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Holmberg's Morning Sickness - Wednesday October 2, 2024 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Remember the thrill of shaking a Magic 8 Ball to get answers to your childhood questions? Would we ace that math test? Would we be famous someday? Well, today, we're bringing a bit of that magic back. But instead of asking about pop quizzes and playground crushes, we're turning to the Magic 8 Ball for advice on something much more important: your retirement planning! What would the Magic 8 Ball have to say about these common retirement questions if it had the wisdom of a financial advisor?   Helpful Information: PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/ Contact: 813-286-7776 Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.com   Disclaimer: Speaker 1: PFG, Private Wealth Management LLC is an SEC registered investment advisor. Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. The topics and information discussed during this podcast are not intended to provide tax or legal advice. Investments involve risk and unless otherwise stated are not guaranteed. Be sure to first consult with a qualified financial advisor and or tax professional before implementing any strategy discussed on this podcast. Past performance is not indicative of future performance insurance. Products and services are offered and sold through individually licensed and appointed insurance agents. Speaker 1: You all remember that thrill of shaking the Magic Eight Ball to get answers to those childhood questions we couldn't wait to find out? Would we ace that math test or be famous someday? All those crazy fun questions we had when we were kids. Well, this week on the podcast, we're going to do the Magic Eight Balls Guide to Retirement Planning with John and Nick here on Retirement Planning Redefined. What's going on everybody? Welcome into the podcast. Thanks for hanging out with John and Nick and myself as we talk investing, finance, and retirement. And we're going back to our childhood with the Magic Eight Ball. Going to have a little fun with these things and shake it up and see what kind of answers we get for retirement. Then of course, let the guys give us some proper answers just in case the Magic Eight Ball gets it wrong. But guys, what's going on this week? Good to talk with you as always. Nick, how are you buddy? Nick: Good, thanks. Just staying busy. Speaker 1: Staying busy, rocking and rolling. Very good. John, my friend, how are you? John: I'm doing all right. Getting ready for this upcoming storm we have, so. Speaker 1: Oh, big fun. Yeah. John: Getting to the grocery store quick, so all the crazies don't run me over. Speaker 1: Nice. Now you got little ones. Do they still sell the Magic Eight Balls in the store? I think they still make them. Don't they? John: They do. I think we had one at one point. Speaker 1: Nice. John: And it didn't work very well, so anytime they asked a question, it would end up on the side and they're like, what does it say? And I don't know. Speaker 1: I can't see it. You got to reshake. John: It was definitely something good that entertained them for a little bit. Speaker 1: Yeah. John: But like any little kid nowadays, it lasted all for about 20 minutes. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Yeah. John: Like, all right,- Speaker 1: Well I'm a wee little kid of the 70s, so I thought they were great. That and the Etch A Sketch and the Stretch Armstrong, I was a happy dude, so. But anyway, let's have a little fun with this, this week here and I'll toss you guys out a question. You kind of give us the Magic Eight Ball and your answer to it, or at least what it maybe should be, so to speak. Right. So we'll make it easy to kind of get things started. John, I'll toss this one to you. Should I start saving for retirement now? What's the Magic Eight Ball say? John: Magic Eight Ball is going to say yes, definitely. The sooner you can start the better. And that goes for anybody, whether that's you in your 20s. I have some clients that right out of college started and now they're in their late 30s, and when we do reviews occasionally, it's always like, "Hey, really appreciate you kind of getting on me for starting to save," because as life happens, expenses are going up, they have kids and stuff like that, it's harder to save. But when they didn't have too much going on in their early 20s expense wise, they were definitely built up a nest egg, so. Speaker 1: Yeah. John: If you haven't started at any point, wherever you are, 20, 30, 40, it's good idea to start. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean 50 as well, right? I mean it doesn't make a difference at this point. Waiting yet another day only causes you more problems, right? So should you start now? Definitely. And I'll give you guys kind of a little primer on the Magic Eight Ball. So we kind of looked through some of the stuff. They have, I guess what you'd call the green, kind of the positive answers, right? Stuff like the one John just got there, yes, definitely, most likely, out look good, that kind of stuff. Then they had that kind of middle of the road, nah, not so sure, right? Reply hazy, ask again later, better not tell you now, that kind of thing. And then of course they had the negatives, which was my reply is, no, very doubtful, don't count on it. So on and so forth. So we'll use those answers to kind of kick things off with each one of these episodes and then let the guys expand on it like John just did. All right Nick, so your turn, give it a go. Is a million dollars enough to retire on? What says the Magic Eight Ball? Nick: That's definitely a reply hazy, try again answer on that one. A consistent conversation that we have with people, whether it's somebody that we've worked with for a while or somebody that has come to us and we're kind of taking them through the planning process is that everybody's situation is different. Speaker 1: Sure. Nick: People love to compare things with each other, whether it's cars, houses, finances, whatever. And we try to make sure that people understand that comparing themselves even to a sibling or a neighbor or friend doesn't necessarily make sense. Some of the most common examples that we'll see are people that maybe they have pension plans because of the sort of job that they have. Speaker 1: Yeah, they saved a million, but they got a pension versus someone who saved a million and doesn't. That's a dramatically different setup, right? Nick: Correct. Speaker 1: Yeah. Nick: Correct. Yeah. And so assets are important obviously, but really the end game for assets in retirement is to generate income. So ideally people will have the combination of both, but having an arbitrary number like a million dollars is something that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And I know that recently there's been some kind of articles in the news about, I think we just hit the highest percentage of millionaires in the US. Speaker 1: Right. Nick: And even from that perspective, dependent upon the situation, again, a million dollars isn't what it used to be. So it really just all depends. We've had clients that have had five or $6 million going into retirement that when we look at their plan, they're going to burn through that in 15 years because they spend too much. And we've had clients that are retired with five or 600,000, but they have their expenses very much in check, they have no debt and they live within their means and their plan looks great. Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. I mean there's three of us here on this podcast and it might take a million for one and 500,000 for the other and two and a half million for the other. Right. It all just depends on where you live, how you live, all those sorts of things. So yeah, reply hazy, try again. And really what it comes down to is get a strategy, get a plan, and get the numbers crunched for your specific situation and then you're going to understand exactly what you need to get to. You're going to have a better outline versus just kind of a shaking the Magic Eight Ball. And I think the idea behind some of this too was fun. You know how you guys in the industry know this. There seems like there's always advisors out there that have a little crystal ball on their desk and they like to say, "Let me check the crystal ball," when somebody asks them a question and they're like, "Well it doesn't work today." And that's because it's not a sound way of doing things. So we thought we'd take that kind of analogy and apply it to this week's podcast. So back to you, John. Can I rely on social security for my retirement? John: Say out look not so good. Speaker 1: Right. John: Yeah, definitely not what you want to be banking on. It's a good source to have. Speaker 1: Sure. John: But you do not want it to be your only source. Speaker 1: It's big dollars. I mean it can be big dollars for a lot of people. And I think an interesting question, and I put it this way, is I've got a family member, a loved one who totally survives on social security only, but it's not what she wanted, right? So could you do it? Yes. But is it ideal? No. John: Yeah, no. I think on average social security covers maybe 30, 40% of someone's retirement income. So you have to look at where's the other money coming from. So just planning on social security I would say is not a very good plan. Speaker 1: Very true, very true. Well following that up there, Nick, give us the Magic Eight Ball answer here. Is it wise then to have multiple sources of retirement income? Nick: It is absolutely as imperative as you can get to try to have different sources of income. A conversation that we have with people consistently is that from the perspective of planning, the one thing that we know and that we can absolutely count on every single year, year after year, is that there's going to be change. And so anything that you can do to build in options, build in flexibility, allow yourself to adapt and pivot to what's going on is essential. And part of that is income streams, not only diversifying assets, but diversifying income streams. Speaker 1: Definitely. Right. So you definitely want to have those. Social security is a big piece of it, but it doesn't need to be the only one. You need to have multiple sources of income streams. All right, John, back to you. Can I expect to have fewer expenses in retirement compared to when I'm working? What's the Magic Eight Ball say? John: I'd say don't count on it. Again, I don't know, we've kind of preface this quite a bit and we've even said it today, everyone's different. So we've had some people where expenses have gone up during retirement because they want to vacation more, they want to do more things with the family. So I wouldn't say plan on that necessarily. And the only way to really find out is to do a comprehensive plan, but then there's going to be curveballs that come at you, whether it's health expenses. That tends to not go down as we get older. So maybe something could be dropping off. Speaker 1: Right. Right. John: But you never know what's going to get added. So do your plan as best you can and try to be as accurate as can. But I wouldn't have that be like the bulletproof, like, hey, my expenses are going to drop so I should be good. Speaker 1: Well, that's a great point because a lot of times people say, hey, here's our back of the napkin math. We think if we curtail this a little bit and this a little bit, we can make it work. Right. We can kind of squeak into retirement. But then you get there and you think, I don't want to do that, right? And there's certainly a lot of conversation around regrets that people have when they're talking once they get to retirement and they go, boy, I wish I would've spent more in those early years when my body would've let me go out and do some things that I wanted to. Right. So can I expect fewer expenses? Yeah, probably not, right? Because like you said, things are going to drop off, but other things are going to add and of course don't count on it. I think that was the answer Rhonda Thomas gave me when I asked her to the seventh grade dance, I think she said don't count on it. I think she must have got that from Magic Eight Ball as well. Nick: That's stuck with you. Speaker 1: Yeah, right. Exactly. It stuck with me. I'm still wounded Rhonda, if you're listening. All right, so let's do the next one here. Should I review my retirement plan annually? Nick, what says the Magic Eight Ball? Nick: Without a doubt on that one. Going back to what we talked about earlier, things constantly change. So updating the plan is really important. The most recent example of why that's important has been inflation over the last couple of years. So when we do a plan and we put in an inflation increase every year in expenses, the software still requires us to kind of update those baseline numbers. And so what we found and what we've tried to emphasize to people is that us capturing and updating those baseline numbers every two or three years is really important and gives us a much more accurate projection from the perspective of planning. So,- Speaker 1: Gotcha. Nick: Those annual reviews are important. Speaker 1: Yeah. And that's how you kind of keep track of the expense changes or the income source changes or added a grandchild, want to change this, whatever the case is. So all those annual things are certainly important. Your life's going to change, your plan has to change along with it. All right, John, will my retirement plan be affected by future changes in tax laws? Not to get political, but you have to talk policy and certainly when it comes to taxation, that's going to be part of the conversation. I mean, seems like everything is political these days, but if you're thinking about future changes in tax laws, you're going to have to certainly think along those lines as well. So what says the Magic Eight Ball when it comes to will your plan be affected by it? John: Signs point to yes. Speaker 1: 35 trillion? Maybe. Yeah. John: Yeah. So you definitely want to take that into account. I mean if you look at maybe people that retired in the 70s and then all of a sudden the 80s, your social security is getting taxed, you weren't really anticipating that happening and then,- Speaker 1: Oh yeah, the IRMAA tax, right? That gets a lot of people blindsided. John: Yeah. So you could count on taxes changing. Whether it's going to go up or down, again, we don't have our crystal ball, but we have the Magic Eight Ball here. Something's going to happen and you should be planning for that. One thing you could do when you're running retirement plans is you can have the ability to stress test it, to take a look at it. So definitely plan on it. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you figure, look, regardless of where your political bent is, we've got a lot of debt and so taxes are going to have to change. And even if it's not this particular administration change, this current election, right, God willing, you live long enough in retirement. If you last 20, 25, 30 years in retirement, you're going to see multiple administrations come and go. And that's going to mean multiple tax law changes because they do that every so often. Right. So the odds of that happening are pretty great. So signs point to yes, you should consider how taxation is going to affect you because it is one of the biggest pieces of your retirement strategy. What is that old saying? It's not what you make, it's what you keep, right? So make sure you're talking with qualified professionals like John and Nick when it comes to dealing with all this stuff. Let's do one or two more and then we'll wrap it up. Nick, let's toss this over to you. Let's see here. Should I focus on paying off debt before increasing retirement contributions? Nick: So I would say depending upon the debt, most likely. Speaker 1: Okay. Nick: From the perspective of consumer debt like credit cards, all that kind of stuff,- Speaker 1: Bad debt, right? Nick: That can absolutely, it's hard to argue that that's not unimportant. One thing that can be a slippery slope for people is it kind of tends to depend on their behaviors. We've had clients that have been good income earners but have at different times had debt problems. And in certain ways, whenever they pay off the debt, the debt comes back up and then they kind of find themselves not saving at all. So it's oftentimes kind of a balance of both. One of the most common sorts of comparisons from a perspective of debt is mortgage. We found that over, we had a lot of those conversations when interest rates were really low and we kind of emphasized with people to take advantage of those low rates and that's come to be a pretty beneficial sort of decision. So I would say in order, consumer debt for sure, trying to do both consecutively, both at the same time, obviously ideal, and then just kind of working through the plan and prioritizing what makes the most sense and how to deploy the money. Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, right? I mean, debt's going to be a big component of that as well, and certainly getting rid of that, the higher interest stuff is always a good idea. So the final piece then here guys, and John, we'll let you wrap it up since you started it. Should I consider working with a financial professional as I near retirement? This is kind of a layup for you, but I'll give it to you anyway. What do you think? John: Appreciate that layup. Answer is yes. As you're getting closer to retirement, it becomes even more important to make sure you're working with someone to update the plan or start a plan and take a look at it. I would say you don't have to wait until you're near retirement. I think the answer is yes at any point. Speaker 1: Yeah. John: Even my younger clients, they always appreciate having someone they could talk to and bounce some ideas off of, whether it's not always comprehensive planning, but it's someone you could talk to discuss things. Speaker 1: Exactly. Because there's so many nuances out there and it just continues to grow and get more complex. So certainly not a bad idea at all to get qualified professionals on your side. So if you need some help, reach out to the team at Pfgprivatewealth.com. That's Pfgprivatewealth.com and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on Apple and Spotify or whatever platform you like using. It's Retirement Planning Redefined with John and Nick from PFG Private Wealth. And we'll see you next time here on the show and enjoy the Magic Eight Ball. We'll catch you later.   Disclaimer: PFG Private Wealth Management, LLC is an SEC Registered Investment Advisor. Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. The topics and information discussed during this podcast are not intended to provide tax or legal advice. Investments involve risk, and unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Be sure to first consult with a qualified financial advisor and/or tax professional before implementing any strategy discussed on this podcast. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Insurance products and services are offered and sold through individually licensed and appointed insurance agents.  

