from the hustle, but the hustle actually hired a guy, he went out and he did Let me see if I can fully automate a newsletter 100% AI so they had their programmers do some stuff and they put it out. It was about the nineties. So they would take today. You know, if today is, you know, April 6th, no, august 6th 2023, they would do August 6th 1993. What happened on that day? You know? Jurassic.   Perry: Park, the whole movie.   Kevin King: But the thing is it was repeating itself. The way it was writing was like all it was just you got to have, you got to have ins that.   Perry: Do a final review. I mean you got to have a human still, do a final review. Yeah, we've got a system. So Chad, my partner Chad, built a software system we're about to launch actually it's called Letterman and it we manage 18 newsletters a day through it and we do it with three outsourcers.   Kevin King: And the way that we do it is we hand out the we handpick what we're going to talk about.   Perry: So basically, we have a bunch of API feeds that tell us these are the stories that are trending about this subject today, and then our guys can go in and just hit, click, click, yes, yes, yes, no, yes, yes, no, delay, delay, delay. So maybe for a future issue, and then it's going to pull together those links and drop them into our software and then the software reads the article and then writes a like a tweet, that tells them to go, that compels them to go read this article. The call to action is compelling them to read the article. Right?   Kevin King: So that's SDO, then something really. It's a. Or is it a newsletter? It's a newsletter.   Perry: So this all goes into a newsletter and basically like, for instance, financials, a great example. The capitalists is ours and we want them to be able to get the gist of, like the Wall Street Journal and three thumbs swipes. And even though we're only writing, there might be 10 links in here. Right, we're writing like 140 characters on each link, compelling you to go click the link, and AI is writing that.   Kevin King: Okay.   Perry: And then they're going over and reading the actual article on the original source, right, okay, so so it's expanded.   Kevin King: It's an expanded judge report or something. It's exactly what it is.   Perry: It's not. It's not even kind of like it. It's exactly what it is Now the opposite. That's only really useful if you have a news worthy topic. Yeah. News or financial or something that's not for entertainment, financial entertainment, sports, politics things that change every single day. But if you're in the Amazon space, you got to think about it more like a, a magazine.   Kevin King: That's what I do, yeah.   Perry: So what we'll do there is find a feature article or three features. Three feature articles is even better. So we'll, let's say, for instance, my things on Amazon, and I'm talking about optimizing the perfect Amazon listing, right? I don't know whatever, but I'd go find three, the three best articles I could possibly find on that subject anywhere in the world, feed them into the AI, have them read all three and then write me a new article. And oftentimes the way we keep it interesting, we have characters, ghost writers created that right in the style of whomever right. So, but I mean really detailed. But one of the things that we found, Kevin, that's killing right now that you might find is our email list. I'm on a mission to get my email list to never send a promotion ever.   Kevin King: That's what I'm on to. I'm on to yeah.   Perry: So the way I do it is by sending out content, so like Perry might send out an email. You're doing it every day right now.   Kevin King: I get an email from you every day on copywriting Big, long email right. Yeah, big long. No, I save them. They're valuable. I mean, some of them go into my swap file.   Perry: It's a subtle.   Kevin King: It's a subtle like you're staying top of mind. You're doing it. Dan Kennedy does it right now and there's a couple others. He's doing that with Russell, but I and they're valuable. You can just read that and never do another thing. But it's you're staying top of mind and then you'll put in something OPS, remember the AI summits coming or whatever that stuff works.   Perry: But what's about to happen with those lists and we're doing another list right now is, once you open that thing about headline writing right, I can fire off a straight up promotion to you.   Kevin King: Yeah, you're segmenting based on what I click and what I do open and read Instantly.   Perry: So you're opening reading my article, right? So you just read my article about headlines and then the. Then you close that article down close that email. The next email in your queue is from me going hey, fibs, copywriting course is 50% off today. Great deal, and you're already so pre-framed to that. The open, the open rate on that second email is like 70 to 80%. Yeah, yeah, we're doing that.   Kevin King: We're going to do that in the product space, where we will watch what people click and if they're always looking on the docs and story, we'll start feeding them more docs. And there's a tool out there, there's a what. There's a tool that does this for the AMA right now, that that does newsletters, where it automated it watches everything and automatically get basically creates a personalized feed in a newsletter we want to Instagram.   Perry: We basically want to Instagram the newsletter business. So if you're only opening dots and stuff, then we want to deliver dots and stuff to you. If you're only delivering lip plumper articles, then we want to deliver a lip plumper off offers to you and and make the newsletter more lip related.   Kevin King: If that's your thing you're into in a makeup space, we're talking about it for newsletters, for you know Amazon sellers, but you can do this for physical products. You can do this for any industry and then leverage off of that. You see that they're always by clicking on the docs and ads. Then you start driving them to your print on demand docs and t-shirts, or you start driving them to Amazon to buy docs and bowls or whatever it's there's a guy that sells drones on Amazon.   Perry: You should have a drone newsletter. You know. You absolutely should have a drone newsletter. We say when, when Perry and I are talking about newsletters there's a big misconception in my mind.   Kevin King: Maybe you have a little bit different take on it, but so many people have what they call a newsletter. You go to their website you know the drone maker, sign up for our newsletter and the newsletter is nothing but a promotional email. It's like hey, we just announced two new parts. We just announced this to me. That's not a newsletter. That's a good one. That's not a newsletter.   Perry: That's a good one. You're not going to get deliverability on it either I mean a newsletter provides value.   Kevin King: It's like 95% value, 5% promotional. It's valued, something you want to get it to where people look forward to getting it, not, oh God dang. I just got another freaking email from drones. Or us Delete, delete, delete. They like I got to open this because they may have some cool tactic in there on how to fly my drone, you know, or in heavy winds, or whatever. Whatever it may be. That's where you got to be thinking when you're doing this, and AI is a great tool. And I always remember something you said when just as a quick aside here, it's a quote I often re-quote you on this and credit to you but you always said, when it comes to selling products on Amazon, people don't buy products on Amazon. They buy photos, absolutely, and so can you talk about just for the Amazon people.   Perry: Nobody can buy a picture. Nobody can buy anything on the internet. It's impossible. All you can do is buy a picture or something that's. Or if you're writing copy, you're creating a mental picture of a thing, right? So yeah, I'm a big believer in product photography being a giant piece of what you do and making something that's demonstrable. If you can actually show how it works in a 30 second video clip, I think that's different than anything. You know that works more powerfully than anything, because you've got to, and design I think you're seeing now is becoming more and more important the quality of your design, because we don't have any way to trust companies, right? You don't really have a way. It used to be the old Dan Kennedy world and Dan at the time was right. You know, ugly sells and pretty doesn't, right? The truth is today, pretty outsells ugly, and that's just. We've proved it eight times, eight times over. Pretty outsells ugly, and especially if you're selling a physical good, right? So don't skimp on the amount of money you spend on photography and photo editing and all those things. I was in was in Kevin interesting thing I was in Guangzhou, China, and I went to this illustration company. They do illustrations, you know. Have you been to? You've been to Yiwu before? Yeah, I've been able. Ok, so you know, upstairs in Yiwu, like on the fourth and fifth floor, it's all service companies, web companies, and I found a company up there and they were doing watches so they would take a watch. You can't take a good enough photograph of a watch for that photograph to actually work in a magazine. It's an impossibility. So what they do is they take a picture of the watch and they pull it into an illustration computer and then there's a program just for jewelry that has all of these textures and paint brushes and all that and they actually build the watch on top of the photo. They build an illustration of the watch and if you ever pick up a magazine and really look at, get a magnifying glass and look at the picture of the Rolex on the back right, you can see where there's an illustration piece cut here or there. You don't see any of the photo. They completely overlay it. But sometimes it takes these guys two weeks to set on illustrator and replace every little pixel dot. Everything is a vector and then they send that off and that.   Kevin King: But now AI can do a lot of that.   Perry: Yeah, I don't know how much I would trust it to do that, but yeah, it probably can. It can certainly enhance the photos a lot. You're seeing AI photo enhancement become a really big deal. Have you seen that thing that takes? I mentioned it at AIBotson. I'm trying to think of the name of it now Topaz.   Kevin King: Yeah.   Perry: Topazai. Well, you can take your old video footage and it'll turn it into 4K footage. It looks pretty doggone good. I mean, you take an old piece of footage that you shot 10 years ago and you run it through there and it'll give you a whole face lift and make it really appear to be a 4K footage.   Kevin King: Yeah, as Remini does that for photos, you can have some old photo or even something you downloaded, some stock image you downloaded online. It's kind of low res because they want you to go pay for the high res. Just download the low res, run it through Remini and it'll upscale it. And upscaleio is another one. There's a bunch of them and some of it's like holy cow. This is amazing stuff.   Perry: Another year from now, probably most of the things that we're using services for now will be you know you don't have to. We're making a lot of money right now in the Philippines by our outsource company uses AI to do things for people. So if you wanted an illustration of a product or whatever, you could send it to man. We're going to charge X for that, but we're actually going to use tools that cut our labor time down by 80, 90%. We haven't got it to where we can cut it all the way out yet and we still hire art directors. You know, really, but it allows you to, instead of hiring 30 B minus designers and you know an art director, you use AI and you get three or three or so, three or four really high level art directors and you don't need all the carpenters anymore. Right, and if you've seen the way they're building houses now, with the brick laying machines and all that all the carpenters, all the framers that won't be a profession in another 24 months.   Kevin King: Well, that's the scare I think that general public has when it comes to AI is like, well, it's going to take my job and so I don't want that, but look what happened in the industrial revolution, look what happened when the wheel wasn't been it. People will adapt and if you don't adapt, you're going to get left behind. And I think right now, one of the biggest skills if you're listening to this and you're, you know, in high school or college or you're young and still trying to figure you need to learn how to do prompting Prompting. I think good prompting versus okay prompting can make a world of difference with AI. As this gets more sophisticated, being good at prompting is going to be a major skill set that's high in demand. Would you agree with that?   0:55:51 - Perry: I think so. It's funny though, you know. Now you can go to open AI and say write me a mid-journey prompt. Yeah you know this and use this camera lens and this but you don't want the camera lens.   Kevin King: That's where photographers and artists right now are.   Perry: You kind of don't. You can actually have open AI right the mid-journey prompt for you. It's crazy and a lot of people are doing that and I think that's. I think prompting is going to become easier and easier, but it's still going to require imagination.   Kevin King: You know.   Perry: No, no artificial intelligence engines ever going to be able to replace imagination. You know it's not going to happen. So I think that we're we're we're fine for, you know, a good long while. I don't see it being a problem, but there's good money to be made right now with just arbitrage. You know how it is, kevin. You've been around this business long enough. When, anytime, a market is inefficient, that's when all the money's made, right, and right now you got people who need things done. Nobody wants to work, right? So you know AI is just filling the slot perfectly, so we can offer services. Now that used to be. You know, like. We'll do unlimited video editing for $2,000 a month, right? Well, we're doing 90% of that video editing with AI. If we were doing it by hand, we'd have searched $10,000 a month, right, and the end of the day, the customer doesn't care. The customer's getting the desired product delivered within a timeline. They don't really care if you did it yourself or if a robot did it. And if they do care, well, it's probably not your kind of customer, right? So all the stuff that you guys go through of writing product descriptions and all your SEO, your keyword loading and your product photo enhancement and all the stuff that you do, I'd say within a year, probably. Right now, if you're studious you can do 90% of it?   Kevin King: Yeah, you can, but within a year. I mean, it's been a big thing. I just was in another mastermind with a big Chinese seller. He does $50 million a year or something. He's based in China and sells into the US and he said that AI has been a leveling ground for the Chinese sellers.   Perry: Yeah, of course.   Kevin King: Because now they used to, you'd have all that broken English and stuff on listings or they couldn't understand the culture to write it in the right way. And he said with AI, that advantage is gone for Westerners, so you got to step up your game and now it's in. Still, you have an advantage in branding or innovation or some other areas, but it's leveling the playing field for a lot of people.   Perry: Yeah, we found it. We found with Mid Journey packaging design.   Kevin King: Yeah.   Perry: It's been. Packaging design mockups have been amazing. We've come up with some really great packaging ideas that we wouldn't have come up with and for the most part you can send those over to your factories in China and get a reasonable.   Kevin King: When people are doing that for product. Now they'll come up with a product idea like, hey, I want to make a I don't know a new dog bowl. You'll have the AI create. You know, they'll give it some parameters. It needs to be this, it needs to be slow the dog down from eating or not slip on the floor, whatever Right and have the AI create a hundred different models of it. Just boom, boom, boom. Use 3D illustrations, put that into a tool like PickFu, let people vote on it and then, you know, have the top couple. You know, go to molding and make prototypes and then do some additional testing. You couldn't do that. That's just what you can do. Now is just some of the times, sometimes almost mind boggling.   Perry: And robotics have really taken down molding costs.   Kevin King: Yeah.   Perry: Back when you and I started, you know I want to custom mold for this. Well, it'll be $100,000. Now you know, six grand you know, whatever it lasts, you know, depending on what you're molding, but it's crazy how cheap molding costs have gotten.   Kevin King: So we're almost out of time here. Actually we've gone over, but just real quick before we wrap up. What are? What would you say are three things out there that you're seeing right now that either hot opportunities that people need to be paying attention to, or three big, or maybe even three big mistakes that people are making when it comes to trying to sell physical products to people.  