Press X Join the Press X Discord: https://discord.gg/MAXtvmv2rw  Topics: Pokémon Presents on Tuesday: predictions? Pyoro “heard of an outsourced Unova-related game” last year, but says “This is not a leak and should be taken with a grain of salt” https://twitter.com/Pyoro_X/status/1761774200577040645 Nikkei Asia corroborates: Nintendo to launch Switch console successor in March 2025 at earliest https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Media-Entertainment/Nintendo-to-launch-Switch-console-successor-in-March-2025-at-earliest "New developments" for Bravely Default series to be announced in 2024 https://www.gematsu.com/2024/02/bravely-series-producer-tomoya-asano-teases-new-developments-to-be-announced-in-2024 Yoko Taro Reportedly Teases Nier 3 at Concert https://www.thegamer.com/yoko-taro-reportedly-teases-nier-3-at-concert/ Final Fantasy VII Rebirth gets gangbusters reviews, Washington Post calls it “the finest Square Enix title published this century” https://www.metacritic.com/game/final-fantasy-vii-rebirth/ Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto has left the EA Battlefield studio he founded https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/halo-co-creator-marcus-lehto-has-left-the-ea-battlefield-studio-he-founded/ Modders create Red Viper, a Virtual Boy emulator for Nintendo 3DS that supports 3D https://twitter.com/Skyfloogle/status/1761806433165734157 Entire outline for early Marvel's Spider-Man 2 story leaks online https://imgur.com/a/G1NBLK5 Questions from Discord: brasop: If Nintendo farmed out the next mainline Pokemon game to another developer, who would you like to see make it?  Joe: When do you think the PS5 Xbox console generation will end? 2 years or so? It feels like it barely got started, maybe I'm just doing COVID math.  Joe: What's some of your favorite video game development company names?  What we're playing: Mary: Persona 3 Reload, Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore (beat), Inscryption,  John: Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

No drinking, no smoking, and she's never been married. Checking all the boxes for John! He thought the first date went well, but now that he wants to see her again, she's ignoring him!

John 5:18-30 | This Sunday we will have a chance to hear from Jesus Himself in an extended monologue recorded for us by John. Jesus was defending himself against the allegations of the authorities, while simultaneously declaring himself to be cleared at the highest levels of authorization. For you Amazon employees, Jesus definitely has a silver badge (or whatever color is highest these days)…for Jesus will claim, I’ve been here since before the foundation of all this!

What you'll learn in this episode: Why every art student should have business classes as part of their curriculum How the American mythology of the starving artist is more harmful than helpful Why it's important to expand a creative business beyond just making How polymer clay went from craft supply to respected artistic medium Tips for entering jewelry and art exhibitions  About John Rose and Corliss Rose 2Roses is a collaboration of t Corliss Rose and John Lemieux Rose. The studio, located in Southern California, is focused on producing one-of-a-kind and limited-edition adornment and objects d'art, and is well known for its use of a wide range of highly unorthodox materials. The studio output is eclectic by design and often blended with an irreverent sense of humor. 2Roses designs are sold in 42 countries worldwide and are exhibited in major art institutions in the US, Europe, and China. Photos Available on TheJewelryJourney.com Additional Resources: Website Etsy Transcript: For John and Corliss Rose, business and artistic expression don't have to be in conflict. Entering the art world through apprenticeships, they learned early on that with a little business sense, they didn't need to be starving artists. Now as the collaborators behind the design studio 2Roses (one of several creative businesses they share), John and Corliss produce one-of-a-kind art jewelry made of polymer clay, computer chips, and other odd material. They joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about their efforts to get business classes included in art school curriculum; why polymer clay jewelry has grown in popularity; and how they balance business with their artistic vision. Read the episode transcript here.    Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is a two-part Jewelry Journey Podcast. Please make sure you subscribe so you can hear part two as soon as it comes out later this week.    Today my guests are designers John and Corliss Rose of the eclectic design firm 2Roses, located in Southern California. They sell worldwide. 2Roses is an award-winning design firm recognized for their use of unusual materials. Today we'll hear more about their jewelry journey. Corliss and John, welcome to the program.   John: Thank you. It's a delight to be here. Thank you very much.   Sharon: So glad to have you.  Tell us about your jewelry journey. Were you designers first? How did that work?   John: Actually, we both started rather early in life. Corliss started as an apprentice in her father's floral store when she was 10, and I was apprenticed into design and graphic arts at age 12. We both came up in the old-school apprentice system and were working professionally by our early teen. It wasn't until later, in our late teens, that we both started professional or, I should say, a traditional academic trend. So, we've always been in the arts, both of us, very early.   Sharon: Were you both attracted to jewelry early as part of this? Where did that come in?   Corliss: We met at art school, and our backgrounds and our career focus on developing a creative career were almost identical, so we hit it off right from the get-go. For the first 10 years of our relationship, we focused on our own individual creative paths, but we kept intersecting with each other. Eventually we made the decision to work together full time collaboratively for a creative endeavor. Jewelry, at that moment in time, was the highlight of where we wanted to focus our energies.   Sharon: Is that when you met, when you were both part of the apprenticeship, or when you were in college? Where did you meet?   Corliss: We met in art school in Chicago.    John: Prior to that, we had quite a bit of time to develop different practices and careers. So, we met midway, I suppose, in our journey.   Sharon: When you say you were apprenticed, was the idea that you would learn how to be a designer, how to be a florist, and that's what you were going to do?    Corliss: At that time, I was being groomed to take over my father's business. I learned not only the design aspect, but at a very early age, I learned cost accounting. I was learning the business aspect of it. I was pretty much indoctrinated from the very beginning that you're going to be an artist, but you're not going to be a starving artist. You need to make a profit out of this so you can flourish. Later on in my career, I had one gallery owner tell me that the work was wonderful, but price it this way because it's one thing to make your bread; it's another thing to put butter on it. So, it was something that I had gotten all along.   Sharon: Wow! Most people don't get that so early, so that's great.   John: All of the apprenticeships I did, it was all about how this is a business first, and we do creative things like manufacturing a product. So by the time we hit formal arts school, when we first met, we very quickly realized that we had a mutual experience of understanding of the art world and our career path. That's what was a very strong attraction; that we both looked at this as a business career. This isn't about abstract ideas of, “Let's be creative,” and all the mythologies that artists are inculcated with. We didn't seem to have that kind of thinking.   Sharon: Were you ahead of your peers in that respect? Were you ahead of your peers because you recognized the business aspect?   John: Oh my god, yes. Yeah, it was really like that. By the time we hit college, most of our peers were just starting out. They were just starting to learn their career paths and trying to figure out what they were doing. We already had several businesses going. For us, the academic training was more of a cherry on the cake and polishing skills. By that time, we were working professionals and had been for quite some time.   Sharon: Wow! Tell us about the jewelry you make. We'll have pictures when we post the podcast, but it's so unusual.   Corliss: We've always been driven by exploration and experimentation with what we call odd media. This is what drew us to art jewelry in the early days. It was like the wild west. Anything went, and we just threw out all the rules of traditional jewelry. Fashion and adornment were being challenged at that time. It was almost like a golden age, where there was a lot of free-flowing ideas, a lot of collaboration with John and me, and a lot of fluid dialogue creatively between the both of us.    John: You asked about jewelry, and one of the things is we didn't start out as jewelers. Both of us came to it through a lot of other mediums. Myself, I started out as a painter, illustrator, furniture maker, gem cutter, sign maker, designer of one thing or another, machinery. Corliss went through all sorts of other endeavors herself.   Corliss: It was basically when we had been together for 10 years, plus doing all of these interesting things, that we made the decision, “Jewelry would be a great direction to go into.” And just to pull the curtain back a little bit and give a peak, I think one of the nicest things that happened to me at that time was that as an anniversary gift, I received lessons for metalsmithing. I learned how to solder, and that was the beginning of it. What I learned, I taught John. We experimented with a lot of different processes and a lot of different materials, and it just started to take off from there.   Sharon: When you say metalsmithing, I would think you would go in the traditional direction, whereas you took the metalsmithing and combined it with polymer clay, it seems, which people don't do. I'm looking at what your website has, and that's unusual. How did you reverse course in a sense?   Corliss: We were very much interested in color. At that time, we were following the traditional path of experimenting with color and its relationship to metals: patinas,P Prismacolor pencils, enamels and things like that. Polymer clay was such a versatile material. It could mimic just about anything. At the time, the product was being developed in Europe, where it was originally manufactured, and there was a small group of people using the product and doing some pretty innovative things with it. I latched onto that train very, very quickly and took myself through the learning curve of how to work with it, and I got involved with that particular community for quite a while to absorb everything I could, like a big, old sponge. To this day, it plays a very vital role in a lot of work we do. Because we have been metalsmiths and I teach, I have been able to actually teach the incorporation of some of the simpler metalsmithing techniques with polymer to people who have only worked with polymer and opened up that door to them. It's been very rewarding in that respect.   