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Jim Barksdale, a former CEO of Netscape, once famously proclaimed there are “only two ways to make money in business: one is to bundle; the other is unbundle.” Bundling is the business of rolling up products or services into packages, usually at a lower cost than buying them individually. Think meal deals, all-inclusive holidays, and software suite subscriptions that throw in all manner of bonus products for “free”. Who can resist great deals like these? Well, sometimes bundling comes at a cost. Both customers and regulators might take issue with a strategy that on the surface offers great value, but can have major drawbacks for choice, competition, and quality. In this episode we unpick both bundling and unbundling, as Alen and Franz discuss: The benefits and drawbacks of each strategy for businesses and customers Famous examples of bundling and unbundling we can learn from How much impact design has in unbundled vs bundled scenarios   www.d.mba

Customer Obsession with Charlie Herrin In this episode of the CrossLead podcast, host David Silverman speaks with Charlie Herrin, President of the Technology, Product, Xperience organization within Comcast Cable. They focus on the leader's role in creating a compelling vision and building a narrative in support of it. Charlie talks about his obsession with the customer and how technology can meaningfully improve a customer's life. He also discusses his personal routines and leadership development philosophy as well as his approach to leading change at scale and how you measure progress.“For me, innovation is not feature matching. Innovation is making someone's life better.” – Charlie Herrin [14:26]“People need to have purpose in what they're doing and it's not just a job. It's not just working on technology. It's not just writing code or creating a design. You're doing it for an end goal.” – Charlie Herrin [18:59]“The role of the leader is to lead and to model the behavior they want to see.” – Charlie Herrin [22:47] Resources A Walk Across America by Peter JenkinsCenter For Creative LeadershipTeam of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris FussellThe Outsiders : Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike Want to discuss some of these topics directly with Dave? Join the CrossLead LinkedIn Group. Episode Transcript DaveWelcome to the CrossLead podcast. I’m your host, Dave Silverman at CrossLead. We exist to help teams, individuals achieve and sustain optimum performance. In today’s episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Charlie Herrin. Charlie serves as the president of the Technology Product Experience Organization within Comcast Cable.When I first met Charlie in 2015, he had just transitioned to the role of leading the customer experience division. He knew the team tasked with the largest NPS implementation in North America at the time. In today’s episode, we focus on the leader’s role in creating a compelling vision and building a narrative in support of it. We talk about his obsession with a customer and how technology can meaningfully improve a customer’s life. Charlie discusses his personal routines and leadership development philosophy. We talk about his approach to leading change at scale and how you measure progress. A proud father, husband, outdoorsman, an amateur photographer. Charlie’s humility and empathetic leadership style makes him a truly world class leader. Thank you for tuning in. Hope you enjoy the conversation that I have with my friend and mentor Charlie Herrin.Good morning, good afternoon, welcome to the CrossLead podcast. Today, we’re joined with Charlie Herrin, who serves as the president of technology product experience for Comcast Cable. Today we’re going to talk about leadership and we’re going to go back and talk about the leadership development from Charlie’s perspective over his career. So, Charlie, thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate you being here now.CharlieThank you. David, it’s good to be here and appreciate it.DaveSo let’s, let’s go through your life journey and example of leadership, but take me back to where you grew up in, and some of those are formative early experiences in your life.CharlieI grew up in a town called Ponca City, Oklahoma. My dad was a chemist and Conoco had their big R&D facility there. So it was a good town to grow up in a lot of opportunities for kids. Oklahoma was, you know, like most kids, I was sort of bored of where I grew up. I was really, really focused on backpacking and camping.I had read a book called Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins, and it really, I just woke me up to the idea of outdoors because my dad is not an outdoorsman.DaveHow old were you when you read that book?CharlieI was 13 and 13. It’s actually I read the National Geographic articles. That he wrote first and then. And then read the book. But you know, that got me into scouting, which I joined largely because they were going backpacking. In New Mexico, and I wanted to do that. And my other passion was soccer. I play a lot of soccer. I was I’m old enough to remember it was actually the first time they had. Started in my city. So I was like on the first team.But I spent a lot of time doing that. And so I was always outside. And when I went to college, which was at the University of Washington, it was largely to go to the Pacific Northwest again. I had this kind of bug for being in the outdoors, and I just wanted to to be someplace where I could experience a lot of adventure that way. Toyed with soccer at the University of Washington, but they’re far better than I am. So I did not go down that path.DaveSo when you got to when you got to Washington University. Talk about, you know, what was your major? I know you were an economics major, but talk about how that sort of shaped you from a from a leadership perspective.CharlieYeah, I went in to college thinking I’d be a history major and kind of pre-law kind of thing and was a pretty good writer. And that’s sort of what I was drawn to. But I ended up taking some economics classes and microeconomics classes. And I was just fascinated by the idea of. Evaluating how consumers make decisions, which is essentially what the, you know, that’s essentially what microeconomics is. Again, I just loved it. And so I kind of really leaned in. But I think from an early point in my life, I was fascinated with the idea of what consumers wanted and how they evaluated their options. And and I think that has served me well. I actually think as I got into the product game. And and consumer experience game and things like that. Is give me a lens that I think a lot of people just don’t use or maybe think about as a first lens. And that’s always my first lens is, you know, how would this benefit me as. A consumer and how would this benefit my family as a consumer? How would this benefit, you know, consumers in my community? And so it was a really formative for me.DaveYeah, it’s amazing that your college major actually was relevant to your job. So I was an oceanography major in college and other than the fact that I like to surf and I was a navy seal. There wasn’t a lot of overlap there.So the fact that you actually took core lessons from that and were able to apply it to to your to your world is pretty remarkable. You come out of university. And what was your first job out of college?CharlieWell, my first job, actually, I thought I was still going to do pre-law. I had taken the LSAT and done extremely well and kind of was off to going to go to law school. Just on a whim I interviewed at Andersen within was Andersen Consulting, its Accenture now. I remember that I took the interview because I was really tired of eating 19 cent boxes of macaroni. I was really, really living on the edge in terms of finances, and I thought, Well, you know, my assets are good for five years and I’ll just go to this interview. But I didn’t really care because I’ve been accepted to law school. And so I just. Sort of answered. However, I wanted to answer.It was a little bit like that Seinfeld episode where George Costanza sort of says the opposite of everything he thinks he should say. And it works for him, and it worked for me. They call me back and said, You hired the guy we hired. And so I went into Accenture Anderson at the time as a developer because that’s how they started everyone.You know, it’s interesting to me, but I found out pretty. Quickly I was in a great developer, but when I was really good. At was requirements and interfacing with with the clients. And again, I think that sensitivity to what they really wanted and needed and being able to add value there. That’s really what drove me. And so I was there for the typical two years and then hired on at McCaw Cellular. Which was the client I was working at. It was exciting. It was an exciting time.DaveAnd when was this, roughly?CharlieWell, this would have been about 94, I heard. OK. Yeah, yeah. What I loved about it was, I don’t know if you guys remember, but you know, in the early, early days of mobile. It was seen as a huge luxury and car phones and the big Motorola brick phones and the average consumer was sort of on to it yet.But I remember in employee orientation there, they showed a video where they told the story about what people really want. And how important communication is and how how important mobility is. Sort of the nomad. They kind of pinned it into, you. Know, we love travel, we love kind of moving around. It got me to really think about an inspiring vision about what you’re doing and how you’re sort of aligning to Age-Old truths about what people have always wanted. It opened up for me the idea of narratives. I mean, I could keep going. I mean, AT&T ended up buying us that I again was able to start to craft why that was good for them, how that can bring mobility really to the mainstream and got to work on some really interesting projects to to do that.It also showed me some things I didn’t. Want to ever do, which is like gigantic meetings. I remember going with b four of us and like 50 others. At the end of the introduction, the introductions alone would take half an hour. But but that got me to really start to understand teamwork and bringing together lots of different disciplines.And I was there for a few years and then I then I came to Comcast.DaveThen you came to Comcast. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. Why did you come to Comcast? What brought you there?CharlieWell, I mean, like, like a lot of people that have been fortunate in their career, I had some great mentors. And one of the mentors I had was a guy named David, and he had come from a McCaw cellular at AT&T and had come over to what at the time was Comcast Cellular business. They ended up selling part of that off. And he went to had the broadband business, and he called me up and he said, You know, you should come over here. It’s just like mobile. You know, mobile was in the beginning seen as a luxury, but.I really think this can can impact people’s lives. And so that’s that’s what really. Got me over again. Just this notion of technology. Improving people’s lives. It’s really been a constant theme in my career.DaveYeah, you’ve been at sort of the vanguard for that in some massive spaces, so what year was it that you went over to Comcast that like late nineties, early 2000?CharlieYeah, it was a 96.DaveAnd so broadband internet was it was just sort of appearing on the yeah, on the landscape.CharlieYeah, it really was. And, you know, we didn’t have it at the time. There was no self install option we had was one of the people on the team that were that were driving that project. It was early, early days. No retail to speak of certainly wasn’t mainstream. So again, a lot of that playbook that we had in mobile could be applied to to to this technology and this value proposition for customers.DaveSo you get to Comcast, what’s your first job when you, once you’re there?CharlieBut my first job was business development, I think director of business development you know, at the time, the cable companies had a venture with together. With this group called. At Home, and it was in the heyday of the internet. The first heyday of the. Internet, I should say. And so it was a lot about you know, establishing relationships and things like that but when at home faced financial difficulties and ultimately disbanded.I was given the task of trying to figure out what our portal was going to be. Email, all of that because I’d had some coding background at Accenture, you know, as a business development that you do a lot of those kinds of things. So we decided to go it alone and stood up our own portal and email, and it was really hard. But that’s ultimately what became. The seed for what became a lot of our interactive properties and and ultimately our product development teams and approach was that interactive group.DaveAwesome. So who is your competition then when you were going to what was it? That was it the Microsoft and Google of the world?CharlieOr, you know, it was AOL, you know, they were huge.I remember, I remember, you know. You know, why are we trying to do this? Let’s just do a deal with AOL and be done and I’m like, you know, look, we’re installing this stuff. It’s a great touchpoint for our customers. Let’s, let’s hold on to it and see what we can do, and sure enough. You know, we could compete there and we won by focusing on what we were trying to do, which was connect up homes and connect people to a vastly bigger world through broadband internet. And it was a little less about, you know, being the portal. It was, it was, you know.Sure, we had one, and we made money on it and things like that. But the real focus. Was just connecting this home, and then we started to put services on top of our portal like. Video and flash players and things like that that were really exciting. That gave us a lot of confidence to go kind of further into the interactive space.DaveAnd then from Biz Dev, what was your next stop in your career?CharlieLet me think. Well, I mean, it became product, essentially. You know, I was running the product. Yeah, it was, you know, running Comcast portal and interactive properties. And, you know, the features that went along with them, which at that time were things like email and personal web pages and stuff like that. And then that evolved into. You know, are you working on the TV products and working on the Infinity Home products and things like that? But it was it was definitely start to run product teams and user experience teams.DaveI think when I met you, you just come out of having run the Xfinity program, which at the time was the most successful product that Comcast had launched, both from an experience standpoint and just from a technology innovation standpoint. Maybe maybe talk about that experience and how that sort of shaped everything you’ve done since.CharlieYeah, I think, you know, when we decided to redefine television and really put the experience and delivery up in the cloud, which we call our X1 experience.I did not start that. That was already started by some really smart folks. But what I did do as I was brought in, we put a new UI on it and we spent a lot of time trying to solve, you know, the discovery and content and put that in quotes that customers have, which is there’s so much on how do I really kind of get to it quickly? How do we make it really welcome and an advanced sort of experience versus what existed before? And so I did run that product team and to your point, that was really successful. You know, I still think it’s one of the better UIs out there, and we really did it by focusing on the content itself and our Mission. Our mission was, A: to put a TV in every pocket, so we focused a lot on the streaming and, and mobile pieces.It was B: to get you to your content that you want faster. And so we spent time on search and discovery and different ways to do that. Whether it’s, you know, rotten tomato listings or whether it’s we had some really cool ways of searching, and then adding things like the voice remote ultimately was sort of the last thing that I was I was involved with.And also looking at that screen as kind of more than what’s on TV like, you can use that