John: You made a good observation about that crossover because as Corliss mentions, it's really a two-way street. What we recognized after a while is that introducing polymer clay to the metal world was one side of the sword, and then it was basically introducing metals into the polymer world. Corliss has developed a whole range of courses, workshops, if you will, going in both directions, and that's become a business unto itself.   Sharon: You seem very entrepreneurial. You seem to go on and on.   Corliss: As John would say, there are many paths to the artist's income.   John: Yeah, entrepreneurialism is really baked into the DNA. I have to go back to the apprenticeships that we both did that gave us a foundation in—I always express it as art as a business and business as an art.   Corliss: It was a work ethic, too.   John: Yeah. So, we tend to always look at what the business opportunities are, how to make money doing this. That's always an issue for anybody in the arts, and that's also part of what we have advocated for for the last 40 years. I have worked with the California University system for decades trying to introduce a business curriculum into the arts, and it's taken 40 years to actually get that message across. It's only been in the last 10 years that we've started getting any kind of acceptance. We've developed many programs for various universities to teach the business side of art, and it's been an obstacle course to get that through. It runs counter—or at least it used to run much more counter to the academic approach to teaching arts, which focuses more on technique than actually earning a living.    Corliss: I've had quite a few experiences with individuals who were poised for graduation in the next six months or so. We would have conversations about, “I don't know what I'm going to do next. I'm going to graduate, but I don't know how to start a business. I was never taught how to make this a practice.” That's where everything started. It started by recognizing that there is a need for it within the education system. It led to developing more and more sophisticated ways of instructing people and getting them a little more prepared for what comes after graduation.   John: The thing we found, though, is that this is a uniquely American perspective. We've developed programs for Canada, for Mexico, South America, and they embraced them. To them it's a no-brainer. It's only America where we've encountered any resistance to it.   Sharon: Interesting. Why do you think that is?   John: I think a lot of it is the mythology of art. I want to be specific about this. We are focusing on metals programs and jewelry design programs for this kind of thing. When I was involved in SNAG, we got into this quite in-depth. One of the biggest impediments is that the instructor basically had never operated a business himself, so to them, they were being asked to teach something they had no experience in. Basically, they got their master's degree, and they went from being students to teachers. That's it. The idea that there was another world out there, they would say, “Yeah, that's great. That would be wonderful, but that's not something I have any experience with.”    Sharon: That's interesting, the idea that art should be pure and sell itself.    John: That's one of the mythologies, so Puritan. It's your labor, I guess. One of the things that occurs to me: many people in the arts define themselves by what they do with their hands, and we have never done that. We conceive the opportunities of who we are by what we do with our minds and how we harness our creativity and create opportunities for ourselves to express that creativity. Jewelry is just one of those things. We have a long history in developing businesses, which goes back to the apprenticeships. From our perspective, it's all creative endeavor.   Corliss: I was a pastry chef.   Sharon: Wow!    John: A television pastry chef, no less   Corliss: Yes.   John: And she basically made formulations for a lot of very famous restaurants and product lines that you would know of.   Corliss: Making the croissants for Marie Callender's. Looked up the recipe for that.   Sharon: Wow!    John: That's Marie right there.    Sharon: How did all this meld into jewelry? I know you through Art Jewelry Forum. I know you do art jewelry, but how did everything you're talking about meld, at one point, into art jewelry? I know you do a lot of other different things, but in terms of the product, let's say.   John: We were both active artists in various spheres. One of the things we were doing a lot was running mining and prospecting operations. We were accumulating massive amounts of gem material, and it came to the point where we had to make a decision of what the hell we were going to do with all this stuff. That's when we came upon jewelry. We could either sell the material wholesale, which we were doing, but really the profitability in jewelry is that we had to finish the faceted stone and polish the rough material. You get the material by the pound, but you sell it by the carat.   Corliss: It was lapidary skills that was the predecessor to this. We were making cabochons. John was faceting and we were also carving. We were carving a lot of natural materials, like bone and wood. The jewelry morphed from that, and it started selling. I was actually schlepping things in a big case, and we found that our work was being very well received. It grew and built from that. Soon enough, we were incorporating precious metal into our pieces.   John: We started doing more of what I would call conventional jewelry, and we had quite a success doing that. Early on, we got contracts with Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom and some larger chains, and very quickly we found out that doing that kind of work is not what we wanted to do.   Corliss: Yes, multiples.   John: Like doing 5,000 of something. You can make money, but the toll that takes on your body—I know a lot of people that do that, and all of them have wrist problems. It leads to health problems. So, that kind of jewelry was when we were getting started and taking off.    When we discovered art jewelry, we lost our minds. It was the wild west. It was all of our art training, all of the things we thought of ourselves as, what we wanted to do in terms of unfettered creativity and experimentation, pushing the boundaries and the edge. That's what was happening in art jewelry. So, we said, “Yeah, that's where we want to go. If we're going to do jewelry, that's the kind of stuff we're going to do.” That's basically how we backed into this world.   Corliss: That's how it opened us up to a lot of different materials. We were in the frame of mind of purposely going out and looking for materials in a lot of different places, everything from upcycling to computer boards and things of that sort, a whole variety of things. We had friends who would tease us and bring us little offerings we could use in the studio and comment, “You two can make something out of anything.” We took that as a wonderful compliment and put ourselves in a position to receive a lot of very interesting material we could use.   John: Well, we had good circumstances and still do because of all these other businesses we were involved with. We had connections within the military, NASA, foreign governments, lights and heavy manufacturing, the medical industry. We were getting access to this insane array of stuff and materials. I've got stuff from someone's space capsule, a jet fighter, fossils of every kind, medical devices you wouldn't normally get your hands on. All of this became fodder for “Let's make jewelry out of it.” One example: I have what we call the world's most expensive pair of earrings. One of my contacts ran a medical manufacturing business, and they spent something like $35 million developing these little—   Corliss: Chips.   John: Yeah, for CAT scanners, and they failed. They didn't work as intended. So we stocked six of these prototypes, which literally cost $35 million, and they were like, “Well, we can't use them. Here, make some jewelry out of them,” which we did. We made earrings out of them, and I love that particular piece. It has a story because they went from being extravagantly expensive to being completely worthless, and now they're a pair of earrings. Somebody put some sort of value on it, I guess.   Sharon: It sounds like people who know you just ship you boxes and bones and screws and whatever they have.   John: We receive regular offerings from friends, which is a delight; it really is. Over the years, we've developed a solid foundation of collectors. We get a steady stream of commissions, and it's very typical to hear, “I have this thing. Can it be—” I mean, we've gotten everything from antiquities—   Corliss: We have Roman coins and special pottery shards.   John: And crazy stuff that people say. “Here, use this as the starting point and make me something.” We actually got a guy's pacemaker one time. “I've had this inside of me for the last six years, and now I'm going to wear it on the outside.”    Sharon: That's an interesting idea.   John: It was quite an interesting piece. 

“It's not my fault he's like in love with me or something!” - John to Sofia after he made out with her boyfriend YES SLOOTS…Our king is BACK. 53 episodes later John Like the Bible has returned from war…and by war we mean the one he recently conquered with “Lisa”, Bitcoin, and the metaverse. More on that later. This week Sofia brings us up to date on ALL things John including his ~thriving~ love life, career, AND skateboarding skills. Promise it's FAR more interesting than it sounds. The duo also dives into some interesting topics such as the “gay best friend” controversy, AND a fun game of “What Kind of Gay Are You?” (PS: If you're a Lana gay we are JUDGING you - kidding…kinda). Finally, instead of Raya, John has a NEW dating app (website?) for us that is by far the WILDEST shit we have ever stumbled across. Just know going forward: no Macy's bathroom is safe.  Follow Sofia on Instagram and Twitter @SofiaFranklyn Find merch HERE: https://sofiafranklyn.com/  Dipsea: http://www.dipsea.com/SOFIA for 30 days full access Freshly: http://www.freshly.com/SOFIA  Dadgrass: http://www.dadgrass.com/SOFIA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As we approach Christmas, we remember again the incredible humility and grace of our God. We remind ourselves of the Son's incarnation, His taking the full nature of a human and beginning His life which He would live in our place for our redemption. We remind ourselves of His low status and poverty. But we also remember the glory and majesty of our God, which shows through even in this story of humility.

Weekly Messages from Courageous Church in Salt Lake City, Utah

Join us at Pastor Rick talks about the next chapter in the Gospel of John series.