screen to, you know, see your security cameras, you can use that screen to interact with customer care, and that’s still something I believe strongly in. We’ll keep, we’ll keep doing that.But the focus and the mission that I gave the team was literally and we headed it at the beginning of every meeting. This slide was like, we’re here to change people’s lives and we’re here to to implement our version of innovation. And for me, innovation is not feature matching. Innovation is making someone’s life better. It can be complex technology that does that. Or it could be something as simple as, you know, sticky coats. But the focus is, you know, making life better and that the job of a good product person.I used to tell this story. My youngest bet you’ve met, Mave.She was four or five and she was opening this present, you know, excited like a kid always is. And she said, I never knew I always wanted this. And I thought it was proof that that’s exactly what a good product person should be doing. And so this idea that we’re constantly trying to figure out ways of making someone excited about what they’re using and have them to start to think like. I can’t imagine my life without this, like, what did I do before? It’s just such a… it was such a, It still gets me super excited just thinking about it. And so and so that is my passion and spent a lot of time there and, nd based on that success. They said, Hey, we have another problem for you, which is the customer experience piece that we’ve been trying to turn around for a while. Could you come in and and Focus on that? And I remember when I first got that gig, lots of things. First of all, that’s where I met CrossLead and you. But I remember getting a lot of questions like, Well, look, you’re not the customer care guy. Like, you don’t have customer service experience. Why are you in this role, right? And my point of view was. Well, customer service is what happens when the experience breaks. So we’re going to go fix the experience which is in the product. It’s in the sales journey, it’s in all of those things. And how do we make those things better so that customer service is reserved for this truly important times when you need it?And look, we’ve got a lot. We’ve got a lot to go for sure. But we made good progress. And what attracted me to that opportunity with Neil Smith, who brought it to me was it was really the chance to change our influencer culture. I wouldn’t say change because I think that the Comcast has always been really focused on customers and wanting to to do right by them. But it was a chance to influence a culture so that you could put some of the metrics around customer experience a little more, you know, in the decision making, in the business. And so that was really, I view that as sort of my experience with sort of culture and bringing people along together, like how do you bring, you know, tens of thousands of people along on this journey and get them to think about it similarly and value the same things? And then recently, I’ve been back in the product world looking back in the product.DaveYeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a remarkable story I remember. I remember the first time I came downstairs on a weekend when I told my kids they could go watch a show and I just sort of marveled at how they navigate it to a show and I’m like, My son can’t read into that voice remote. Was like, I think I was hacking the system by just talking into it. And he was like, Yep, that got me to the the picture. I wanted and then was able to click and much to my horror. I was like, Wow, you know, he’s now fully exposed to the whole world pretty quickly. So to the extent that you want your product to work for a five year old like mission accomplished, that was pretty, pretty remarkable.Go back to the vision statement. I think that’s really I think that’s a really interesting point to dig out on a lot of times, you know? You know, part of the role of the leader is to inspire people towards a new vision. The fact I’d love to hear more how you think about the repetitiveness, how often you to do that, to sort of actually unlock that capability set for an organization?CharlieYeah, I think what I learned was a lot of us, I think, make the mistake we put. We we put effort into these mission statements. Maybe you see them once or twice a year. You know, you couldn’t walk around the halls of those companies and ask them with what the mission statement is, what they’re there to do. Why are they there? And here’s similar things you’d hear very, very different things. I don’t know if you always hear the exact same thing. But I learned that pretty early on, Jim Barksdale was the president at McCaw Cellular, and he brought a lot of things from his time at FedEx. In terms of how you shape culture. And I just remember being struck by how everyone embraced it because they used it all the time because they saw it was in front of them all the time.And so when I was really trying to build out a product culture at Comcast. The idea that people need to have purpose in what they’re doing and it’s not just a job, it’s not just working on technology, it’s not just writing code or creating a design. You’re doing it for an end goal, and having an inspirational end goal is A: important so that everyone’s excited about what they’re doing. And B: is something I learned from from you guys. Having a common mission. And a common understanding allows you to make better decisions down in the trenches and within the teams. And so that to me, was was was really important. And what I found is you just can’t do it once in a while. You literally have to repeat it all the time, which is like all my own hands. Yeah, all the time. You can’t say it enough. And so I’ve taken that to heart and really think if you’re going to try to build a different culture, really get people to live up to your mission, they have to see it constantly. It can’t just be at the budget time or on a poster in the break room. You really need to sort of reinforce it and show that you’re living it and show that you’re excited about it.DaveYeah, no. 100%. If you think about the probably the most influential leadership lesson from from these last couple of experiences at Comcast, maybe tell a story around it that really helps, helps, helps the audience personalize it. If you could.CharlieI probably should have thought about this a little more. I mean, there’s so many. I’m the kind of person that thinks about these moments, and I just dwell on them all the time. I will say one thing I learned about what two things one is I was in my early forties because before I really am in my early fifties now, before I really realized that leadership was a discipline, you could practice and try different hats on. I assumed prior to that the people were either natural leaders or they weren’t.And yeah, and so I went through some leadership courses and Center for Creative Leadership was one. And I realized, you know, it’s. It’s it’s a lot about what you’re saying to the team, how you’re listening to the team. It’s a lot about communications and you should try some things.And so I forced myself in these all hands to try to be a better speaker to try to, you know, I tried a lot of different things. And so that’s one: one is that, you know, I came to realize that leadership was something that you could practice and you should look to others, read books about it and etc. I just it wasn’t in my sort of DNA at that time. It is now. And one of the there’ve been so many great leaders that I’ve worked for, but one that stuck with me because he was very different was Neil Smith, and what I remember from him was sort of just an unwavering courage and optimism about the mission and just extreme focus.But done in a way that was very friendly and collegial and collaborative. I remember when he offered me this role. He said, I think this is going to be a lot of fun. It’s also going to be really hard. And so, you know, I’m thinking to myself, OK, Neal. He’s a seal, former seal. So if he says something’s going to be hard, it’s going to be really hard. But that got me excited. And I remember that.DaveWhat do you mean by hard Neal? I wonder if we have the same scale for what that means.CharlieExactly. But I remember the look in his eyes that he’s genuinely jazzed about it, and that was the moment I flipped as like, OK, I’m all it. And so.DaveThat’s great.CharlieLeadership vision or leadership principle, I learned from that and, there were others, obviously great, great mentors. I’ve had the fortune to work for. But I just took that to heart and said you know what? The role of a leader is to lead and to model the behavior they want to see. And I think he did that really well. And so it doesn’t serve a leader. Well to sort of get down or get exasperated or, you know, they really got to show that. They are excited about what they’re doing and confident that it can be done. And so that’s one lesson I’ve definitely taken, I take it to heart.DaveTalk to me about your personal habits, like how you sort of set yourself up for your day, for a week, for your month, for your for your year. Are there specific things that you do that are so unique to you that may be perceived as quirky?CharlieNo, I would say, yeah, I do have a bit of a habit of it’s quirky now, but it’s it’s what I don’t have is, I think, what I aspire or aspire to.Which is sort of you probably wake up early and work out really hard and get your day going. I do that in spurts. And actually during this pandemic, I’ve been pretty good. So my day typically starts at five or earlier. I sleep less as I get older. But and I’m not a kind of guy that can get up right away at work. I’m just not. And so the one habit that I do have, which my wife teases me about, she calls it puttering around. But you know, I get my coffee. I read some email and I always I always read the news or watch the news, BBC or something like that or NBC.For me, it’s just having an hour and a half of quiet time to kind of think about the day. And actually a lot of the stuff I think about. I process emails and stuff like that but a lot of this stuff I think about is what we’ve talked about a little here today, which is like, how am I going to sort of. You know, support the narrative I’m telling in the meetings that I have today? You know, where where are there opportunities to influence, you know, towards the mission of what we’re trying to do?It’s a bit of a reminder of really what I’m all about and what I’m here to do I love that. And then, you know, it’s awesome. And then, you know, I have during, especially during Kovner, because I’m not an early morning workout person. I did start blocking seven to eight to work out, and so I’ve been pretty good about that, but other than that, I do have a lot of like quirky habits or. I find a lot of quirky habits, but not on a daily basis But now and then, I’m a big fan. Like, I’ve got four kids and in the evening, you know, try to get as much done. During the day so that I can have some time with them. You know, we’re big, big family dinner, people.DaveOh, that’s great. That’s great. If you go back to your early days as a as a scout and I know, I know you’re very successful, you went on to to to get your Eagle Eagle Scout badge. Maybe talk about what was like one of the core takeaways that you still live today from from those experiences is as a child.CharlieYou know, I would think, well, first of all, I was again very focused on the camping aspects of being a scout. So to me, it was it was about getting a bunch of skills that I wasn’t going to be able to get from from my dad. And know I would say. And I went on. My son is an Eagle Scout. I went on to help with his troop. I would say what I took from it was a notion of civic responsibility and just just the idea of. You know, doing things for your community I did not. And we’ve talked a lot about it. I did not go on to serve in the forces or anything like that, which has been a minor regret of mine but I do. Feel like as a, as a person in society, we we owe something to the community.And I think that scouting experience fostered that and then I would say as an adult leader in the scouts when my son was in it, when I was amazed by is just how accomplished and. Thoughtful these young men and women can be. And the potential is so much greater than I. Think we give kids credit for. And so I was I was.Truly inspired by the accomplishments of some of these, you know, 16, 17, 15 year olds in terms of what they knew about.DaveYou know.CharlieEverything you know, they just attacked it and with such a curious mind. And so that was that was really inspiring to me.DaveYeah, it’s awesome. I mean, obviously, the hope he prepared peace plays and it sounds like he’d do that every morning. I love the fact that you connect. You take the time to be thoughtful about your day in looking at the various interactions you’re going to have and saying, All right, how do I take that, that vision and weave that into these meetings? That’s that’s that’s that’s extremely thoughtful, makes a ton of sense and probably a practice that everybody could probably apply.CharlieI think you can take that into sort of your your your goals, too. Again, I’m a big believer in keeping track and keeping score. And so every quarter when it I say my goals were how my grading myself and I, you know, send that to my boss. And one, it helps the scope creep. It helps to remind your boss. What you said you were going to do. And two, it keeps you honest and it makes you a person of your word and transparency. Look, I’m not. I’m not getting this a goal done.CharlieAnd for these reasons, but I think it’s important to constantly revisit what you’re where you’re trying to do.DaveYou talked earlier or we’ve talked earlier about, you know, the importance of teams and sort of your your sort of development around those concepts specifically in this role because I think it was it was interesting. I think to be good for the audience to hear kind of unique is that position because you weren’t really in charge of anything, right? But you had influence over sort of everything. And so you really had to work in that distributed almost team of teams and time. Maybe maybe talk a bit more about, you know, some of the key things you took away from trying to drive a transformation from a centralized resource with a very strong incumbency in that, you know, and the respective silos and disciplines of the organization?CharlieYeah. And to me, that was a really fun moment, actually. And I’m not. Saying that’s just because I’m on a CrossLead podcast. But as you know, the story was you guys had given me the. Galleys of team of teams to read, and I was always away on a vacation and so I had this role and I had some ideas of things I wanted to do the piece that I hadn’t figured out as like, how am I really going to get all of these different disciplines to to chase the same vision and figure out how to do that?And in reading that book. I was so excited, like I wanted to leave vacation right away because for me, it unlocked the idea. That you can create a shared consciousness in greater context around a mission with some pretty simple communication tools.Some simple sort of team decision making tools and so that was an, you know, you were there. As we launched. You know what we called the forum, which was our sort of our company once a week meeting where we invited everyone to participate. And what it taught me was the context is so critical to the teams making decisions and it can turn things from adversarial. Into sort of pure alignment with just understanding a little more context and that’s that’s something I’m really driving.As I focus on teamwork now. Very smart folks on the team are very focused on their area of the business, not coming together regularly to understand other people’s parts of the business. This notion of a quarterly business reviews where everyone sits in and again, I pull those lessons from from CSX that. If you really want to give people the license to do what you want them to ultimately do, you need to give them full context and a very clear mission that we all agree on. And once that happens, magic because, you know, it just starts running itself. That’s what I learned. You