In 2008, the economy had tanked and John McDonald was left at a crossroads. Rather than withdraw into comfort, he took the opportunity to do something a bit crazy. John was a woodworker who spent time at trade shows, and someone once suggested that he make cabinet doors that fit with IKEA cabinets. With nothing to lose, John launched Semihandmade to do just that. Now, a decade later, Semihandmade has seen consistent double-digit growth year over year and has been featured in countless blogs, interior design social posts, on the feeds of influencers worldwide, and in the homes of tens of thousands of people. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, John tells the story from start to finish, including how he built a successful ecommerce custom cabinet model on the backs of the IKEA brand, and how he’s now launching into the DTC space with the first US-made custom cabinet DTC offering, BOXI. From finding the right partners, to building an omnichannel approach that doesn’t handcuff your resources, to challenging yourself to strive for more, you’ll learn something from John and his story that just might help you level up your ecommerce business, too.  Main Takeaways:Perfect Partners: For ecommerce brands taking on an omnichannel approach, there is no reason to tie up a lot of your resources into retail spaces and showrooms. Instead, exploring partnership opportunities with other brands in a similar category might be a mutually beneficial way to expand your brand, the brand you partner with, and offer an in-store experience to customers who seek one.Meeting the Moment: The world of home furnishings and interior design is changing rapidly, especially as A.I. and VR technology enter the marketplace. With that tech, users are gaining more flexibility to design their own spaces without leaving home, which means there is an opening for DTC companies that are tech-first. Step Up or Step Out: You can’t let competition scare you, let it inspire you to raise your game. By surrounding yourself with the best and forcing yourself to compete against them, you have to level up to simply survive, and succeed expectations to grow your business in a meaningful way.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, Cofounder at Mission.org. Today, I had the pleasure of chatting with John McDonald, the Founder and CEO at Semihandmade and also Boxi. John, welcome.John:Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.Stephanie:I'm really excited to have you on. Before we get started, I was hoping you could give me a little background, and for anyone who doesn't know what Semihandmade is and also Boxi, how did you start it? What is it? How do I think about it?John:Sure. Semihandmade is a company that's been around, I guess, just over 10 years now. We're based in Southern California. We make doors that fit IKEA cabinets. What that means is, if you want to buy a kitchen, bathroom, closet media system, IKEA, for the most part, gives you the amazing flexibility of not buying their doors. For a kitchen, you'd buy the cabinets, you'd buy the interior components. Then we have over 40 different options from entry level doors to some really high-end, one-of-a-kind offerings.Stephanie:I love that. Do I think of it like white labeling? You take IKEA's [inaudible] and then you can add like rose gold fixtures on it, yeah?John:Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The credit, obviously, goes back to IKEA. This is an ever expanding ecosystem that's been around probably for 15 years now. People that make amazing slipcovers that you can put on their sofas. People that make furniture legs, companies like us that make fantastic cabinet doors. It's a way to get a really high-end look for a really mid-level price.Stephanie:Cool.John:I'm even fortunate to grow quite a bit with that.Stephanie:That's great. How did you come to this idea?John:I'm always honest and clear that this was ... It's a spectacular idea that somebody gave to me.Stephanie:Who gave it to you?John:I think his name is David Stewart. I think he's a photographer. Look, I'm 53. I don't know if I'm older than a lot of the people you talk to.Stephanie:A little.John:I came to things a little bit later. I had moved to California from the East Coast when I was 21. Well, wanted to get rich and famous, work in the film business, didn't really have any kind of plan, bounced around with that, was writing, not making any money like everybody else I knew waiting tables. Then I woke up in my early 30s and said, I got to do something with my life. It was post 9/11, which is a wake-up call for a lot of people. I tried a bunch of different things. Then I somehow landed in woodworking and furniture making at first and cabinetry. I got good at it.John:Through the late '90s and early 2000s, that's what I was doing, Southern California based custom furniture and cabinetry company called Handmade. I worked hard. I approached it like a business into my late 30s, which was different than a lot of other people I knew, the craftspeople, spectacular artists, but just no head for business, no interest in business. I always looked at it like as a business like any other. That's what I was doing through, again, the early 2000s. I was networking and blogs just started to happen. I was doing a lot of woodworking shows but also design shows. At one of those design shows in 2008, I think somebody came up to me, this guy randomly and said, "Have you ever thought about making doors for IKEA cabinets?"Stephanie:Was that something that others were doing? Why did he have that idea? Then was like, I'm going to tell John to do that.John:It's interesting. Again, I always want to give credit where credit is due. On top of him, there was a company called Scherr's based in North Dakota that has been making doors for IKEA cabinets just a little bit prior to that. People are always making their own doors as well. It is because IKEA lets you not buy doors when you buy their kitchens. I don't know why he mentioned it. I think part of it was because when I did those shows, it was a show called Whelan Design, which is a great show in Southern California at the time and back when Dwell magazine was really in its heyday and just an iconic brand.John:I was always like the one off independent company. It was me and all the big brands. It would be like Kohler and Caesarstone and Sub-Zero. I was there alongside them with my little custom furniture setup. I don't know if he took a liking to me, but we just spent that day, the Friday and then the following day just talking about it. I had no idea what he was talking about at first.Stephanie:That's awesome. Then for people listening, I know when I first heard of your brand and was looking through it. I'm like, oh, it's just like a small thing, a big thing. Then I was looking through some of the stats and you've been named like the fastest growing private company every year by Inc. magazine [inaudible].John:Well, yeah, one of. Yeah, one of many. Inc. 500 originally, we've been on that list, I think, six or seven years now.Stephanie:You've had double digit growth for almost a decade, year every year.John:Yeah. It's exciting. It's, again, one of many things. I try to be candid and clear, but I never expected this. I never thought in a million years I'd be doing this. Every year that we were fortunate to grow, even my ambition or dreams, it got bigger. It's like get to a million, get to two million, get to five million. It's been exciting. Believe me, I don't take it for granted. That's why I enjoy doing things like this, because I always ... At 40, I was newly divorced. I didn't have any kids at the time. I have a son now. He was nine. I lived in my shop for a year, because I got divorced.John:I didn't have anywhere to live. I had options, but I wanted to hide. I lived in my woodworking shop. I lived on my sofa with my dog. I just said, I got to do something else. It was a huge wakeup call. Then that's when the conversation I had, I think, six to nine months prior. It was like, maybe I should try this. Again, in terms of the second acts in life, whatever, I was 40 and had no clue. 10 years later, more than 10 years later, it's different.Stephanie:Yeah, that's very inspirational. Cool to hear about and cool to see where you can start and where it can grow to. How did you grow the company? From starting out where you're woodworking, you're building stuff, and then you're like, okay, I'm going to buy IKEA stuff and make it better. How did you get in front of people and be found in general?John:Like anything, Stephanie, it's like you look back on it and as much as it was, a long journey at times were so challenging, whatever. You get through it, and you gloss over it. It's only when conversations like this that I do get an opportunity to look back. The reality was, again, I had a nice custom furniture cabinetry business. I had some really good clients. I work with some good architects and designers. Then in 2008, the market tanked. Everybody went in the dumpster. I had to do something else. Things had slowed down.John:I started saying to a couple designers and architects, "What if we try to do integrate some IKEA cabinetry into the custom project." Because at the end of the day, a box is a box, and you're just going to see the outside of the beautiful panels and the doors. There were a few people that took a chance on that. That's how it ... It's like anything. I was 100% custom in 2009. Then it's like, okay, you can start mixing it in and starting to organically ... I don't even know what kind of ... I wasn't doing advertising. Blogs had just taken off.John:Apartment therapy had seen see me at a design show and written about me, which was amazing. That was a really big deal. L.A. Times did a story on me, which is incredible. Yet it was always organic. Through 2010 and 2011, it became, okay, now we're doing half custom, half IKEA. Then every year, it's a little bit more headed towards full IKEA. The truth is, I don't know when it was, maybe 2013, when it was fully just making doors for IKEA. It was fun. It was always a steady progression, always growing every year.Stephanie:Yeah, sustainably growing, which is a lot different than a lot of the brand.John:Yeah, profitable every year. Beginning, doubling every year, which, again, was not what I expected. Part of that, what's funny too is I have a lot of incredibly supportive family, but also friends, guys that I grew up with. When I was in California at 21, or 22, or 29, or whatever, they were amazing. They love me. They were supportive, but they probably had no clue where I was headed. I didn't either. Now, it's fun. I gave them a hard time constantly about the fact that they probably gave up on me.John:Not in a bad way, but it's just ... I mean, I do think that there is a time to cash in your chips. It's great to have dreams. There was an interesting like Scott Galloway kind of thing recently about if you should follow your dream. His overly simplistic thing is definitely do not follow your dream. Because unless you're willing to pay your bills to start because following just exclusively your dream can be incredibly impractical. The people that you admire, suddenly, the people that I admire weren't these head up in the clouds kind of people. They worked really hard. I geek out on founder stories, things, podcasts like this. I'm fascinated by that. It's never an overnight thing, or at least it's rarely. Again, I'm 53 now. This is all house money.Stephanie:Wow, that's awesome. When you started, getting more money, you're doubling growth, more revenue, obviously. Where did you invest? How did you think about investing that? Because I'm sure you're like, woo-hoo! I'm going to go have fun now.John:No.Stephanie:No?John:It was never like that, no. It's interesting. I would say I like nice things like some people do. I'm pretty frugal. In terms of the business, everything lives inside the business. I had a partner at that point. Up until three years ago, we made everything in-house. I was the original guy making the doors and packing them up and then shipping them in New York or different places. Then my partner at the time, Ivan, came on board. He was the guy cutting the doors. Now, we were fortunate to grow.John:Eventually, we had close to 35, I think 35 or 40 people that were working in production. Up until three years ago, we topped out at 75 people and half of them were making products. Now I'm proud to say we don't make anything in-house. Everything, it's made around the US, some at the top manufacturers in the country. That was a huge shift. To answer your question, everything is in the business. That's why you see revenue numbers are different than other things.Stephanie:Yeah. What were some mistakes maybe that you remember where you're like, ooh, I would have avoided this if I were to do it again, or especially in the more maybe the past five years or something. Not early on when you're just ...John:Right. If we're going to say 10 years ago, the mistakes that I made were unavoidable in the sense that I was creating this out of thin air. Ivan and I were just making stuff up as we went along. We were two guys. He's a little bit younger than me. He came out from Boston. I came out from Philadelphia to be writers. In some ways, no business starting this kind of business. In the last five years, it's probably the mistakes that I've made are ... I don't know, maybe waiting too long to really build up the team, which is not to say that we didn't have good people, we did.John:Part of my job now is just looking at the next 12 months and 18 months and say, hopefully, where are we going to be? Where do we think we're going to be? What are we going to need then? As someone who is ... Again, I think pretty honest about their limitations or whatever, we only thrive with people that are smarter, better, or more experienced than me. That's one of the biggest changes in the last at least six months, where we really just hit the gas and brought in some really amazing complementary pieces.Stephanie:Yeah, cool. How do you think about building on top of another company? What if IKEA changes their cabinet line or does something different, did that ever worry you, building a business that's ... I mean, a lot of businesses are built on another businesses, obviously. How did you think about that?John:We've always been after market. With IKEA, it's pretty well documented. We've gone up and down with them. I think in most ways, they appreciate what we do. Certainly, it's undeniable that we sell kitchens that people wouldn't normally buy if we weren't available. They also, I think, hate a little bit that we're there. I don't know this is arrogant or anything to say. They're not going to change their model because of us. They're never going to not sell doors. Even if they did, I would say to people like, "Then just buy the doors that literally cost $2."John:Then we'll pay for them and recycle. Their model is that a la carte wide range of pricing. We've always been respectful. Again, I have immense respect for them and what they built. It's extraordinary. Even when my fiancé and I moved into a new house and it's like going there, buying the basics for the house, it's just nobody can beat it [inaudible].Stephanie:Yup. I'm doing that now as well. I think, like you said, you're opening up a market that they probably wouldn't have access, otherwise. When I'm about finishing this house now, I honestly would not have thought to go to IKEA to get cabinets. I don't know. Then when I saw you guys, I'm like, oh, well then you can have the finishings and the colors and the things that I actually want. I don't actually care what a cabinet is like inside or behind the scenes, but I care about how it looks. A lot of the IKEA stuff does look like you know sometimes.John:Yeah, it's understandable. Because at that scale, you can't get that fancy and creative. This is the part where I drop names, just in the sense that what I do love is we work with some really cool people that do make IKEA more accessible. It is people like Karlie Kloss and Coco Rocha and all kinds of celebrities and high end designers and influencers. They, more so than us, have normalized IKEA. That's good for everybody. If design is supposed to be democratic and accessible to everybody, there's nothing more accessible than IKEA. Obviously, Amazon, Wayfair, and things like that.Stephanie:Walmart? Walmart is coming back. I have bought rugs now, a little egg wicker chair. It's from following influencers. I'm like, Walmart is coming back.John:You're right. It's funny, because the same thing with my fiancé, Stephanie. Yesterday, she was looking at different coffee tables. She said, "This is ... " She showed me a thing. I was like, "That's awesome." She said, "Oh, it's like the Kelly Clarkson line." I was like, "This is great." It's true. Look, certainly, you can make the argument that some of that stuff is more disposable and it's going to go into a landfill and less sustainable. I understand that. The reality is, not everyone has the same access to disposable. If you can get cool stuff, it's reasonably priced and it lasts for a few years. I don't know. It's hard to turn that down.Stephanie:You mentioned that you partner with influencers and celebrities. How does that relationship work?John:Yeah. I think that's always been a huge differentiator for us, one of several things. From the start, I always felt no self-consciousness about reaching out to people. Whether it was blogs, I would say, "This is what we're doing. Here are some photos. I'd love for you to write about us." Or even influencers. The biggest one and the one that we worked with the most is Sarah Sherman Samuel. We've had a door line with Sarah for three years. That's a situation where, god, I think 2014 or 2015, she reached out and said, "Hey, I bought a bungalow in Venice. I love IKEA cabinets.John:I wonder if we could partner on some doors." We did a small collaboration, gave her a tiny discount. She painted the doors. She styled everything. She took photography. The kitchen went completely viral. It's one of those kitchens that is everywhere. I think a really cool Farrow & Ball paints, brass and mixture of this light green and white. That just opened the door to all these other relationships. People saw that and started reaching out to us. It's been an amazing thing. The truth is, we've gotten to a point where we've had to pull back on that because it's just a different way to market the brand. It can be expensive. It's definitely grown us, there's no doubt about it.Stephanie:Have you thought about Netflix series? I'm just thinking, wow, they should be on a home remodel type of show. How perfect is that? People always trying to do amazing things on a budget on like the HGTV [inaudible].John:Yeah. We've talked about that stuff in the past. I like that stuff. Again, I don't know. I do think it's interesting our growth. That's how I always look at things, behind the scenes of how businesses grow, especially within that. I do like someone we haven't worked with in a while, the Studio McGee, the Netflix series, which is great. That's really interesting, especially after listening to another podcast like our friends at Business of Home, where ... I left the podcast with so much more respect.John:Because my interaction with them was a long time ago, and then I just see the photos and the beautiful stuff. Just the growth that they've had and the behind the scenes, and again, hearing their story is really extraordinary. I enjoy watching that stuff. I don't know if I want to watch this. I get sick of hearing myself talk. Maybe if it's everybody else, that might work.Stephanie:Yeah. I was just thinking like, wow, that'd be a really good partnership strategy. I always bring up the Container Store partnership that they had on the Netflix series and just how much Container Store sales went up after that series.John:[inaudible]Stephanie:I can see why, same thing with cabinets and stuff.John:Yeah, it's interesting. Because even that, again, I'm a lot older than you, but in the early '90s, whenever Trading Spaces came on and that was huge like ...Stephanie:I watch Trading Spaces, just to be clear.John:I mean, even in the '80s, the godfather of that is like Bob Vila in this old house. That's definitely before your time. That was restoring amazing New England homes and stuff. It was master carpenter, Norm. I think Norm Abram is absolute craftsman. That was the start. Then you had Trading Spaces. Even now, you would have thought, after 10 years, that goes away, and it hasn't. That's the thing. Is it the ladies like Home Edit and stuff like that? I don't know. It hasn't evaded, it just only grown. Obviously, Chip and Joanna Gaines and the dynasty that they have built. It doesn't show any sign of stopping.Stephanie:Yeah. It seems like the world is now just moving to a more curated collections like I'm going to look for someone who knows my style, so I don't have to waste time looking at everything. Whereas before, it's like, oh, I'm going to go to Target to get this, and then I'm going to go to Dollar Tree to get this. I make it up. I think, 10 years ago is very much about DIY, but all over the place. Now, it's like, okay, I'm going to follow Chip and Joanna Gaines, their line at Target, whatever that is, and follow the people that I know are my style and be ready to immerge myself in that brand.John:Yeah. The interesting, whether it's the 180 to that is the amount of growth that Restoration Hardware has had, where it's just almost like meteoric, being a complete luxury brand and selling the whole experience. It is like the Ralph Lauren of today, and now as they move towards hospitality restaurants and sounds like hotels. Part of your brain thinks, man, you can't sustain that. How do you keep growing? There is a market for that. Even when you watch the Studio McGee, their services are not expensive. Amber Interiors, who we work with, people like that, incredibly talented, at the really high end of the market. They keep growing.Stephanie:Yup. Tell me a bit about your omnichannel approach. I saw that you had showrooms around the country. Then you're, obviously, online as well. Now you're moving into DTC. How do you think about keeping a cohesive story of your brand but also expanding and reaching a lot of people on different channels?John:I guess the biggest challenge, if it is the biggest, it's just the fact that what we're selling comes at a higher price point than the average online purchase. We sell certainly, if you're doing a GODMORGON bathroom vanity, that then may cost $150, $300, $400. We're selling cabinet doors and panels and complementary trim and things like that that can cost $3,000, $5,000, $20,000. Again, it's not buying a pair of Warby's or an Olay bag for a couple hundred bucks. There's a lot to it, a lot of back and forth. Excuse me.John:Showrooms we're always a part of we've got to show people our product, especially when we're asking them to spend that much. The benefit of IKEA is, even though they're still a privately held company, there are only, I think, less than 60 around the US. What I could say to people to say to you, Stephanie, or wherever, like you're in New York, go to one of the five local IKEAs. Then come into our mini ... I never want to call it a showroom, because it could be 200 square feet. It's got some cabinetry in it. It's got door samples, things like that. There would be a whole experience.John:I would always say, if you want to see a kitchen, go to IKEA and you can see 15 kitchens or see 20 kitchens. Want to see the doors? Come see us. We've had that in New York, in Brooklyn, in Chicago, obviously, in LA, Minneapolis, a bunch of different places. Again, trying to be reasonable about that. I don't want the overhead of signing leases if I don't have to. What we've typically done and we will continue to do even more so is partner with other great brands. It is like a multi-brand approach.John:With our lighting friends, with hardware companies like Rejuvenation, Fireclay Tile, upcoming collaboration with Caesarstone, it's partnering with Cambria in the past. It's just saying, let's do this collectively. Because the kitchen is, as someone said to me, "The base purchase, if you're fortunate to have him as a house, there's a car, and then maybe there's your kitchen." We're trying to grow the company that way. We started what I think is an amazing ... I got to [inaudible] blog anymore. It's that. [inaudible] stories that launched last summer.John:That was the idea that I wanted to bring together all these great writers, great content to help promote the brand, of course, but also expand us, again, to make that cliché to becoming a lifestyle brand. On the one hand, it would be enough to have a really successful cabinet door company. I just think we have the opportunity to do so much more. That's what something else we can talk about, is this brand Boxi, which is going to launch at the beginning of March. That really is direct to consumer. That's our own product, no IKEA. That's a whole different thing for us.Stephanie:Alright. Let's move there next after my one thought. I've many ideas when talking to you now.John:Awesome.Stephanie:What about having like partnering with IKEA on their AR app or developing your own AR app, instead of having to have a showroom, being going to IKEA, pull up your phone, and then you can swipe through the designs of ours, and you can see exactly what that trim would look like, what that doorknob or whatever, so then you eliminate showroom.John:It is interesting. Look, the thing with IKEA, they have partnered with people in the past. Obviously, places like Target have done an amazing job of that completely. As you said, Walmart too.. It always seem like the natural fit with us. If you were going to do it with anybody, it would be us. In terms of AI, yeah. IKEA has been slow and is put a huge push in the last couple years of their online presence and their economy. They have an app they launched last month. What we are doing with the new brand is working with a 3D AI company called Skip. It's going to launch in the next few months. That lets you basically not go in showrooms.John:There are ways to order this new line of cabinets, and one of them is to make an appointment and someone comes to your house and 3D scans your room. Then you design remotely. With 80 hours of AI and machine learning and everything else, it's compressing that and then presenting you with design options.Stephanie:That's cool.John:That's where we're headed. All has changed dramatically in the last year. COVID or not, it was headed towards that. The new iPhones have the camera technology where you can almost do that. Maybe in 12 to 15 months, you don't even need a guy to come to your house. You can do it with your iPhone. They're already pretty close.Stephanie:Yeah, I think it's fair. I have a little tape measure app on my phone and it says, okay, scan the whole room. You do that and then you can measure everything. The placeholders all around the room for you and [inaudible].John:Yeah, it's fascinating. Even brands like Primer that launched last year, which do the work with other brand partners, and you want to click on like the Hygge and West Wallpaper, you can hold it up to your wall. They'll show you different swatches and things like that. It's interesting. For us, yeah, that is part of what we think is a differentiator. IKEA is always going to have massive brick and mortar. Even though they move in some cities towards smaller footprints, it's still footprints that are 20,000 to 150,000, as opposed to 300,000. There's another cabinet line that's launching.John:It just launched, it's got a 30,000 square foot showroom on the East Coast and 100 kitchens. You go in and wear the AR or the VR goggles. That's completely different because you're looking at some space that has nothing to do with yours. It's kind of what you're saying. The point is, things are changing so fast. With Boxi, it is saying, can you make this as DTC as possible? The caveat being, it could cost $10,000 to $15,000, to $20,000. It's not like ...Stephanie:Okay. Tell me what is Boxi then since we [crosstalk].John:Boxi is the first American direct to consumer cabinet brand. It's a cabinet system for the entire home. It's basically taking the last 10, 11 years of everything we've learned from IKEA and saying, let's try and offer something. I don't know, if it's ... I don't want to say better than IKEA. Because again, I've huge respect for them. It's a more complete package. Certainly, the quality is there. The accessibility is there. One of many things that we're going to improve on is the fact that Semihandmade customers have to go to IKEA first.John:It's a two-part process where you've got to go to IKEA. You've got to order the cabinets and hardware. Then you've got to order the doors from us. Thank God that they do, but especially in the last year, IKEA, like a lot of people, has suffered horribly with supply chain issues. We have