know, one of the things that I chose, why I chose. The NPS system to implement was not sure. The score is important and the question is important. But to me, there were two. Factors that were the most important that I wanted to kind of get into the culture one was the idea of.Following up with customers calling them, you know, getting more feedback from them and using that rich, rich data to wine solve their problems, but then start to really look at it at a.DaveIt initiated their own priorities.CharlieYeah, I mean, I think it’s really easy to to look at machine data and believe your own data. You can’t argue. People’s perception because that’s what they have, you know, and so that’s important to have their perception is as a measure or marker of where they are with your brand. The other component and the most. Exciting component was this notion of Ian, the employee NPS about what you’re doing. And what you do in that process. You use. Surface, you have them surface at a very local level issues that are keeping. Them from accomplishing the mission. When you address them. And what I liked about NPS is it put everyone at a senior leadership team. On notice and accountable for solving those problems.They have to to, you know, because we elevate them, we track them we make sure everyone knows them.And it’s basically an insurance policy to make sure you’re listening to your to your employees because they know what to do. They want to do right and they know how to solve the problem, and you’ve got to sort of listen to them. Yeah.And so that was that was really important. And I think the whole stakes. Journey also taught me just the importance of, you know, your frontline workers in terms of listening to their ideas and trying to make their job easier so they can do the job that you want them to do, which is take care of the customer. And that, to me, is. More important than any kind of score is. That we have a system now and when I walk I guess I haven’t walked through the halls in a while, but when I used to walk through the halls. The things that made me the most proud about that. Whole period of my career was hearing. People in meetings talking about in peace as part of their decision making or product feature or whatever, and it’s in every single meeting, in every single function, you know, legal, finance. Billing and that to me was OK. It’s part of our DNA, is part of our culture. That’s the most proud thing I have of that whole period.DaveYeah, that’s a great example of culture change right there. You know, being on a sort of management and it’s hard to quantify culture, oftentimes it’s sort of like oxygen. You don’t really notice it until it’s missing, right? When you get that, when you get those insights just by walking around. We used to call it troop in the line, right? You go out and they’re in their foxholes, in the front lines and just sort of hear what the men and women are talking about. And and when you hear them repeating back narratives that you’re trying to push at the top, you feel you feel great.CharlieYeah.DaveWho say it’s not important who I am and what you’re saying. And that’s great. It’s awesome. OK? As you think about. So I mean, that’s a good segue way into the last year and a half have been incredibly challenging for a lot of people. And I know, you know, specifically the work environment I’d love to hear, you know, specifically how you guys have sort of dealt with the pandemic and and how you’re thinking about your team and Asia as it sort of return to work opportunities, startups and how you’re thinking about best practice coming out of that?CharlieWell, the first thing is we’ve always placed. Employee safety as a as a super high priority. So that is guided everything for us. And so early on, you know, it was like, All right, how do we keep our employees. Safe and. Still try to. Accomplish the things we want to do as a business and get customers hooked up to, you know, because now they’re even more focused on on staying connected. So one of the things I’m really proud of is we moved, you know. Tens of thousands of employees to work from home within 60 days. And we did it in a secure way with a scalable VPN and a lot of creative technologists and just hard elbow grease to get that done. And with with the idea that we can make them productive and happy at home.And not place them in harm’s way by having them come in to sort of open floor plan call centers and things like that. So that I think going in, we didn’t know how easy or hard. Well, we knew it’s gonna be hard. We didn’t know how successful we were going to be, but we were very successful. And I think the employees reflected. That terms. We love that you’re focused on us, that you’re focused on our safety and health. And then talking about doing.Doing a good job and as a as an employee. And I just think that that was. Such a proud moment for us to be able to do that. The other the other one was, you know, again, some the network performed really well amidst a huge surge in traffic, and we were able to deploy some really smart technology and AI into our network to to make sure that it continued to do that.And so I think it showed us that preparing your core. Assets and applying technology in a smart way, you know, for these unexpected moments is just so critical. So we learned that about ourselves as we think about. Coming back to the office. You know, first of all, working remotely. And using the software we use as Microsoft Teams. Just I think it surprised everyone. We how good it was in terms of being able to. Accomplish our goals, launch products remotely, you know, gather as a team to to make decisions, and it’s just really positive experience.And so as we come back into the office because we do feel like, you know. The collaboration and co-location and things like that are very important will be. Will understand how to be more flexible. But I think what it’s. Taught us is the importance of distributed locations. How do you include, you know, your, your development centers. In. India or Israel or Denver and really bring the teams together? That’s been a lesson we’ve learned. But I think as we go back, we are looking forward to getting. Back and being together and driving those that teamwork. But we’ll have some tools, some extra tools. To be even more connected and even more flexible, and we need to be.DaveAwesome. Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. I was having this conversation with some, some other executives recently as they think about navigating this. And I think a lot of a lot of people, specifically, they’re in a position to make decisions around this are sort of wrestling with, is it back to five days or is it only going to be a hybrid or whatever else? And you know, my my thought is once people learn a new skill and learn new muscle like they’re never going to go back to exactly the way it was just going to have an expanded toolkit to do stuff. And I still think the most effective form of communication is in person face to face. Yeah. So for those you know, those really, you know, high, impactful sessions that are needed, just they’re still going to be a requirement to do that. But I think we’ve all learned that there’s the ability to sort of operate, like you said, in a distributed manner, be effective going back to, you know, the team, a team story for a second. You know, we we set up our physical infrastructure around the globe realizing that the majority of the people that need to be involved in the night’s operation. We’re not going to be physically present, not because of some pandemic, just because of. Right, right. The laws of physics and distribute. So we actually designed our spaces with that in mind, meaning like we knew that most of our conversation was going to be have to be in a virtual setting and the people in the room were important, but you know, it was trying to. Index to make sure they were inclusive was what I love about what I love about how teams and when you go to fully virtual is not everybody has the same experience because they’re through a common platform coming back to some hybrid model where you’re going to, you’re probably going to have a scenario where. You got some people in the room and other people out of the room, but you still got to get the same thing done. It’ll be interesting to see how people people sort of navigate that, but that was like, you know, a critical insight because it was just a constraint that existed for us. So it wasn’t an option to get it the other way.CharlieYeah, I think two things. one is we’re also sort of retooling our rooms for this notion of a more inclusive environment with remote workers, whether they’re individually promoting or. Or, as I mentioned, one of our dev locations that. The key one of the things that we’re doing, which. Is the key thing that I think everyone feels like they really missed was especially on engineering side, it was this kind of whiteboarding. I think that virtual whiteboard. Is just as hard. As you get your whiteboard there. So one of the things we’re doing is. Setting up cameras on the whiteboards and we’ll see. How we’re going to how that goes. And we’re going to we’re going to start going In some of us just to test it out here and a little bit.But I do think I think the second thing is, I think all of. The participants of a meeting are going to be a lot more in tune with the fact that there are remote folks. Prior to COVID, we had have all these sort. Of we try to have these rules of, Hey. If you’ve got someone remote, don’t forget to ask them their opinion. You know, we had these, you know, don’t close that meeting without asking anyone on the phone, you know, their thoughts. That kind of thing, because we were trying to reinforce this notion of, don’t forget. And I think. That will be a problem anymore. So I’m looking forward to.That better, better team cohesion. But it is going to be, you know, we don’t know yet. We’re going to learn. Our way through it. Like, think most like most of your companies?DaveAwesome. So to last question. first of all, what are you guys working on now? Like, what are your top, you know, key priorities and you know, on your own leadership development, like what do you what do you kind of like focusing on are finding the time to read or think about now?CharlieWell, as I as I set up the structure, it’s really trying to figure out how do I drive more contextual, better alignment with the teams, including some of our stakeholder partners? That’s like not a new problem, but it’s I’m sure that we are persistent or that you’ve always got to work on and you can always get better at. And I think it doesn’t get better without a very. sIntentional way of doing it. So I’m looking at some training to help with that.You know, I think, you know, a lot of that. We did a lot. Of listening sessions with our DNI efforts. Listening sessions are actually part of NPS. We call them huddles. So some of the training I’m looking at. Is how to have conversations. How do you have really honest, hard conversations, but not in an adversarial way? And there’s. There’s some good. Material out there, so I’m going to be kind of focused on that. And then the second thing we’re focused on is how do we really set our. Ourselves up for the future of what the home is going to be and spending a lot of time really looking at really, really where customers are going to want home? How are they going to?What kinds of entertainment are they going to want and getting. Back to some some strategies? One of the things I’m interested in doing.Is is driving sort of a ten year strategy cycle within the group. A lot of companies will do five year plans or three year plans. And how do you sort of have a rolling ten year kind of plan on on again?Less about the finances, but more about where.Consumer trends are going to be and how do we really make sure that we’re applying our innovation and our resources in a smart way to make sure that those are seen and worked into our products in a real way?So those are sort of the two big.Sort of new cultural things I’m working on.And then other than that, we’re going to keep driving.Connecting homes, you know, and people, whether it’s some of the mobile products we’re launching now.Or.We’re going all broadband and some of our new forms of entertainment, you know, it’s just it’s a busy, busy world as you as, you know, lots of product changes. But it’s.Exciting. And so, you know, continuing.To focus on what we want to do and not kind of chasing what others are doing is always about.Also making sure that you’re staying true to what you think you can build as is key to me.DaveThat’s great. That’s great. What’s the most recent like book you’ve read or the movie you’ve seen or show you’ve watched or something? That’s that you found interesting that maybe the audience could benefit from?CharlieYou know, I was trying to look at I was trying to look up the title of this book I read, I will get it to you. But it was really about.Successful leaders and CEOs.And how they thought about.Capital allocation.Again, I apologize. I can’t think of the title I need to look at because.DaveThe main theme in a couple of months. The main thing was, look here eight CEOs. And they were some of the most successful CEOs in history. And they may not have been the high flying ones you’ve heard of. But they really return shareholder value because they thought constantly about how they were allocating capital and just sort of the thought process that they went through and I think that is increasingly. Something that I’m certainly spending more time thinking about as well because you do, you have to shut down. Some things to start new with new things, and that’s hard. But you know, the people that either through instinct or. In this case, you know, just really good studying of where things are going. They’ve been able to make those those choices. So I apologize. I don’t have the name of the book, but all I know.Is we’ll make sure we capture it in there and in the of notes. That’s awesome, though. It’s awesome, and I think it makes a ton of sense, you know, thinking about prioritization and how you make some decisions about, you know, at the local level.But then at the more strategic level where you’re at, it really comes down to where are you going to make that capital wise and in bringing out the right process that’s actually driving that ten year vision you’re talking about is is. Really important. Try. Thanks so much for taking time with us today. We really appreciate it was awesome having you on the CrossLead podcast. Any final thoughts or comments?CharlieNo. Again, I appreciate and honored that you asked me to participate. I’ve learned so much from listening to others. Talk about their experiences. Certainly learned a lot from you.Just how hopeful can be helpful to someone again. The notion of high performing teams and how you organize that is is, to your point, it’s a persistent problem. So I think you’re doing good work and it’s critical.DaveIf the listeners want to learn more about you or follow you. Is there even a way to do that given your own position? Yeah, people are going to love this question.CharlieYeah. And honestly, you know, I’m not active on the social media platforms, so I think you probably just need to look for. I know that, you know, I’ve got some some of my keynotes out there. You can watch them. And, you know, once COVID kind of gets better and we’re traveling more, I’m sure I’ll be. I’ll be doing some conferences and things like that.DaveAwesome. All right. Well, thank you, Charli.e. I really appreciate you spending time with us today.CharlieLikewise. Thank you.Daveone more thing before we finish the episode, the CrossLead podcast is produced by the team at Truth Work Media. I want to make this the best leadership podcast available, so I would love to get your feedback. Our goal this season is to have authentic conversations with special operators, business leaders and thought leaders on the topics of leadership and agility. If you have any feedback, suggested topics or leaders that you want to hear from these, email me at contact@crosslead.com. If you found this episode interesting. Please share it with a friend and drop us a rating until next time. Thank you for joining.