customers now, unfortunately, it's January, they're hearing, cabinet boxes might not be available for three, four, or five months because ...Stephanie:I ordered a couch from Pottery Barn and four months out. [crosstalk] order, I just didn't look, I guess.John:As a business, on a personal level, that annoys me because I want ... That's a whole thing. We have such ridiculous expectations because they're easily met or they have been up until now. Not to blame Amazon because that's too easy. I'm a hypocrite about Amazon too. With Boxi, we're saying, no big box stores. Somebody can come to you, things ship, leave the factory in a week. Part of what we're doing, you're from Palo Alto, I don't know if you're born there, but it's almost like an In-N-Out Burger West Coast approach. Meaning we're going to do a limited number of items, and we're going to do it great. If you want ...John:What they do is they're great. What's interesting about that is they ... I think just little background on burgers. I think the founder was best friends with Carl Karcher who started Carl's Jr., another big West Coast place. In the '50s, they open hamburger stands right next to each other. The In-N-Out guy's thing was always, I'm not worried about competition. You're welcome to open across the street from me, next door, or whatever, because I'm just going to bury you. I'll just be that much better. Not like in an obnoxious, overly competitive way. Just like, this is going to raise our game. With us, with Boxi, yeah, limited selection, fast turnaround ships in a week, never need to go to a big box store. It's built in the US at a really competitive price point. That's the idea.Stephanie:I love that it's built in the US. I think that a lot of companies right now are bringing things back into the US and some are struggling seeing how expensive things can be and what was happening overseas and maybe how it's just different here. What did you guys learn from IKEA that you're taking with you? Then what are you discarding where you're like, we're going to do this different though?John:Again, in some ways, I learned everything from IKEA. Look, I learned a couple things. One of them is you can't compete with them in terms of pricing. That's the most basic thing. I always say like, with Amazon, the same thing, you can't ... I mean, then the turnaround lead time. Up until recently, with COVID, you could buy a kitchen today and bring it home today. Nobody else could do that at a crazy price. Best of all, really high quality. IKEA, to their credit, pretty much every year, as long as I can remember, the last 10 years, is right at the top of like J.D. Power customer satisfaction in terms of quality, customer service, things like that.John:You could complain about certain products from IKEA and their quality, but their kitchens, I think, are inarguable. As much as I'm not affiliated with them directly, I always get defensive when people would slag them. Because it's also understanding that the product that they offer, and this blows some Americans minds, but it's a particleboard core with a melamine skin, a three-quarter melamine box. That standard in the entire world for kitchen cabinets. The most expensive cabinet brands in the world are constructed the same way.John:In the US, that's less the case because 70% of the market wants a frame around their cabinet. It's literally a face frame cabinet. The European style that IKEA is called frameless 32 millimeter. Again, I've learned everything. We're deeply indebted to them.Stephanie:Well, is there anything that you're changing though now that you are exploring DTC that's [crosstalk]?John:Yeah. We'll always have the ability. With Semihandmade, one of the differentiators were ... You'll always have this when you're smaller, we're microscopic compared to them. It's just being able to be nimble, to be able to get more custom, to be able to offer certain versatility that they could never do. Limited run doors, ability to do appliance panels for really anything. The Semihandmade, we could always do that. We can do upgrades with matching ... We used to do open cabinets that match your doors and things like that. We do less of that now.John:With Boxi, what will be interesting is because the hope is anybody to scale and to have short lead times, quick turnaround, we're not going to offer as much customization. We've learned like what ... In terms of people's taste. We have eight doors, which are basically the biggest sellers for Semihandmade. It's basic white, gray, black, and some wood tones. It's not saying like we have at Semihandmade of 45 choices. That's fun to me. Because if anything, you can have too many options and that is paralyzing.Stephanie:Yup. Just going to say that I appreciate when things are curated or you showed me something cute and I'm just like, "I'll have that." Whatever that is, the white, the gold, and the brown, perfect. That's what I want. Not choose every single piece of it. Which I think is for a lot of ecommerce, that's what I've heard throughout many interviews, is don't give so many choices, show people what you think or know that they're going to want based off of preferences or how they're interacting with your site or whatever it may be.John:That's part of if there'd been multiple challenges with getting Boxi off the ground understandably. I think the biggest one is like you said, with even a call today, there was seven of us on the screen and I said, "If the seven of us were the typical technology guys or girls that knew nothing about socks, but we're launching a socks brand, we wouldn't bring all this baggage to it about what we thought we knew." With Semihandmade, we have all this great knowledge, but some of it can get in the way with the new brand.John:Because the new brand, for it to really work, you can't do all the customization. There are certain things that Semihandmade where we'll make exceptions and we'll do things. Of course, you always want to service the customer, first and foremost. It's just recognizing that if the goal is for this really to take off and grow, which I think it will, we have to be a little stricter, a little more brand fidelity, like say, this is who we are, this is how we get to where we want to go, and then stick to that.Stephanie:Yeah, that seems tricky. Having two different hats where you and your team are like, we know what works, this is what works, we build a company that does this. Then having a slow creep where you turn the other brand into the same thing. Like you said, you have to really be strict about creating a whole new company with a new vision and making sure everyone's on board and not just let the old company creep in and [crosstalk].John:I think in some ways too, whether in a good way or a bad way, the fact that we've been fortunate to have growth and success for Semihandmade, it's either made it easier or harder to get the new venture off. Because it buys you certain time. If we were a startup, we raised funding. We've got 18 months to runway all these different things that will be different. Probably, things have taken longer. On the other hand, we wouldn't have been able to do it. When this launches, what we leverage is, yeah, it's 10 years of Semihandmade. It's 25,000 projects. It's incredible.John:We have 2,000 semipro designers around the country that are champing at the bit to offer this. It's relationships we've got with Rejuvination and Kaff appliances and Caesarstone that are going to be partners. I continue to remind people and even myself like if we were a startup, we'd never have this stuff. We wouldn't have five, six amazing influencer projects that you're going to roll out in the next six weeks with the new launch. You'd be launching and then keeping your fingers crossed.Stephanie:Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. Alright, so let's move over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have one minute or less, prepare, get your water, [inaudible], shake it out, do what you got to do. Alright, are you ready, John?John:Yup.Stephanie:Alright. What one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?John:That's great question. Do I have a minute for this?Stephanie:Yeah, a minute.John:I think it depends. I'm cynical about the fact that in some ways, yeah, a lot of companies have taken off, Instacart and things like that, but even like Wayfair. I was reading Bed Bath & Beyond today. I think the question is whether or not that'll be sustained. When life comes back to normal, which hopefully, inevitably will, certainly, people will be more inclined to shop online. There's no doubt about that. The world is changing. It's not going to go back. There are companies that have gotten a little frothier or whatever that I think that artificial is going to wear off. It's normalized.John:It's great. There's stuff I would have never done. Even with not ecomm, but with Zoom, we hired a new president, Beth and Molly, who runs marketing and stuff. I hired three of our highest people remotely. They're based in New York. I would have never done that. I would never trusted people or trusted myself. Now, it's normal.Stephanie:Yeah. I was slow with grocery delivery and curbside pickup. It forced me to do that because I was the one who always want to go to the grocery store, look around with my friends, whatever it maybe. Now, I'm like, oh, I don't really want to go there anymore. There's no point. I'll save my time and do other things.John:It is amazing. To me, it's more interesting to see how those people make money. That's the part where it's one thing to do great revenue. Obviously, profitability is a thing, unless it's not your money, unless you have a thing too. When it is your money, it's much more of a focus.Stephanie:Yeah. We just had someone from Intel on who was saying that they work with a hardware store and they're struggling because contractors were coming in and placing 40, 50 item orders for curbside pickup.John:All of it?Stephanie:Because they're like, why would I send in my contractor and paid him to be there for two to three hours when I could just have you all do it. They're struggling with trying to figure out the program because they weren't really expecting them.John:Yeah, that's interesting.Stephanie:I'm like, that's scary. What's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?John:Business wise or otherwise?Stephanie:Anything, whatever comes to mind.John:I guess the biggest cliché was my son's mom having my son. That's probably ...Stephanie:That's a good one. Having three kids, I appreciate that answer.John:I mean that from heart.Stephanie:Yeah, that's a good one. What's up next on your reading list?John:I constantly have five or six books I'm reading. That's interesting too, whether it's because I pursued writing for a long time. I haven't made the jump to eBooks. There are few writers that I correspond with on Twitter. Twitter is another thing that I didn't use that much before this. I've asked them like, "Well, what's the feeling on eBooks? Is it like cheating or whatever?" Of course, these guys and girls want to sell books. They're not considered cheating if you buy their eBook. The response I got from a bunch of them was, it's best in some ways for nonfiction.John:I read tons of nonfiction. I'm reading Say Nothing, which is a story about the troubles in Ireland. I'm finishing a great book on ecommerce called the Billion Dollar Brands book, something like that. That's spectacular. I've got so many. I'm reading a book on Chinatown, the making of the movie. I love a lot of different things. It is mainly. It's less fiction now. It is more nonfiction.Stephanie:Very cool. What is your favorite cabinet design? What's in your house?John:My house, it's interesting. Because in my house that I share with my son who I split custody with, we have a more contemporary kitchen. It's walnut. It's unique. We sell a fair amount of walnut and it is one of a kind. Every kitchen is different. That's a little more contemporary, even though it's wood. It's contemporary. In the house with my fiancé, where she lives, that's a more traditional. It's a shaker kitchen. It's got some really pretty hardware. I guess I'm very particular about what I like. In general, even when we she and I have arguments about furniture, I just say like, "Buy something quality and it'll fit with everything else." I know it's a copout, but that's where I'm landed. I love eclectic as long as it's nice quality.Stephanie:Yeah, cool. Alright and then the last one, if you were to have a podcast, what would it be about? Who would your first guest be?John:That's a great question. I like a lot of probably IKEA. I like a lot of different things. Even podcasts, same thing. I didn't listen to before, frankly, a year ago. I listened to one the other day. Marc Maron was really talented, funny guy who've been doing podcast for about 10 years. He had this guy, Daniel Lanois, who's a big time record producer, did U2 and all kinds of amazing people. I was amazed at the depth of Maron's knowledge of music. I don't have that. I don't know. I like diverse things. I don't know if I could do it.John:Because I like to think I'm a good listener, but I'm probably not because I'm always ready to say something. Obviously, like in your spot or whatever, to do it well, you should be listening to people. Again, I love screenwriting podcasts. I like anything. I like news, podcasts.Stephanie:Okay, so it'd be a little bit of everything. I like that. That's cool.John:I could do this kind of thing. If we're talking about remodeling, if anything, would always have an edge to it. If I were going to do a show, that's the thing. I gravitate less, maybe not towards Gordon Ramsay, but like Anthony Bourdain. There would be an edge to it. It wouldn't be ... Even when I was inside people's houses, I don't know if I was combative. I had very strong opinions about with architects and designers and homeowners and what I thought they should want. The one thing I don't like is when it's all sweet and sacristy and artificial. Totally with an edge.Stephanie:I like that. That sounds good. Alright, John, well, this has been a pleasure having you on. Where can people find out more about you and your work?John:Sure. Semihandmade, we can do semihandmade.com. Then Boxi, which launches March 1st, is at boxiliving, B-O-X-I-L-I-V-I-N-G.com.Stephanie:Okay, thanks.John:I appreciate the time. This has been great.Stephanie:Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on. It was fun.John:Thanks for having me, Stephanie.

Panel: Charles Max Wood John Papa Special Guest: Adrian Faciu In this episode, Chuck talks with Adrian Faciu who is a developer for Visma and is a blogger. The panel talks to Adrian about his blog titled, “NgRx Tips & Tricks.” They ask Adrian in-depth questions about NgRx, among many other topics. Listen to today’s episode for more details! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:55 – Chuck: Hi! Our guest is Adrian Faciu. 1:10 – Guest: Hello! I am Adrian and I am a developer who works for a Norwegian company, but I live in Romania! 1:35 – Chuck. 1:36 – Guest. 1:47 – Chuck: The market is so global. I have talked with many different guests from different parts of the world – it’s really neat! It’s this global phenomenon. 2:12 – Guest: It’s a great thing! 2:23 – Chuck: They have an office where you live? 2:31 – Yes. 2:37 – Chuck: How are you guys using Angular over there? 2:47 – Guest: We have several different products. We customize using them with internalized tools. 3:04 – Chuck: Real quick let’s talk about your blog post. I will admit I am not that familiar with NgRx, so I will ask newbie questions. Now do you want to explain what this is? 3:41 – Guest: Sure! The short story of the article is I saw people doing things the hard way. And after I figured out some things, people encouraged me to write about my experience. 4:37 – Chuck: John Papa just signed-in! 4:53 – Guest: Yes NgRx is... 5:02 – Chuck: You used classes for all actions what do you mean by that? 5:05 – Guest answers the question into detail. 6:31 – Chuck: Let’s say we have a class that uses a log error... 6:42 – Guest: For example you have actions that... 7:02 – Chuck: When you use the reducer... 7:10 – Guest: There are other tricks we can use like keeping all of them in the same file... 8:00 – Guest talks about the union type. 8:24 – Chuck: You learned this by doing things wrong – what happens when you do these things wrong? 8:30 – Guest: If you don’t put all of your classes in the right file then you end up with a lot of files. If you don’t create hero types then you’d have to... 10:02 – Chuck: If you import user actions then does it import all of the other types? 10:08 – Guest: Import everything from that file. 10:17 – Chuck: If you have any questions, John, feel free to chime-in! 10:29 – John: Yeah I am scanning through this. The negative I hear a lot of through actions, it’s cause we create constants – the action class creators, it seems to cause an undue amount of stress. How much actual code do you actually have to write – how do you feel about that? 11:12 – Guest: I didn’t want to write all of this code! That’s what I wanted to avoid. 11:44 – John: I wrote them, didn’t like them, I went back to them... It wasn’t just that I created a new action I had to create the constant and other things – also the place you do the union type, I’d forget to do the union type at the end! If you don’t have all of those things then it won’t work. Even on a simple project I’d have 120 lines of code for a simple task. 12:49 – Guest: Yes. Sometimes I would forget this or that. I’d have to figure out what I did wrong. I went back and created classes for a lot of things. I like the benefits. 13:19 – John: I like your ideas and your tips in your blog. How do you feel about the NAMES of those actions? 13:55 – Guest. 14:51 – John: Important part is the naming of the string inside of it – that’s the value... So you can see the actions that are being displayed. 15:25 – Guest: If you didn’t do it right that’s where the problem would be. 15:38 – John: To me it’s a love/hate relationship b/c there is so much code to it. I usually copy and paste which means that I usually forget to change something. I agree, but I don’t’ like creating it. 16:05 – Guest: I’ve been trying to figure out a solution for it eventually I gave up. 16:23 – John: Moving onto effects – inside that happens inside of the Redux cycle – if you want to do something outside of it that’s when you do effects right? 16:40 – Guest. 16:49 – John: Using the effects is good or do it a different way? 17: 20 – Guest: It makes my components cleaner. I have seen projects that DON’T use it and it’s not the best. 17:36 – John: Like getting a list of customers... (I am using my hands and nobody can see me!) It’s weird to me to NOT use the effects! 18:52 – Guest: If you implement some type of caching then it’s everything to put everything in the state. 19:07 – Chuck: I haven’t used it as much as I would like, but I haven’t do much with it. 19:23 – John: I am curious from somebody hasn’t dove into it – does effects make sense to you, Chuck? 19:39 – Chuck: It seems like effects is a side effect? Like calling out an external API... 20:10 – John: Yeah even multiple effects. John asks a question. 20:23 – Guest answers the question. 20:29 – Chuck: I like that you can make constrained assumptions and all of the complicated... 21:10 – Guest: I am using my effects like functions. 21:26 – John’s question. 21:31 – Chuck: Doing everything! You said implement the 2-payload method – that doesn’t make sense? 21:43 – Guest: Not 100% convinced you need it. What people are doing on these actions... 22:43 – Chuck: How much magic you want? 22:50 – Guest. 22:59 – John: I am confused about ERROR HANDLING. What do you advise for people to do? 23:21 – Guest: Basically, when you deal with that effect you deal with the actions, and the actions... If you get an error on it it’s done. I was trying to explain there that...do it on another stream. Try it on another stream and handle it. What happened to me – I did it on the action state and I got an error and then everything will stop. 24:27 – John: That’s not good! 24:32 – Chuck. 24:35 – John: Good tip! 24:40 – Chuck: Angular has gotten better at that. I still find, though... 25:06 – John. 25:16 – John: Hey I appreciate these blog posts that don’t always show the happy path. To show the unhappy path is a good idea. 25:32 – Chuck. 26:00 – Going down your list, Adrian, let’s talk about effects are services. I agree, but not that we have... 26:24 – Guest: I have seen cases where people forget that. They say I want to call a service, how do I do that? They forget... 26:50 – John: You have to provide your services somewhere. The old way was you could go into the... What do you do? 27:28 – Guest: Most of the applications... 28:17 – John. 28:25 – Chuck: I love deleting code! 28:32 – John: You end up in a spaghetti pool, though, if you needed that deleted code. Nooooo!!! 29:00 – Chuck. 29:01 – Guest. 29:10 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 29:49 – John: Let’s talk about reducers – the smallest part of your tip sections. You say, “keep them simple” – how do you keep them simple? 30:07 – Guest: I have received this observation from several people. This is the biggest problem I had. How to keep them simple... 31:08 – John: When someone makes that type of code – where would you want them to put it? 31:23 – Guest: It depends on different types of actions. Maybe I have some sort of matter that I added to the data – an action from my application we can catch it into an effect and... Not all of the actions have to go to the reducer. 32:04 – John: I say, “Hmm...” when I see reducers like this...they are running a synchronized code inside of a reducer. And I see that a lot. 32:24 – Chuck. 32:28 – John: You go call a reaction, and...sometimes they are doing HTP there, but it’s hard to explain. 33:11 – John: What are some of the things that they can do to step-into, when they are using these? 33:16 – Guest: That’s why I only have these things about the reducers. 33:48 – Chuck: I am wondering what is the life cycle look like? What do you call a reducer from an effect from an action or vice versa? 34:09 – Guest answers the question. 34:37 – John: It can be confusing with all of these different terms. Where does it end? Your component you have to say: call this action. Perform this action and then the action says get customers – the NgRx library listens for that and helps connect to the reducer for you. Look into the action and then return that to a stream to whatever... 35:29 – Guest: Yes, it sends it to reducers. Guest goes into more detail. 36:09 – John: You never talk to the reducer directly? 36:17 – Chuck: ...is that something I should have done before – or does it call effects and the effects load the information into the state and the reducer pulls it out for the action? 36:46 – Guest. 36:58 – Chuck. 37:03 – Guest. 37:53 – John: It really depends on what you want to do, Chuck. John will give a hypothetical scenario. 38:58 – Chuck: In your scenario, let’s say... 39:14 – John: Everything is right up until the end there. It’s a little magical, honestly. I just know here is my selector and here is my data! 40:17 – Chuck: Selector is essentially I am interested in THIS state or THIS state change. 40:40 – Guest. 40:50 – Chuck: So when that changes... 40:56 – Guest. 40:59 – John. 41:05 – Chuck: A little piece of the overall store. 41:18 – Guest: My tip there was a bout the selectors... 42:30 – Chuck: So I can hand off my selector to multiple places? 42:36 – Guest: Yep. You don’t need to know anything else. 42:44 – Guest: Combine it as needed. Another benefit here is memorization. It says that each time you select pure functions it wont call the function again. 43:42 – I am seeing a trend in your tips, too. I am seeing easier way to code. You are always saying selector technique. There are a lot of terms in NgRx module. Dispatchers and states and stores...it’s nice to have a way to create the code easier. 44:21 – Guest: It does take a lot of time for someone to grasp. 44:30 – Chuck. 44:35 – John: Don’t use the store all over the place – that’s what Adrian says! 44:54 – Guest: I think it’s more like dumb components. I have a container of all of these dumb components. The container is the one that KNOWS. 46:22 – Chuck: It’s just a button. 46:28 – Guest: You click the button and it triggers. Whenever you want to use that component then you... 46:48 – Chuck: Any types of data that you wouldn’t want to use in your NgRx store? 47:07 – Guest: It depends – I am not holding any logging information there, though. 47:51 – John: I like to ask WHY. Property initialization. You are saying... 48:11 – Guest: It’s less code and it’s reasonable. If I can have less code then I’d love to have it. I think it’s cleaner b/c it’s not that much code. Most people might think blah, blah, blah, but I think it looks okay. 48:46 – John: I can see why it would be less code. 48:57 – Guest. 49:07 – John: I haven’t seen this: looking at your property initializer... Looking at your code here, Adrian... The store object itself is a reference to the NgRx store. That means you have to... To me I don’t want my app to know that NgRx is involved. I started to do this...I was creating an Angular service, which... Have you done this before? 50:33 – Guest:  I have seen this function but I haven’t played with it. It makes sense. This takes it a step further. Like you say it’s perfect b/c nobody knows anything about that store, but it’s a new level. I think you have some benefits with that way of doing it, too. 51:23 – John: The one thing that sticks out is company name is your observable, then your... 52:10 – Guest: Yeah that’s good b/c it might be better! They might not even know what NgRx is, and you have a service so just use them. Yeah it’s just an observable. 52:33 – Chuck: You don’t want to see my garage. 52:44 – Guest: Some services are underrated. Like you suggested we could use them for much more. 53:01 – Guest: It was nice writing these tips. 53:19 – Chuck: What are working on now? 53:23 – Guest: Writing a new blog. 53:41 – Chuck: We will keep an eye out for it. Where do you post? 53:55 – Guest: Usually Medium, and Twitter. Search for my name and you will find me, b/c I have the same handler on all the places. 54:15 – Chuck & John: Let’s go to picks! 54:30 – Chuck is talking about future episodes and potential topics. You can vote stuff up on Trello on NgRx so we can go deeper on this topic. 55:40 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 1:02:00 – Advertisement – Cache Fly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular C# Chuck’s Twitter John Papa’s Twitter Adrian’s Medium Adrian’s Twitter Adrian’s GitHub Adrian’s Blog Post Adrian’s Article: Testing NgRx Effects Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Cache Fly Picks: John NgRx Data Conferences  - Don’t feel mofo Charles Discord App Adrain Angular In-depth Doc Wallaby