This episode examines the often untold story of Hoxie desegregation in 1955. Ethel Tompkins, the first African American graduate of Hoxie High School, provides a first-hand account of what it was like during that era. Jim Barksdale is also featured in this episode. He recounts stories his mother and aunt told him about that time period in their lives. To donate to the Hoxie museum fund: Hoxie: The First Stand Hoxie Facebook Page For more information about Hoxie desegregation: Hoxie Desegregation Special thanks to our sponsor The Arkansas Humanities Council

EP261 - Benedict Evans Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) has been a VC, an operator, consultant and an investment banker.  His VC career includes a five year stint as partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He know lives in London, where he publishes an excellent weekly newsletter “What mattered in tech this week?“, a podcast “Another Podcast“, and some epic annual presentations, such as this years “The Great Unbundling.” You can find all things Benedict Evans at his website. He’s one of the most thoughtful people in the commerce industry, so we tried to cover a lot a ground in this broad ranging conversation. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Episode 261 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Wednesday April 21, 2021. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode a 261 being recorded on Wednesday April 21st 2021 that’s a lot of twenty ones I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:41] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners Jason this week on the show we have a really exciting guest he’s a renaissance man of sorts, he’s been a VC an operator a consultant and an investment banker. You and I love his annual Mega presentations that dig into various Tech Trends and he also has a awesome Weekly Newsletter that I highly recommend called What mattered and Tech this week. Listeners please welcome Benedict Evans to the Jason and Scot show. Jason: [1:12] Hey Benedict we are thrilled to have you, it’s and it’s a it’s creating a special occasion for us I rarely get to talk to Scott during daylight hours but but because of your time zone we’re talking in the middle of the day it’s fun. Benedict: [1:29] Cool well it’s good to hear you listen to the podcast so especially the ones about statistic so it’s always good to chat about this stuff. Jason: [1:36] You you are like one of eight listeners that enjoy my Deep – in statistics. Benedict: [1:42] Well it’s a former Equity analyst like I want to know what the number is I’m not happy with saying like so statista I want to know where is a number from and what is it what does it mean. Jason: [1:52] Yeah there’s there’s I feel like I thread this really fine line the overwhelming majority of people don’t want to be overwhelmed with the numbers and then the eight people that are interested in the numbers I’m always nervous are going to realize that my numbers are wrong so it does it seems like it’s a very narrow audience of like you know my mom that’s willing to to take my content exactly as is but enough about me Scott gave some of the highlights but can you walk us through your career a little bit Benedict and how you got an interest in all this stuff. Benedict: [2:19] Sure sir so I did a degree in history I went into Investment Banking as a sell-side equity analyst so, write research about mobile operators back when mobile networks were amazing and exciting Dynamic growth companies, and then I went and worked in strategy and BD in media and telecoms companies for a while and then as a consultant advising, media Telecom technology companies and then from 2014 to 2019 and a 2019, I work for Andreessen Horowitz which is a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley with sort of 15 billion dollars under management that invests in, people making new companies sometimes actually around e-commerce mostly around software to help other people do e-commerce but my other things say invested in instacart. [3:14] And then at the beginning of last year I decided to move back to London and do my own thing and so, instead of picking up some things I’d already been doing so I have a Weekly Newsletter with sort of Water by notes for the week and I have a website where I write about stuff and I do a big as you said like a big presentation, and so I’ve been doing that for the last sort of 18 months or so which is kind of an interesting just in its own right of you know what is it like to. Try and do content in a world where suddenly you can’t meet everybody and yet on the other hand suddenly everybody on Earth is willing to meet you by video. Jason: [3:53] Yeah and I would argue also can seemingly consuming more content. Benedict: [3:57] It is yeah I mean it’s an interim we can maybe go into this later but I had this sort of interesting moment a couple weeks ago when I was asked to speak at a conference in September in Zurich. And I thought actually that’s a choice now because in 2019 you either went or you didn’t do the business. And in 2020 it had to be video. And now it’s a question should that be video or should I go there and why would I go there do I want to go to Zurich with a be a benefit to me to meeting lots of people at the event should I hang around after I present it, and we’re now I think just thought of trying to work out what all of that means in lots of different spheres whether it’s you know remote work or e-commerce or, put a TV all kinds of different questions as we kind of we’ve had this of 18 months of forced experiment where everybody has to try working from home and are ordering everything on the web we inquire networks going to settle. Jason: [4:53] I know for sure I think that experiment is still ongoing because I’m like you I’m starting to get these, these optional in-person invites and it’s very unclear, what my criteria needs to be for those so still still sort of sorting it out I am I’m fascinated you you moved back to the UK not too long before the pandemic right was it. Benedict: [5:20] Yeah well I was sort of Fed Up of living in a city with no museums or art galleries or interesting shops and then of course I landed straight into the lock down saying like my timing wasn’t kind of wasn’t ideal you know so it’s a line from airplane you know I picked the wrong year today okay. Jason: [5:36] Yeah and to give listeners an idea of your standards you move from San Francisco like they might have thought you just moved from like like Bozeman Montana or something but like by us standards that’s on the high end of culture so yeah. Benedict: [5:50] Yeah that’s what they tell themselves a lot. Jason: [5:52] Yo I yeah I’m not disputing it just just stating the fact and I am I am mildly concerned for you because I do feel like moving to the UK has one significant disadvantage you went from a place where your, accent like automatically conveys credibility and authority to a place where you’re just another dude with a newsletter. Benedict: [6:15] This is true yes coffee accent doesn’t really come across in the newsletter it is into the icy day she works by twice in that sort of our over a certain level and like any Foreigner I think. Sort of automatically gets attributed a greater intelligence it’s like well if you manage to move and come here you must know stuff, so you like Americans in Britain generally regarded as being sort of feeble-minded but you know once they’ve got a job then they regarded as well they must know something. Jason: [6:40] Yeah my strategy is to move to Australia because I feel like that’s the one place where I could sound reasonable. Benedict: [6:46] I could work it could work. Scot: [6:48] You don’t drink enough for Australian the but they do have Starbucks you okay, a couple of follow-ups on your career when you were at Andreessen Horowitz what was your did you have a focus area or were you more of a generalist. Benedict: [7:03] Well so I think well so it’s your choice on says so when I went smartphones with a thing. And I’ve been talking a lot about smartphones along interesting I was talking about this with somebody the other day I’ve been talking a lot about smartphones in public online along with her instead of you. Um do you may know. And the sort of the interesting thing was that sort of both of us were people who came from the industry and knew how to do the analysis and how to make the charts and were allowed to talk about it in public, so there’s lots of people in investment Banks or Nakia or apple he knew all this but couldn’t talk about it in public and they’re also people who are interested but like didn’t know that, Nokia published quarterly unit shipments on the investor relations website. And so then but and so what I sort of built up with profile a publishing stuff online because I had a job I was a consultant I was freed and so I could say stuff in public since I was mad I was a small thing going. Certain point small things stop being interesting because it happened. [8:05] 90% of the developed world has a smartphone now four and a half billion people adults a five and a half in adults on Earth had a smartphone is not interesting anymore it’s like talking about Broadband adoption in like 2010 like we get it happened. And I think there’s a sort of a general point there in Tech that the point that you understand something is generally the point that it’s time to start looking for something else. It’s kind of the point that it’s become boring and you know it’s not what’s the important where the important questions are and say there was a time when that was no PCS in the 90s. If a PC thing with it going to be interactive TV well that it’s not being an interesting conversation same with smartphones like it happened absol’s happened what next and so, for one axis that becomes well let’s think about machine learning and crypto and a regulation, on another it let’s think about what my old boss Marc Andreessen called software is eating World which you’ve basically what happens when four five billion people are online. What happens with mass mass internet adoption, um which is kind of like it’s like being in like 1950 or 1960 and saying well like the last 50 years was how does everybody get a car and what is a car what is a car company in the next 50 years is with Donald’s and Walmart is what happens when everyone has a car. So you could kind of say well that’s sort of where we are in Tech now by the last 50 or 60 years is how does everyone get a computer and the next 50 years is well what happens because of that or whatever it is I suppose what I’m getting at is like the questions just keep changing. [9:32] So when I was there I was looking at smartphones now I don’t really look at smartphones very much. Scot: [9:39] And then you know it’s interesting if I understand you’re you’re doing some ice on LinkedIn you’re doing some work with some investors, that looks kind of like part-time it seems like your full-time gig is really kind of being part of the crater economy is that is that a fair characterization. Benedict: [9:57] No I suppose so yeah so maybe I was I had an mft I’ve all I left row when I started a sent out a newsletter in like 2013. It’s a bit like you know the joke that you know I didn’t realize I was doing machine learning I thought I was just making if statements in Excel I didn’t know it was a neural network and it’s not going to say I didn’t know I was making an end of T I thought I just sent his letter, and so yeah I suppose I am, yes I mean in the sense of poetry because I supposed to do only with some portion of what I do is actually. Selling content in some form some portion of it is you know more conventional speaking and talking and working with people in passing or by Zoom so you know I give presentations I spend sort of a day a week as a venture partner with a London firm called mosaic which invests in you know series AC stage software companies in Europe and that’s fairly convert straightforward Venture Capital but I do a bunch of different things. [11:00] Yeah I’m not sure if that was consciously a reference or not but there’s certainly a connection in there somewhere. Scot: [11:06] Only like five of our listeners got that Joe and I was one of them all right let’s let’s jump into one of our favorite topics which is e-commerce, you know so maybe I know we’ve had some interesting Twitter conversations of the impact of covid on e-commerce and, one of Jason’s favorite graphs is that one that shows that we’ve like almost tripled our adoption here in the United States which he yeah I’m joking his he takes offense at that, but what have you seen so you went you had this interesting perspective of you kind of know the US market and then now you’ve been there and UK / London what are you seeing as far as e-commerce impact during covid. Benedict: [11:49] Well so several different observations one of them is we actually have pretty good data for the US and the UK much less good data for the rest of your ordinary much harder to get and harder to compare. Um second observation would be the UK and Europe in general had a much stronger lockdown in the US, the US have service strong lock down in some places but not kind of nationally whereas the UK basically shut down for the last three months. [12:19] Um and third observation is whatever you make of that the u.s. went from sort of 16% to sort of a bit over 20 percent penetration if you exclude gasoline and restaurants and things. Um on the same basis that UK went from 20% to 30% and has been sort of bouncing around a bit had a second lockdown but in the UK is sort of stabilizing it about 30%, um most of the rest of Europe was three to five years behind, the UK and this is old joke that when the apocalypse comes you want to be in France because everything happens five years later there and that’s kind of sort of kind of what happens in Tech, type the French kind of ruling class the French newspaper reading class has suddenly discovered Amazon and having all the kind of moral panics we were having about Amazon like five years ago, um like there’s a data from eurostat they don’t have penetration data but they do have usage data and in 2019 I think only about 38 39 percent of all Italians made any online purchase at all. [13:21] So you’ve got this very wide spread across Europe of adoption and basically the UK and like the small Northern so you know this candies Belgium Netherlands and so on, ahead, of the USA Southern your big you at the big European countries I like 5 years behind the USA but of course the lockdown has been this sort of catalyst to make everybody at least try this stuff and Pull It Forward, um the other number is in the if you exclude grocery which is sort of you know a third of retail sales or something. So if you exclude grocery sales and look at everything else in the UK it’s now 40 percent e-commerce so. We’re now at this sort of point where it’s no longer a segment or even you know some if it will even for a long time it was something that some people did for some things and now it’s something everyone does for everything, but you’ll now it is real Tipping Point where you’re having kind of a lot of major retailers disappear or move radically pullback. And a lot of people asking her what is this going to look like what is the world of physical retail even going to be as we come out of this. I feel like that’s probably I mean I didn’t have the US Direct us UK comparison, clearly like us department stores in things a bit in long-term decline but I don’t think the u.s. is at the stage of like 40% of the mall is gone. Jason: [14:47] Yeah it’s fascinating the like I’d be curious to unpackage just a little bit like so and and these aren’t perfect numbers but rough numbers for for conversation purposes if you kind of use the same definition of retailgeek, um the u.s. is going to have about 25% e-commerce penetration versus I’ve seen 35 to 40 in the UK so so I think it clearly is. Is wildly ahead right in my mind there are three things going on there I can in both countries there’s. There’s a lockdown impact and prove your point the lockdown played out differently and in the u.s. it, spread out very differently just depending on where you lived but there’s hey we’re all getting less clothes and what clothes we do get were way more likely to get online stuff like that right so. The there’s a / stored impact which I do think is unique to the us like we. [15:41] 4X the amount of stores per capita in the u.s. that you had in UK so there was there was a long overdue correction and the covid-19 impetus for that that correction and then there is, I think at the moment a fundamental difference to how, people in the United Kingdom and people in the US get groceries digitally like the the UK was far in advance of the u.s. in terms of digital grocery adoption, before the pandemic so in the u.s. there was this huge thing over half the population tried ordering bananas online for the first time ever, um and while I’m sure there was some cohort of new new grocery Shoppers in UK as well it was. It was less and part of me thinks like fundamentally, the UK is an island with much greater density like you like the bananas like we call it it’s ironic that we call it shipping because the bananas don’t have to get on a boat to go like anything that there’s not a ship involved in the UK very often, the. Benedict: [16:45] This is a couple’s this is I mean it’s interesting stuff in here because well so two things to say one of them is so yes the UK will sort of five percent online grocery penetration. And no actually growing that fast I mean you got to 5% in a straight line since about 2000 basically. And it went ten percent more or less overnight and stayed there, and it’s still a now it’s gone up a little bit more in rent into the second lockdown I should say incidentally for all of these numbers this is not being distorted by the fact the total retail sales went down so this is after total retail sales went back up to the same level it’s still at that high level, so UK went from 5% to 10% I think the u.s. is sort of half that at most, um the other question I was thinking all these how much variation is there in the USA to your point about density if we were doing this analysis for New England or for California, would this look different with the numbers be higher I mean I don’t know I think the BLS is just started doing some numbers but. There’s I wonder how much the u.s. let the lower u.s. penetration is skewed by the flyover states if I’m allowed to call it that. Jason: [17:55] Yeah absolutely and I haven’t seen definitive data but my sense so a very, interesting distinction the overwhelming majority of digital grocery in the u.s. is curbside pickup, so we all think of the milk getting deliver to the house but but something like 80% of all the digital grocery orders in the US are a customer going to a store and picking up all their bags in the parking lot instead of, having them delivered and that’s largely because of the unit economics just don’t work in most of the u.s. neighborhoods. Benedict: [18:28] Is the density point was the you you know I’m sort of sitting in my hat and it’s my study looking out of the window in the city of, I’m in an Edwardian you know looks like it’s not like Brooklyn but it’s you know only Edwardian by bedroom houses and there’s you know practically cues of do grocery delivery van sometimes, all I mean that’s part of the point is that the UK retail industry is just much more competitive than the US and retail industry which you thought of gets hidden by the fact that the US has lots of supermarkets but they will kind of regionally dominant, Lucy UK there’s like five supermarkets I can shop from from here. [19:06] Five different chains and so there is a Tesco truck and a car do truck a Safeway truck and the sainsbury truck. Going down the street twice a day every day and they all these custom-built refrigerator trucks. And so that they know that degree of density does change things I think the other thing that’s happening right now it’s sort of goes onto a kind of a broader point is there’s now a wave of sort of one and two hour guy on the back of a bike grocery delivery startups one of them is his Turkish company called get ear or get GOI cottonwoods called now there’s like three of them, and they’re all based on basically dark stores in light industrial areas around residential areas. Um and it’s guys on bikes bringing you to bought a bottle of milk a pack of Pastor a bottle of olive oil and you know whatever they can fit in the bike and it’s sort of topping up the bay so you do the big weekly shop which might move to delivery but then you’ve got this I need its a 50 pound, $75 spend top up which is also happening, and that’s also course about density and how often you need it and what you wanted to pay Logistics to that. Jason: [20:22] Yeah now it’s and that is fascinating like I feel like you’ve highlighted what to me is the next digital wave of grocery like the the first way like the the biggest money to be made is on these big shops right so if you can, win a bunch of those customers that get 60 to 120 items, um in their cart like the unit economics are easier there and that’s in the u.s. certainly where all the big Grocers focused their attention, but you’re absolutely right like there’s a, a totally different mission that people use grocery stores and in the US the providers are heavily fragmented right so you’re going to go to Kroger Walmart or Albertsons to get your your big grocery shop but have you live in a, a urban city. [21:08] Probably going to a bodega to get a bagel or a coffee or or you know replenish the sugar you just ran out of right you like all those, those top-ups you know tend to get served by these smaller local grocery stores and now we’re seeing a boom in the in. E-commerce for those those top up so here in the US we’ve got go puff which is kind of a, purpose-built delivery Network that really focuses on that top up and then you have folks like door – that grew up in meal delivery trying to kind of move over into that does Top-Up missions as well so it’s, that’s going to be interesting in the UK is that are they the same providers that are doing the top ups and. Benedict: [21:52] The different know the different companies well so yes or no so some of the supermarkets have that Top-Up thing as well because what the supermarkets have done in the UK over the last 20 years is that created what they call a Metro format, which is sort of like a bodega size store that it’s open 24 hours and it’s right and it’s got a limited and will limited selection, but it’s you know it’s a double it’s two or three shopfronts wide, and it’s it’s a Tesco Metro it’s the same speeds Metro and so they’re using those as endpoints for a guy on a bike at the same time, I mean the other interesting thing there you know just talking about door – is the number from Uber last week. That they would like a think a 30 billion dollar run rate on rides and now fifty two billion dollar runway on ubereats, one of the things we’ll sort of sort of to kind of Link think sort of things in here one of these want I should have one of the points I wanted made in the presentation I did in January with that instead of thinking about e-commerce by product category and saying well books are different from makeup which are different from shoes which are different from. I don’t know like consumer electronics which are different from something else instead you should split it into Parcels versus delivery versus bikes. [23:11] And so on that basis is everything that can go into a brown cardboard box which is basically the airway Amazon sees the world and everything that can’t, which is either a refrigerated truck or you go to the grocery store or it gets brought to you on a on the back of a bike. Um and in that category you basically have Grocery and restaurant, looking at the numbers I mean I kind of struggled with for mentioned numbers earlier I got wildly conflicting numbers based on which research I looked at but it looked like something like a third to a half of us restaurant spending is actually takeout or delivery anyway and like was before the internet. Jason: [23:50] Yeah my number is it was close to 50 before and and was like well over 70 of Court off Prem was well over 70 during the pandemic. Benedict: [23:58] Yeah and I think like the interesting General thing I was thinking about this is a like split e-commerce into can it be a cardboard box or a bike or truck, oh collection but the other thing I was thinking is like if you just forget about e-commerce for a minute and you kind of ask the question well why is it that you buy a pint of milk, from a completely different kind of store from a bed or couch why does he care I have a giant store in the edge of town and Walmart have a giant store in the edge of town and the bodega doesn’t, the night we know the answer but like if you kinds of systematized that it’s like there’s like an algebra, of cost per square foot how urgently you need it how willing the far you’re willing to go how often you need it how big the inventory is you know add 20 more criteria that get you like a kind of a multi-dimensional scatter plot of, aquella versus a department store versus a high-end Boutique versus a bodega versus. Pick 10 all the retail categories and sort of what the internet does is it’s kind of like it adds three ways. [25:01] And so it enables a whole class of new kind of retailers so like it’s like freeways and cars enable big box retail for the sake of argument and enable the different kind of Supermarket where you can fill up your car as opposed to having it carried home. And the internet like adds a whole bunch more criteria in the same way to that whole Logistics question. Which gets you both to my point like the one our grocery delivery versus a weekly shop and it gets you that question do I go there or do they come here and what do I pay on each side. Which is another way of saying like maybe instead of saying the internet is completely new we should say this is just like another wave of change in retail. Scot: [25:38] Yeah yeah I agree with that Framing and it’s interesting, so it wouldn’t be a Jason Scott show if we didn’t talk a little bit about Amazon and I noticed you didn’t mention them as one of the trucks coming to your neighborhood makes me so they just basically ceded the UK grocery delivery space. Benedict: [25:55] They do but they’re not in grocery delivery so they of course so there’s I mean it’s the sort of someone was saying what’s the you know the children’s game where you ring the doorbell and run away what do you call that that’s called parcel Force. Did one of the career firms here. And so yeah there is an explosion in the other so say they were the refrigerator trucks which are all the supermarket’s plus a car do. And then there are parcel trucks which are a whole other bunch of companies so it’s dpd it’s making supposed to office and it’s dpd and it’s Amazon and it’s a couple of other things but that’s sort of basically the story, um but it’s just a whole other hold on the model there is existing in powder. Scot: [26:43] Dude so Amazon’s pretty dominant there in the UK and obviously in the US doing really well do you see anything slowing them down or how do they fit into that framework you just lay down. Benedict: [26:54] So I think well I’d sort of propose maybe another framework so so I think like the way I always have to talk about Amazon is you know this cliché that e-commerce has infinite shelf space and I said that’s not quite right for Amazon and Amazon has one shelf that’s infinitely long. And so everything they sell has to fit onto the same shelf and be sold in exactly the same way through exactly the same website and exactly the same Majestics in the same kind of boxes. And the like the story of the last 20 25 years is converting more and more product categories to discover people are willing to buy it like that. [27:31] Where you know start with books but it turns out there’s an awful lot of other categories that you wouldn’t have thought people would buy like that it turns out they are willing to buy like that, um and then the other side of e-commerce is yes people will buy it online but not like that. So you need a completely different web experience different kind of recommendation or service, for you need to have free returns or it needs to be hand-delivered or whatever it is but it needs to be something other than the Amazon commodity logistic model. And so I mean you see this in the kind of the market share, that you know they’re also to people who are under the impression that e-commerce is 75 percent of retail and the Amazon is a hundred and ten percent of that but of course it isn’t, um you know Adams and his goal sort of seven or eight percent of us retail it’s got a bit less than half of depending on how you count it instead of it’s got sort of 4045 percent of u.s. e-commerce and it’s kind of the same in Britain, um Maybe a bit higher Court member rather unsurprisingly you look at the share in lockdown and the the online-only retailers share went down as a show of e-commerce but there’s a whole other question a lot well what are the other ways of buying this, which I would think you know basically you never the what’s old is new and Amazon is the new Walmart and Amazon Walmart converted a whole bunch of stuff into Walmart. [28:54] And Amazon is converting a whole bunch of stuff into Amazon but it doesn’t follow that everything becomes that. Scot: [29:01] What are some of the other modes so you mentioned like Uber Eats and food delivery which is kind of a different mode what are some of the other modes that you’re seeing. Benedict: [29:10] Well so I think I mean just this is mechanistically there’s parcel and then there’s truck brings it to you there’s you go and get it and then there’s guy on a bike, we just don’t like the kid on bike brings it to you there’s also sort of orthogonal to that the set of so that’s a very Silicon Valley word but same sort of next to that you’ve got like, I should say societal next to sound clever you’ve also got like free returns, for subscriptions or subscriptions where you get 10 things that you don’t know what we don’t know what you’re going to get and so there’s lots of different kind of merchandising and retailing models. Um that are quite distinct from the Amazon merchandising in retailing model which is like you know whatever you know you can have any color you want as long as it’s black. Scot: [30:02] I do so one that that we’ve been following closely is live streaming which is kind of caught fire in China, but as you know some of these things they kind of catch fire in China and they stay in China they don’t so like you know what I would call chat Commerce as a big thing in China hasn’t really kind of made it out there do you see live stream becoming one of those are you seeing any evidence of that like in your. Benedict: [30:24] So I think a lot of people trying it so it’s clearly on everyone’s experiment list for this year will it work I don’t know. I mean I think this is like the general puzzle I have looking at China which again is sort of on my list to write about I read about it as a column in my newsletter but I should write about it again it’s like sometimes I feel. [30:45] So this is what we’re saying this so like I started Mike when I started my career I’m mobile internet was everyone was very excited about mobile internet if it didn’t actually exist anywhere except in Japan. The Japanese operators that launched this thing called I’m out and equivalents of I made which was a phone that had a packet-switched network and an internet connection and it was unmetered, when I was submitted a comment anyway it was cheap and they had an app store and you could look at stuff on your phone and you have like a big not even color screen but it’s like a big screen with lots of text, he was a mate and they were like millions of people using this and the chart was going up into the right and it was amazing and they were kind of to sort of lessons from this the first is that I made turned out to be a dead end it wasn’t actually the future. The second was that you couldn’t actually find out what was going on except like a third hand because you couldn’t use the product yourself you couldn’t read the language. [31:40] You couldn’t read the, like discussion of it by informed people because it was all in Japanese you couldn’t go there because it was like $5,000 to go there and even if you did go there you still couldn’t use the product if you want a Japanese resident you can buy the phone so everything was sort of a third hand, and you tear this stuff about this amazing stuff that was happening in Japan you would quite know okay is that actually what’s happening and be what predictive value does that have, easy like I don’t know it’s like you go to a country another country on holiday and you see a retailer that you think that’s really cool I wish we had that at home a bender but you know it wouldn’t work. Like you couldn’t take that retailer on just do it in LA and expect it to work. [32:17] And which is still the thing I should have wonder if I look at it all the other this is repairable to this in Tokyo chit China we sighs how much of this is put how much of this is being accurately described in the first place. Jason: [32:29] Yeah. Benedict: [32:30] Because that was the whole problem with like the whole bot thing to in four years ago everyone said oh we chat is amazing and it’s all about Bots and Chinese people said like no it isn’t it’s not about possible. And the other piece is like how predictive is this how much of this is about Japanese the Chinese market structure and LeapFrog in traditional retail and like five other criteria about how that market is set up and it wouldn’t necessarily work here. And maybe the third step is which is one of the things I think is interesting about Clubhouse is is it that you take that core concept but you do it in a complete different way. So Clubhouse looks a lot like stuff that was happening in Japan so in China a couple of years ago a bit in a little bit it’s also completely Americanized. It doesn’t have 800 things on the screen and you know it’s not that visual overload that you get with two European eyes looks like that’s how that’s how European see Chinese apps are like oh my God there’s so much stuff on the screen but it has tipping and subscription and it’s not add based in the same way and you pay for content. And so I think that’s like a generalized thing I wonder if I look at all of this stuff in China you have like eight or nine hundred million people you have a huge number or smartphones you have a huge number of entrepreneurs scrambling over each other frenzied Innovation creation copying of every kind of course is going to be amazing ideas coming out of there. But it’s a big jump to go from that to look at one particular company and say well that will work here. Jason: [33:56] Yeah it’s interesting as you’re explaining it like I’m also thinking like I noticed there’s a very often a fishtail version of this to write that the. The real numbers that were already impressive in China for you know some like different behaviors than we see here, keep getting Amplified every time someone tells the story so I you know live streaming Commerce is 70% of all Commerce in China and you know WeChat is 50% of all Commerce in China and all these things that are like objectively not true. Benedict: [34:26] Yeah and you can tell. Jason: [34:27] Yeah and I. Benedict: [34:29] Is there anyone can make up any old bollocks about what’s happening in China and people will believe it. Jason: [34:33] Man yeah and toll recently and you know I was desperate to understand these real experiences and so I have a lot of Chinese co-workers and I there were super patient with me, sort of like annotating screenshots from from various apps and things but, to your point like it was impossible for me to experience, are we pay for example right because you you literally need a Chinese bank that an American citizen could not get like that very recently is not true but like all of those digital wallets were, not available the westerners and when you take digital wallets out of all of these ecosystems the experiences wildly different. Benedict: [35:15] Yeah is actually a which is to my point exactly like trying to understand I made 20 years ago. Jason: [35:22] Yeah yeah. Benedict: [35:23] Literally be like looking at pictures and stuff and stuffing stuff through Google translate if that even existed then and try to work out how this works. Jason: [35:32] Yep I’ve sat in a number of meetings at Best Buy when we’re talking about if we should have a web browser and using the wildly successful I’m owed example but yeah so I do want to, half pivot I guess still on Amazon another topic that comes up a lot and I know you you have a strong perspective on it is this whole notion of Amazon private label and and you’ve done some some awesome writing that Scott and I have both enjoyed talking about you know what a, a miraculous new invention private label is since Amazon invented it a few few weeks ago and what is potential implications are an antitrust can you kind of. Give us your primer there. Benedict: [36:17] Yeah well sorry I was kind of interesting so. This is kind of Trope of attacking tech companies where you say you idiot you invented the thing that already existed so people looked at Lyft line and said you invented buses. [36:29] And the funny thing is when people complain about private label by reaction is you can back congratulations you invented retailing. Because this is book that I kind of talked about quite often by Zola, from the 19th century called Bonner did and happiness of women which is basically a novel about the creation of Bon Marche and it’s equation of department stores in the nine 1860s 1870s. And the central character instantly turns a Draper’s shop into a department store through force of will over like 10 years and there’s highlight pages and pages in this book about return on Capital and stop days. [37:08] Um and working capital and he invents lost leaders, and there’s like two pages where his staff is saying but we’re losing money on every yard of this and he says yes I know that’s the point and he invents free returns. And of course and fix prices if you can’t have a discount until you’ve got a fixed price and free returns and catalogs, and meanwhile the the shopkeepers on the other side of the street as saying like have you seen what that Maniac is doing he’s selling hats and gloves in the same shop he’s got no morals it’s indecent. And you read this thing and it’s like this is people describing hours this is Amazon you know this is this person who’s creating this different way of packaging up all this business and selling it in different ways and innovating furiously on every different aspect of it but one of the points is that the thing that he’s selling is a loss leader is private label fabric. [38:01] And you kind of you you go and you look it and it’s maybe this is a point about you know UK versus American retail like I never would have occurred to me that you wouldn’t know the supermarkets are full of private later product. And you go and look at the history of this and like the FTC wrote this like a hundred page report in the early 30s on chain store private label brands. [38:22] And guess what it’s like a quarter of all these girl sales in the US are private label brands in the early 30s and so I think the sort of the interesting thing here is to say look. This is the stuff that you were describing. At the most basic level has been part of retail 450 years every retailer does his most weed hairless do it way more than Amazon it’s like one or two or three percent of Amazon sales it’s 20 to 30 percent of sales and most retailers you’ve heard of except for the Gap where it’s a hundred percent but you know how I’ll get Macy’s Wal-Mart it’s 10 20 30 % of cells. And so so the question here is like is it that you just didn’t know this happened and you’re shocked and astonished to have find out about it. [39:07] Is it somehow different when Amazon does it. And of course it’s different in some sense because like Amazon is in a supermarket but is it different in some kind of meaningful sense because like yes of course they have scale they do so there’s Walmart, yes of course they look at the data of what selling in their store yes well done so does every other retailer they have computers do they know what they sell. He’s a they’re looking at what you’re searching for but not buying and that’s a different kind of data to the data the Walmart has well maybe. But how him how big a deal is that as opposed to the fact that they’re just competing with their suppliers like all retailers. Case is actually just a moral Panic is it that you had no idea this existed you’re shocked to discover and you think it’s amazing in the evil because you think Amazon is amazing evil. I’m always a genuinely something different about the way that Amazon does this that matters. Um or of course do you think that all our retailers should be stopped from doing this. And you can say that but you do have to understand that that’s like a third across K you’ve just band. [40:14] So I think those are the sort of the interesting questions of course they intersect with a kind of a joke that Berman made earlier that there are people who think that Amazon is sort of like 45 50 75 percent of American retail so you do actually have to understand their Amazon is roughly the size is the same size as Walmart, no it doesn’t have a monopoly. But then it does have a monopoly in certain very specific areas you know there are certain businesses where I’m as an only is the only Channel not just in private label but you know it works. Does that person have a does that person have Market dominant dominant does Amazon have market dominance in grocery obviously not his it have market dominance in books obviously. Jason: [40:51] Yeah no it’s super interesting and it’s funny I was. I found myself in a mild Twitter feud on this topic this week that I had to retreat from, because I sort of made the same point you did that you know hey Amazon has like one percent penetration and you know 25 to 50 is not is not uncommon so Amazon’s the worst private-label her in the history of retail at the moment. And then you know we were talking about the various categories of private label and and I pointed out that the interesting thing to me are the, desirable unique products that retailers are starting to invent that our own Brands right and so I use that Target has a bunch of good examples of this like cat and Jack is their apparel brand, but my hypothesis was. Like arguably the most successful version of this recently is the as I hit mute the Alexa the you know which is essentially a private label product that that Amazon invented and a bunch of people in Twitter like push back in there like, that that’s not a private label product that’s something you know Amazon invented the the whole category while I can. I don’t know I might go so Amazon invented the Bluetooth speaker that’s interesting but but you. Benedict: [42:06] Reporting invented the clock radio. Jason: [42:08] Exactly and so but but I did really like you know is there a way in which they did an interesting mashup and that unlocked you know huge demand sure right like I’m it’s an impressive product but it’s, at that whole Space is super interesting and the same people that are pushing back and going like oh this is you know uncompetitive unfair Behavior, certainly enjoy their Kirkland 5 pound bags of nuts and they certainly enjoy their Alexa and you know you go back, the history of retail retail started out as the the product inventor selling their own product right like wholesale is is a much newer invention. Benedict: [42:45] Yeah I mean I think the. So to specific in a general points is specific point is I think the interesting thing about Amazon Marketplace is that if you are super thoughtful Innovative creative sort of regulator if that’s not in any sense an oxymoron. You would propose that Amazon be obliged to provide wholesale access to its Logistics and it’s e-commerce. Like if that’s your view think Amazon is a monopoly or anything Z Amazon is guilty of Market abuse what’s your remedy well they have to provide wholesale access to the logistics and website and guess what they do in fact that 60% of the business. From and I think the the interesting sort of General point. Is here and this is sort of a point I might sort of what Emily talking about regulation is like. [43:34] The the kind of the eye-catching hand-waving sloganeering stuff generally falls apart when you start asking questions so like let’s break up Google, okay into what and what problem does that solve YouTube is still YouTube it still doesn’t have any competition let’s break up Facebook okay that doesn’t stop teenage girls looking at self-harm content on Instagram those are different kinds of problem. The stuff is going to hurt is regulating where the buy box can appear around Marketplace. It’s you know regulating the price that Amazon charges for shipping, from Marketplace and in the same way it’s going to be no the at the hey antitrust off that’s going to hurt is going to be digging deep inside the mechanics of the ad marketplaces, and finding some Loosely worded email and finding Google ten billion dollars and making them sell double-click. No it’s not that doesn’t make a great book title that takes 20 minutes to explain what the fuck just happened if I’m allowed to say that case 20 minutes did it’s a staff that takes 20 minutes to explain what happened and turns out to be 15% of Google’s profits, that’s where I think most of the regulatory staff will actually bite. Scot: [44:49] I know we’re running up against time and we want to be we’re thankful that you took time out of your schedule to talk to us the I didn’t want to end without talking about just kind of at a macro sense your latest Mega presentation was around great unbundling, so maybe tease listeners with kind of what is that and maybe one example of something coming out of the Great unbundling. Benedict: [45:13] You know it’s always kind of a challenge to you know talk about what’s happening in what’s changing in tech for either more than one minute or less than two hours. Um because you can either say look everything’s going to be software or you can all you got off and you spend an hour and a half talking about what’s happening in Indonesia you know like and digital transformation and all kinds of other stuff that I didn’t even mention, um I think the kind of the cool thing that I wanted to talk about was and this is great and I started with this quote from one of the owners of Kraft Heinz where he said I’m a terrified dinosaur I thought I was in a world of kind of efficiency and old Brands and profit maximization and now suddenly everything’s being disrupted. [45:51] And I think you can kind of generalize this to like everything in retail and e-commerce is clearly breaking apart and no one knows what the new stability will look like. Meanwhile because you have this completely different channel that totally changes everything in cpg everything in brand everything in consumer product because suddenly the way that you sell it completely changes and that creates all sorts of different kinds of competition a different kinds of product. And then third very obviously the whole world of advertising is breaking apart like Google and Facebook between them and now probably half or more of total us advertising. Maybe more I’ll remember the number now and say like this this we’ve gone from this world of basically creativity and telling stories to being data. And meanwhile that place doesn’t have ads and so like the whole world of brand has changed the whole other retailers changing the whole world of after I think it’s changing and of course TV as well is complete completely broken apartment and you know where the show is going to be what channel the channel is going to be one of the aggregate is going to be and in all of these things the kind of the model it’s like you used to have this very clearly defined go-to-market where you have the people who made things and the people who are aggregated and sold it and now that’s all been broken apart, all the people who used to sell to aggregators whether that’s TV companies or retailers or any kind of data market and now like okay well we’ve got completely different aggregators and also maybe we should be going Direct. [47:19] And ever wants to customer relationship. Most of those companies however most consumer brands are actually not consumer businesses they’ve never they don’t actually sell makeup they sell trucks full of makeup. To warm up or 240 and they’ve never actually been a b2c business. Um and now suddenly they all need to think about whether they should be a b2c business and if not what are all the new b2c businesses that will completely take over their Channel, and what how much data they should have and what they should do with their data and what all of this means and so this is great quote from great Jim Barksdale from like 25 years ago there’s only two ways to make money in business bundling and unbundling. And what’s happening now is like everything across brand retail consumer products advertising TV is being unbundled. And it’s going to get re bundled at some point in some ways but we don’t know what. Scot: [48:08] Yeah I find myself I’ve got 20 subscriptions right to all these different things so now I need someone to do aggregate that for me where I unplugged my cable thing because it got too expensive but I’m spending just as much but now I’m having to manage 20 subscriptions. Benedict: [48:22] Yeah exactly I said it was with the point earlier it’s like the remaking of retail around the freeway or the remaking of retail around electricity and around elevators and department stores you know it’s another of these sort of generational resets of how all of this stuff works. And like all the cars are thrown up in the air no nose with a little girl and not everybody is going to have a DC business in five years time and that applies in Hollywood as much as it does in. Cereal. Scot: [48:52] Yeah and then it’s kind of fun to think through so in the world of e-commerce all these brands are going direct which is interesting and but then you know from a consumer standpoint where does it stop because you don’t want to go to 80 different websites to get that one brand you know to the extreme example you know there’s a benefit to the grocery store of having one place that has all these brands aggregated, so We’re kind of in an unbundling phase and then I wonder is there a new model that comes along and is the bundling or does Amazon kind of become the bundle or do you have a point of view on where that goes. Benedict: [49:26] So I think clearly you know it’s a different way to think about this and one of them is clearly not everyone’s going to be able to go to Road and a lot of stuff will collapse back in I think the way that WWF, WWE wrestling people rolled back into a bundle with interesting because you would think that would be a standalone brand that would be able to do that and they decided didn’t work Disney can. Um Sony can’t like insanely build its own direct-to-consumer subscription video business probably not so what a Sony Pictures do. Um says a lot of those sort of questions I think there’s a sort of a subtext within this and maybe another layer in this is I had this wrote this things that are four five years ago that I called lists of the new search. And I she showed a slide to accompany the other day and I had a picture on the one hand of Macy’s from my 1910 you know the store the biggest store in the world, on the other hand there’s a store in Tokyo that just sells one book. [50:23] They change it once a week and they’ve got a table piled of copies and they’ll tell you about the book and the kind of the question is like how do you find a product, see if you go to this store they only sell one book so that you don’t have a discovery problem but you’ve got to know that the shore store exists which basically means either advertising or they’re paying rent in the right part of Tokyo and so the that part of Tokyo is the aggregator. Oh you can be in the multi-brand boutique and you’re not quite as hard to find but that Boutique has to find you and has to choose you and you still have to know about the boutique for you can be in Macy’s and then like okay you’re going to be a bit difficult to find that but you’re not going to unlike you to walk past that product now or you can be an Amazon and you’re one of however many hundred million schools and you’ll never like walk past it you have to know what you want. Um and so but if you’re in Amazon and you have to know then how do I know it exists while I read about it in Vogue or read about it in wallpaper or GQ or somewhere. And so this is sort of sense that like you can either be. This carefully curated thing but how do you find the curation or you can be in this vast thing that has everything but then how do you find it in the answer is well some other kind of curation but there’s like there’s not like an answer to that there’s just kind of a pendulum that swings back and forth. Jason: [51:36] Yeah it’s fascinating to me it’s I kind of putting a historical retail lens on it again like in a, in a earlier world when there were was a choice of three hammers to buy like you could bundle discovery of hammers with consideration of hammers and fulfillment of hammers right and that’s what independent hardware stores did and then the, the pianos of the world or the the Home Depot’s of the world said hey now there’s a hundred Hammers and it actually became way harder to, discover and pick a hammer because they did such a good job of bundling, fulfillment and distribution of all these hammers when Amazon makes 80,000 different hammers available, they can they simply cannot also be the point where you discover and decide on Hammers and so I actually think it’s. Bundling fulfillment in some of these things or purchasing some of these things has created new unbundling zuv, Discovery and so you know that’s an interesting space to me in Commerce right now is how how many. Products used to be discovered on the Shelf of a grocery store and are now being discovered in a tick tock video or whatever else. Benedict: [52:49] Yeah I mean I think a lot of this is Pop Culture which is to the point about you know we’ll live streaming work I don’t know that’s like saying well that new, my fashion magazine for teenage girls while I don’t know maybe, awesome but he knows a lot about that and it’s pop culture and its retailing and Merchandising it’s not really a technology question and it’s also I mean that you know the maybe another way of thinking about this is that like in, 1800 there was a very finite amount of product, there was also very limited number of customers you know number of people who are actually kind of consumers in any really meaningful sentence for fully like a couple of thousand people in each Country and then the Industrial Revolution happens and suddenly you have infinite product and you also have like many more consumers and then you have but you have the gatekeeper of the logistics on the retailing and the which is either the retailer or the media to tell you what bye, this is the bait The Gatekeepers are the newspapers and magazines on the one hand and the retailer on the other side and maybe the retail is whole set up behind them. Um so you have infinite product and customers but you have this gatekeeping function its activation function and now you know you don’t. [53:59] You know now it’s Google or its Amazon and Amazon has however many hunting a hundred million schools or its Alibaba and they said there’s infinite product and infinite choice. And that almost gets that gets you to the book store that only sells one book. I mean I remember years ago reading about it I denim store in Tokyo that was called not found because they didn’t want to show up in Google they wanted it to be impossible to find them in Google. [54:22] And you almost feel like there’s almost like an arts and crafts moment now we’re like in 1800 if you said I want something handmade that didn’t mean anything, in 1900 if you say I want something handmade that that becomes a very meaningful statement you know I want to step out of mass production and I sometimes feel like there’s a lot of different strands in, popular culture now that is sort of about stepping out of the fire hose he sort of what it serious as well isn’t it. That is what Instagram is getting at there’s a lot of sort of ways that are trying to get you a way as not just a search box it’s something else. Scot: [55:00] I remember the early days of etsy everyone thought they were crazy because the handmade category on eBay was like 20 million and they’re like can’t it’s not Venture back avoid the Tam isn’t big enough and now it’s like two billion dollars in GMB. Benedict: [55:12] Yeah well that’s like that guy who said that the time for Uber is taxi cabs like yeah I know. Scot: [55:19] What do you think about scooters Tam is walking do you buy the you buy that argument. Benedict: [55:23] I don’t know um there’s. Scot: [55:26] Are they a thing in London or is London. Benedict: [55:40] This is clearly a shift in electric changing what that can mean, and changing the practicality of that and massively broadening that and there’s a shift instead of popular consensus around what road should look like which means that scooters and bikes can become much safer and much more practical. Um How big is a scooter and a bike has some practicality in that like it’s you know you can fold it up so it doesn’t take the space that a bike the fall but whole bicycle does Maybe. You know I mean it is a business how big a business is everybody on earth going to have one I don’t know you know I couldn’t have used one to commute 35 miles a day to Menlo Park from San Francisco, um but I can certainly see that filling a segment. In the same way that like it’s I don’t know maybe it’s like being in like 1975 on the same do you think hatchback small cars are going to work. He wants his worlds for some people in some places. Jason: [56:37] It’s never really fulfilling answer though yeah. Benedict: [56:40] Yeah it’s the answer is sort of yes maybe for some people it’s never going to be like binary. Jason: [56:44] Depends exactly. Benedict: [56:47] Well this is I you know I studied history at University and I’m the master of my college Hugh trevor-roper of sort of famous for saying history teaches us nothing except that something will happen. It’s always different. Jason: [56:59] Yeah, hey I know we’re coming up on time maybe one one last question pivoting as far away from history as possible all this interesting Innovation is there anything in particular that you’re excited about for the future of Commerce like is there is there one of these Trends or technologies that you’re more more bullish on than others. Benedict: [57:19] Um I think there’s like a hole I hate this is such an overused term but it’s convenient there’s a sort of a Cambrian explosion in every kind of remote work every kind of video and collaboration and interaction we’re not in the same room and what do you do that it would be better than video. And there was also a Cambrian explosion, in every kind of sense of what would e-commerce be how would it work what does physical retail look like if it’s no longer the end point to a logistics chain so again a horrible word experiential huge amount of people thinking about retail is experience, events is experience what does it mean if the alternative if it’s if it’s always easier to get it by Amazon or to buy online what we what is the reason you create to go to the store. [58:07] If it’s easier to buy it on Amazon what’s the reason you create to put it on the website. If people aren’t buying that online what would you put what would you change what online experience would you create to change that, and I think the kind of the lockdown have been this sort of catalyst. Of just we maybe just like the realization like everyone is online everyone will buy anything online there is no product that people will not buy online if you can’t come up with the right experience and so we’ve got this sort of huge wave of innovation coming in the next year two years three years around working out what that means, is this like all the things that come off to zoom which is a bit like all the stuff that happened with voice after Skype, all the stuff that comes because out of that realization and it’s just going to be so many sort of interesting models in interesting ways of doing this. Jason: [59:02] Yeah that is interesting it’s. It’s going to be a fascinating area for all of us to live through that’s for sure I’m grateful we’re in a time of such such interesting and fascinating disruption, Benedict that’s going to be a great place to leave it because it’s happen again we have used up a perfectly good hour of our listeners time, as always if you have any questions or comments about the things we discussed on the show we’d love it if you’d leave us a comment on our Facebook page or hit us on our Twitter feed and for sure if you enjoyed this show we sure would appreciate if you jump on the iTunes and give us that five star review. Scot: [59:41] Benedict thanks for coming today if folks want to find you online you’re pretty much everywhere but what’s kind of the best Gateway that you folks. Benedict: [59:49] Well if you Google me my parents had good SEO so Benedict Evans will take you to my website which is Ben Evans been – evidence.com and there’s various sort of things you can do that. Scot: [59:59] Yeah yeah yeah I share that with you Jason does. Jason: [1:00:04] Yeah Scott Scott’s parents either had great SEO or were very bad spellers. Yeah or perhaps perhaps both but I really enjoyed the chat thanks so much we’ll put a link to your bananas in the show notes and until next time happy commercing!

Had the opportunity today to listen to two internet legends have a fireside chat conversation, Steve Case and my partner Jim Barksdale. Their leadership at #AOL and #Netscape was so foundational to the commercialization of the internet. Here are some takeaways from myself and co workers Greg Griffith and Gregg Newby. Enjoy! #thirdwave #internet #accelerateMS

The buzz: “If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine!” (Jim Barksdale). Machine Learning is impacting core business processes, but many companies are struggling with how to operationalize it. The key – and what data scientists spend 80% of their efforts on – is having the right data. What is good data? The experts speak. Ginger Gatling, SAP: “Chemistry is the study of matter, but I prefer to see it as the study of change” (Walter White, Breaking Bad). Blake Howitt, SAP: “If everyone is thinking alike, then someone isn't thinking” (Gen. George S. Patton). David Quirk, SAP: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now” (Chinese Proverb). John Schitka, SAP: “We classify things for the purpose of doing something to them. Any classification which does not assist manipulation is worse than useless” (Randolph Bourne). Join us for Can't Live Without You: Predictive Machine Learning Needs Data Management – Part 2.

The buzz: “If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine!” (Jim Barksdale). Machine Learning is impacting core business processes, but many companies are struggling with how to operationalize it. The key – and what data scientists spend 80% of their efforts on – is having the right data. What is good data? The experts speak. Ginger Gatling, SAP: “Chemistry is the study of matter, but I prefer to see it as the study of change” (Walter White, Breaking Bad). Blake Howitt, SAP: “If everyone is thinking alike, then someone isn't thinking” (Gen. George S. Patton). David Quirk, SAP: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now” (Chinese Proverb). John Schitka, SAP: “We classify things for the purpose of doing something to them. Any classification which does not assist manipulation is worse than useless” (Randolph Bourne). Join us for Can't Live Without You: Predictive Machine Learning Needs Data Management – Part 2.

（以下文字只是音频内容的少许补充） 硅谷前辈 Jim Barksdale 有一句名言： 这个世界上的生意要赚钱，只有两种方式：捆绑，或是分拆。 In business, there are two ways to make money. You can bundle, or you can unbundle 关于Jim Barksdale 他曾是网景（Netscape）公司 CEO。也曾在 McCaw Cellular/AT&T Wireless 担任过CEO，在 FedEx担任过COO。此后他还在时代华纳（Time Warner）、FedEx、升阳（ Sun Microsystems）的董事会担任董事长。他还是前美国总统乔治·布什的外交情报顾问委员会成员。 关于“绑定/拆分”这个说法的背景 Jim Barksdale 在网景上市前的欧洲路演上说了一开头的那句话的背景是，微软面对网景浏览器的威胁，将 IE 浏览器和 Windows 操作系统捆绑销售。 但 Jim Barksdale 认为“绑定/拆分”的分析视角可以运用到各种商业模式的分析中，而不仅仅是科技领域。但因为技术的发展正使得“绑定/拆分”变得比过去更容易，因此我们在最近十多年看到的因为“绑定/拆分”而带来的商业模式颠覆正越来越多。 很多科技领域的投资人、分析师等也都很经常用这个概念，例如风险投资机构 A16Z 的 Benedict Evans 和著名分析师 Ben Thompson。 关于“绑定/拆分”的例子 苹果公司通过软件和硬件的绑定，带来更优的用户体验，也使得消费者愿为苹果产品支付更高的溢价； 音乐行业原本的商业模式是将新曲和旧歌放在同一张唱片上打包销售，用户即使只想要听其中一首歌也要买下一整张唱片；但苹果的 iTunes 服务打破了这种绑定，让用户可以单独购买喜欢的单曲。 传统杂志是一组文章的绑定：用户为这样一整组文章付费，广告商也为这样一整组文章投放广告。互联网使得文章可以以单篇形式分发给读者，读者很少为内容付费，或可以只为单篇文章打赏；广告商也可以根据关键词，或其它细分条件，进行更加定向的广告投放。 “绑定/拆分”对商业模式颠覆的规律 新技术出现时，更多“拆分”行为会对商业模式带来挑战； 当技术和产品成熟，更多商业模式的创新和“绑定”有关； 未来的“大绑定时代”的几个例子 巨头们正在不遗余力实施绑定策略，例如亚马逊和微信现在所采用的策略； 为了更好的用户体验，很多面向消费者的人工智能产品必须绑定更多功能，或有新方式能够提供一整套的用户体验； 交通出行领域也许会有一些商业模式各不相同的“绑定”出现； 延展问题 在媒体领域，会有什么样的“绑定”出现； 在您所在的领域，可以用“绑定/分拆”做什么样的分析； 相关阅读 Podcast: bundling and unbundling — Benedict Evans (https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/8/15/podcast-bundling-and-unbundling) What Happens When Mobile (Really) Hits the Wallet (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK9owf0PSZU) Ben Thompson：媒体这栋大厦快要倒了 (https://36kr.com/p/5062455) How bundling benefits sellers and buyers (https://cdixon.org/2012/07/08/how-bundling-benefits-sellers-and-buyers/) Ben Thompson：微软的垄断遗风 (https://36kr.com/p/5086152) Enjoy！

My guest this week is a bundle of curiosity, and that is one of the nicest things I could say about someone. For several years, Tren Griffin has been writing a weekly blog post that highlights things he has learned from various investors, businesspeople, musicians, comedians, and more. Lately, he has also been tackling individual businesses, and broad topics like scaling, competitive forces, and product market fit. Tren’s full time job is serving as a director at Microsoft. He’s also worked with or for several well know businesspeople and investors like Craig McCaw, and written several books including one on lessons for entrepreneurs, one on Charlie Munger, and another on negotiation.   We discuss value creation vs. value capture, alpha in investing, sales, hip hop, and why he’d teach high school students about convexity through a drunk driving analogy. I could have talked to Tren for much longer than I did, but sadly, we both had flights to catch.  If you take anything away from this, I hope its just how much fun it is to just be curious about business, and how you can learn a tremendous amount if you just keep reading about the things that interest you and talking to others. Please enjoy my conversation with Tren Griffin. For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag   Show Notes 2:26 – (First question) –  key levers of the universal business model 4:26 – How do you know when you’ve achieved real value creation 6:24 – Importance of value capture and how they enhance value creation              6:31 – Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future 9:08 – Price power 10:28 – Are discussions of moats more useful to businesses than to investors 13:12 -  What Tren learned during his early years working with Craig McCaw             16:28 – The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success 16:36 – The skill of capital allocation 18:37 – How would Buffett and Munger bet on tech if they were starting out today and their philosophy of betting against change 21:57 – How Tren became so fascinated with Charlie and what he’s learned from him             22:32 – The Alchemy of Finance             23:17 – Damn Right: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger             23:19 – Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger 25:21 – Most memorable moment or lesson from Charlie 28:19 – There are more pockets of Alpha 19:20 – How he thinks about factor investing 31:25 – What are the scalability features that make a business attractive 31:28 – A Dozen Attributes of a Scalable Business 35:37 – Exploring some of the other important levers of businesses, such as subscriptions, customer acquisition cost, and more.             36:20 – Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In 37:11 – Wholesale transfer pricing 39:18 – Pros and cons of subscription business models 43:14 – Magic of getting products distributed 44:58 – Best sale Tren’s ever made 46:46 – Most important lesson for young people 49:01 – Any businesses that are piquing Tren’s interest right now 50:16 – Tren’s interest in hip-hop and how it helps him reach more people 53:49 – A look at some interesting quotes from Jim Barksdale 58:22 – Learning by doing             1:00:48 – Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed 1:01:06 – Period of his career that he felt most alive 1:03:03 – Advice for young people thinking about business and entrepreneurship 1:04:56 – Why are so few people passionate about what they do for a living 1:10:44 – Kindest thing anyone has done for Tren   Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.  Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub Follow Patrick on twitter at @patrick_oshag  

How did McCaw consistently foster some of the best talent in the wireless industry? This episode explains how a unique company culture can have a big impact. Featuring interviews with Fred Mercado, Bob Ratliffe, Steve Hooper, Hal Eastman, Dennis O’Connell, Jayne Hart, Peter Currie, Jim Barksdale, Kerry Larson, John Keller, and Dan Hesse.

    In Tech Focus we look at our new Acer Acer Veriton M6640G.  Straight out of the box it supports the 4 monitors that I need to drive.  Pretty much silent and driven by a super power Core i7 CPU bringing a lot more power for the video editing and other work that I do. Public Relations - we look at some strategies that you can use to work better with journalists to help get some public relations.   Redefining your marketing strategy.  We think IT services are boring and hard to market, so we market different things that we do.  We talk about how you can redefine the stories that you tell potential customers.  We use Ice Cream trucks, Ferraris and drones as a part of the way that we have redefined our story. We talk about ways you can market your business in 2018 - you could do a podcast.  That is a lot of effort, but the next speed back is Facebook Live video.  It is live and scary.   Facebook advertising - We using targeting to create really tightly targeted ads.  It can be very powerful in reaching the right people. SEO and your website.  Google Analytics makes SEO a lot easier than it ever used to be.  We discuss the secret to SEO and why you really need to understand it and how you can use it to your benefit. Networking - Old fashioned network in conjunction with your new exciting online methods can make a big difference.  It reinforces what people have seen online and gives them an opportunity to talk to you.  We use Social Media as a conversation starter as well as one trick I use to stand out in a crowd.   Marketing Automation - We look at automatic ways that you can do online marketing. This is really powerful because it is marketing that happens 24 hours a day without any work for you.  What data do you have and how are you surfacing that with your customers? Test and Measure your marketing.  You can learn so much just by looking at reports in Facebook and Google Analytics about your customers.  This makes it a lot easier to craft a story that resonates with prospects. We finish with a quote from Jim Barksdale.  If we have data, let's look at the data.  If all we have is opinions, let's go with mine.  

Netscape oprichter Jim Barksdale maakte in de vorige eeuw de opmerking dat je slechts op twee manieren geld kunt verdienen: bundelen of ontbundelen. Het was een antwoord op de vraag of Microsoft niet eenvoudig een browser met hun operating system zou kunnen meeleveren.

Our special guest will be the Democratic candidate for the Georgia US Senate seat Jim Barksdale 

The buzz: It's NOT like “déjà vu all over again”! -Yogi Berra. Wake up call for the Chemical industry: Digital Transformation is real and more relevant than ever for your businesses. Reality check: Many of them still think of “digital” only as a way to improve manufacturing and supply chain. But today's digital is a path to becoming more agile and productive, growing profitability and achieving sustainable competitiveness. The time has come for the industry to refocus your digital lens on the future – and that starts now. The experts speak. Greg Gorbach, ARC Advisory Group: “If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine” -Jim Barksdale. Charles Wallace, Solenis: “Some people don't like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster” -Elon Musk. Rich Seltz, SAP: “If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong” -Charles Kettering. Join us for Chemical Industry: Digital Transformation as a Success Model.

The buzz: It's NOT like “déjà vu all over again”! -Yogi Berra. Wake up call for the Chemical industry: Digital Transformation is real and more relevant than ever for your businesses. Reality check: Many of them still think of “digital” only as a way to improve manufacturing and supply chain. But today's digital is a path to becoming more agile and productive, growing profitability and achieving sustainable competitiveness. The time has come for the industry to refocus your digital lens on the future – and that starts now. The experts speak. Greg Gorbach, ARC Advisory Group: “If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine” -Jim Barksdale. Charles Wallace, Solenis: “Some people don't like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster” -Elon Musk. Rich Seltz, SAP: “If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong” -Charles Kettering. Join us for Chemical Industry: Digital Transformation as a Success Model.

Jim Barksdale in the run-up to the Netscape IPO told potential investors that you can make money in software in two ways: bundling and unbundling. Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky revisit that thesis in the context of a mobile app world -- how Facebook for example, is unbundling itself, while at the same time Baidu is bundling everything together as fast as it can. How and why Barksdale's thesis is very much alive and well in the mobile world. All that, and the proper use of "fissiparousness" in a sentence.

The tech luminaries on bundling and unbundling in the digital age.

Summary:Netscape launches and is a smashing success. Jim Barksdale officially comes on as CEO. Netscape fights off legal threats from the NCSA and the University of Illinois. Despite it’s young age and lack of profits, Netscape files to go public in THE historic IPO of the era. Flush with cash, flush with fame, Netscape girds for battle with a new foe: Microsoft.Bibliography: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/newsrelease1.html http://www.businessweek.com/stories/1994-10-23/from-the-man-who-brought-you-silicon-graphics-dot-dot-dot http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/07/25/8266639/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Layout_engine_usage_share-2009-01-07.svg Speeding the Net: The Inside Story of Netscape and How It Challenged Microsoft; Quittner, Joshua; Michelle Slatalla; Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998 http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,984131,00.html http://books.google.com/books?id=fzoEAAAAMBAJ&q=mundane+collection+of+not+entirely+debugged+device+drivers#v=snippet&q=mundane%20collection%20of%20not%20entirely%20debugged%20device%20drivers&f=falseImage Credit:Assorted Materials See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.