Panel: Charles Max Wood John Papa Special Guest: Adrian Faciu In this episode, Chuck talks with Adrian Faciu who is a developer for Visma and is a blogger. The panel talks to Adrian about his blog titled, “NgRx Tips & Tricks.” They ask Adrian in-depth questions about NgRx, among many other topics. Listen to today’s episode for more details! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:55 – Chuck: Hi! Our guest is Adrian Faciu. 1:10 – Guest: Hello! I am Adrian and I am a developer who works for a Norwegian company, but I live in Romania! 1:35 – Chuck. 1:36 – Guest. 1:47 – Chuck: The market is so global. I have talked with many different guests from different parts of the world – it’s really neat! It’s this global phenomenon. 2:12 – Guest: It’s a great thing! 2:23 – Chuck: They have an office where you live? 2:31 – Yes. 2:37 – Chuck: How are you guys using Angular over there? 2:47 – Guest: We have several different products. We customize using them with internalized tools. 3:04 – Chuck: Real quick let’s talk about your blog post. I will admit I am not that familiar with NgRx, so I will ask newbie questions. Now do you want to explain what this is? 3:41 – Guest: Sure! The short story of the article is I saw people doing things the hard way. And after I figured out some things, people encouraged me to write about my experience. 4:37 – Chuck: John Papa just signed-in! 4:53 – Guest: Yes NgRx is... 5:02 – Chuck: You used classes for all actions what do you mean by that? 5:05 – Guest answers the question into detail. 6:31 – Chuck: Let’s say we have a class that uses a log error... 6:42 – Guest: For example you have actions that... 7:02 – Chuck: When you use the reducer... 7:10 – Guest: There are other tricks we can use like keeping all of them in the same file... 8:00 – Guest talks about the union type. 8:24 – Chuck: You learned this by doing things wrong – what happens when you do these things wrong? 8:30 – Guest: If you don’t put all of your classes in the right file then you end up with a lot of files. If you don’t create hero types then you’d have to... 10:02 – Chuck: If you import user actions then does it import all of the other types? 10:08 – Guest: Import everything from that file. 10:17 – Chuck: If you have any questions, John, feel free to chime-in! 10:29 – John: Yeah I am scanning through this. The negative I hear a lot of through actions, it’s cause we create constants – the action class creators, it seems to cause an undue amount of stress. How much actual code do you actually have to write – how do you feel about that? 11:12 – Guest: I didn’t want to write all of this code! That’s what I wanted to avoid. 11:44 – John: I wrote them, didn’t like them, I went back to them... It wasn’t just that I created a new action I had to create the constant and other things – also the place you do the union type, I’d forget to do the union type at the end! If you don’t have all of those things then it won’t work. Even on a simple project I’d have 120 lines of code for a simple task. 12:49 – Guest: Yes. Sometimes I would forget this or that. I’d have to figure out what I did wrong. I went back and created classes for a lot of things. I like the benefits. 13:19 – John: I like your ideas and your tips in your blog. How do you feel about the NAMES of those actions? 13:55 – Guest. 14:51 – John: Important part is the naming of the string inside of it – that’s the value... So you can see the actions that are being displayed. 15:25 – Guest: If you didn’t do it right that’s where the problem would be. 15:38 – John: To me it’s a love/hate relationship b/c there is so much code to it. I usually copy and paste which means that I usually forget to change something. I agree, but I don’t’ like creating it. 16:05 – Guest: I’ve been trying to figure out a solution for it eventually I gave up. 16:23 – John: Moving onto effects – inside that happens inside of the Redux cycle – if you want to do something outside of it that’s when you do effects right? 16:40 – Guest. 16:49 – John: Using the effects is good or do it a different way? 17: 20 – Guest: It makes my components cleaner. I have seen projects that DON’T use it and it’s not the best. 17:36 – John: Like getting a list of customers... (I am using my hands and nobody can see me!) It’s weird to me to NOT use the effects! 18:52 – Guest: If you implement some type of caching then it’s everything to put everything in the state. 19:07 – Chuck: I haven’t used it as much as I would like, but I haven’t do much with it. 19:23 – John: I am curious from somebody hasn’t dove into it – does effects make sense to you, Chuck? 19:39 – Chuck: It seems like effects is a side effect? Like calling out an external API... 20:10 – John: Yeah even multiple effects. John asks a question. 20:23 – Guest answers the question. 20:29 – Chuck: I like that you can make constrained assumptions and all of the complicated... 21:10 – Guest: I am using my effects like functions. 21:26 – John’s question. 21:31 – Chuck: Doing everything! You said implement the 2-payload method – that doesn’t make sense? 21:43 – Guest: Not 100% convinced you need it. What people are doing on these actions... 22:43 – Chuck: How much magic you want? 22:50 – Guest. 22:59 – John: I am confused about ERROR HANDLING. What do you advise for people to do? 23:21 – Guest: Basically, when you deal with that effect you deal with the actions, and the actions... If you get an error on it it’s done. I was trying to explain there that...do it on another stream. Try it on another stream and handle it. What happened to me – I did it on the action state and I got an error and then everything will stop. 24:27 – John: That’s not good! 24:32 – Chuck. 24:35 – John: Good tip! 24:40 – Chuck: Angular has gotten better at that. I still find, though... 25:06 – John. 25:16 – John: Hey I appreciate these blog posts that don’t always show the happy path. To show the unhappy path is a good idea. 25:32 – Chuck. 26:00 – Going down your list, Adrian, let’s talk about effects are services. I agree, but not that we have... 26:24 – Guest: I have seen cases where people forget that. They say I want to call a service, how do I do that? They forget... 26:50 – John: You have to provide your services somewhere. The old way was you could go into the... What do you do? 27:28 – Guest: Most of the applications... 28:17 – John. 28:25 – Chuck: I love deleting code! 28:32 – John: You end up in a spaghetti pool, though, if you needed that deleted code. Nooooo!!! 29:00 – Chuck. 29:01 – Guest. 29:10 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 29:49 – John: Let’s talk about reducers – the smallest part of your tip sections. You say, “keep them simple” – how do you keep them simple? 30:07 – Guest: I have received this observation from several people. This is the biggest problem I had. How to keep them simple... 31:08 – John: When someone makes that type of code – where would you want them to put it? 31:23 – Guest: It depends on different types of actions. Maybe I have some sort of matter that I added to the data – an action from my application we can catch it into an effect and... Not all of the actions have to go to the reducer. 32:04 – John: I say, “Hmm...” when I see reducers like this...they are running a synchronized code inside of a reducer. And I see that a lot. 32:24 – Chuck. 32:28 – John: You go call a reaction, and...sometimes they are doing HTP there, but it’s hard to explain. 33:11 – John: What are some of the things that they can do to step-into, when they are using these? 33:16 – Guest: That’s why I only have these things about the reducers. 33:48 – Chuck: I am wondering what is the life cycle look like? What do you call a reducer from an effect from an action or vice versa? 34:09 – Guest answers the question. 34:37 – John: It can be confusing with all of these different terms. Where does it end? Your component you have to say: call this action. Perform this action and then the action says get customers – the NgRx library listens for that and helps connect to the reducer for you. Look into the action and then return that to a stream to whatever... 35:29 – Guest: Yes, it sends it to reducers. Guest goes into more detail. 36:09 – John: You never talk to the reducer directly? 36:17 – Chuck: ...is that something I should have done before – or does it call effects and the effects load the information into the state and the reducer pulls it out for the action? 36:46 – Guest. 36:58 – Chuck. 37:03 – Guest. 37:53 – John: It really depends on what you want to do, Chuck. John will give a hypothetical scenario. 38:58 – Chuck: In your scenario, let’s say... 39:14 – John: Everything is right up until the end there. It’s a little magical, honestly. I just know here is my selector and here is my data! 40:17 – Chuck: Selector is essentially I am interested in THIS state or THIS state change. 40:40 – Guest. 40:50 – Chuck: So when that changes... 40:56 – Guest. 40:59 – John. 41:05 – Chuck: A little piece of the overall store. 41:18 – Guest: My tip there was a bout the selectors... 42:30 – Chuck: So I can hand off my selector to multiple places? 42:36 – Guest: Yep. You don’t need to know anything else. 42:44 – Guest: Combine it as needed. Another benefit here is memorization. It says that each time you select pure functions it wont call the function again. 43:42 – I am seeing a trend in your tips, too. I am seeing easier way to code. You are always saying selector technique. There are a lot of terms in NgRx module. Dispatchers and states and stores...it’s nice to have a way to create the code easier. 44:21 – Guest: It does take a lot of time for someone to grasp. 44:30 – Chuck. 44:35 – John: Don’t use the store all over the place – that’s what Adrian says! 44:54 – Guest: I think it’s more like dumb components. I have a container of all of these dumb components. The container is the one that KNOWS. 46:22 – Chuck: It’s just a button. 46:28 – Guest: You click the button and it triggers. Whenever you want to use that component then you... 46:48 – Chuck: Any types of data that you wouldn’t want to use in your NgRx store? 47:07 – Guest: It depends – I am not holding any logging information there, though. 47:51 – John: I like to ask WHY. Property initialization. You are saying... 48:11 – Guest: It’s less code and it’s reasonable. If I can have less code then I’d love to have it. I think it’s cleaner b/c it’s not that much code. Most people might think blah, blah, blah, but I think it looks okay. 48:46 – John: I can see why it would be less code. 48:57 – Guest. 49:07 – John: I haven’t seen this: looking at your property initializer... Looking at your code here, Adrian... The store object itself is a reference to the NgRx store. That means you have to... To me I don’t want my app to know that NgRx is involved. I started to do this...I was creating an Angular service, which... Have you done this before? 50:33 – Guest:  I have seen this function but I haven’t played with it. It makes sense. This takes it a step further. Like you say it’s perfect b/c nobody knows anything about that store, but it’s a new level. I think you have some benefits with that way of doing it, too. 51:23 – John: The one thing that sticks out is company name is your observable, then your... 52:10 – Guest: Yeah that’s good b/c it might be better! They might not even know what NgRx is, and you have a service so just use them. Yeah it’s just an observable. 52:33 – Chuck: You don’t want to see my garage. 52:44 – Guest: Some services are underrated. Like you suggested we could use them for much more. 53:01 – Guest: It was nice writing these tips. 53:19 – Chuck: What are working on now? 53:23 – Guest: Writing a new blog. 53:41 – Chuck: We will keep an eye out for it. Where do you post? 53:55 – Guest: Usually Medium, and Twitter. Search for my name and you will find me, b/c I have the same handler on all the places. 54:15 – Chuck & John: Let’s go to picks! 54:30 – Chuck is talking about future episodes and potential topics. You can vote stuff up on Trello on NgRx so we can go deeper on this topic. 55:40 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 1:02:00 – Advertisement – Cache Fly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular C# Chuck’s Twitter John Papa’s Twitter Adrian’s Medium Adrian’s Twitter Adrian’s GitHub Adrian’s Blog Post Adrian’s Article: Testing NgRx Effects Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Cache Fly Picks: John NgRx Data Conferences  - Don’t feel mofo Charles Discord App Adrain Angular In-depth Doc Wallaby

Panel: Charles Max Wood John Papa Special Guest: Adrian Faciu In this episode, Chuck talks with Adrian Faciu who is a developer for Visma and is a blogger. The panel talks to Adrian about his blog titled, “NgRx Tips & Tricks.” They ask Adrian in-depth questions about NgRx, among many other topics. Listen to today’s episode for more details! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:55 – Chuck: Hi! Our guest is Adrian Faciu. 1:10 – Guest: Hello! I am Adrian and I am a developer who works for a Norwegian company, but I live in Romania! 1:35 – Chuck. 1:36 – Guest. 1:47 – Chuck: The market is so global. I have talked with many different guests from different parts of the world – it’s really neat! It’s this global phenomenon. 2:12 – Guest: It’s a great thing! 2:23 – Chuck: They have an office where you live? 2:31 – Yes. 2:37 – Chuck: How are you guys using Angular over there? 2:47 – Guest: We have several different products. We customize using them with internalized tools. 3:04 – Chuck: Real quick let’s talk about your blog post. I will admit I am not that familiar with NgRx, so I will ask newbie questions. Now do you want to explain what this is? 3:41 – Guest: Sure! The short story of the article is I saw people doing things the hard way. And after I figured out some things, people encouraged me to write about my experience. 4:37 – Chuck: John Papa just signed-in! 4:53 – Guest: Yes NgRx is... 5:02 – Chuck: You used classes for all actions what do you mean by that? 5:05 – Guest answers the question into detail. 6:31 – Chuck: Let’s say we have a class that uses a log error... 6:42 – Guest: For example you have actions that... 7:02 – Chuck: When you use the reducer... 7:10 – Guest: There are other tricks we can use like keeping all of them in the same file... 8:00 – Guest talks about the union type. 8:24 – Chuck: You learned this by doing things wrong – what happens when you do these things wrong? 8:30 – Guest: If you don’t put all of your classes in the right file then you end up with a lot of files. If you don’t create hero types then you’d have to... 10:02 – Chuck: If you import user actions then does it import all of the other types? 10:08 – Guest: Import everything from that file. 10:17 – Chuck: If you have any questions, John, feel free to chime-in! 10:29 – John: Yeah I am scanning through this. The negative I hear a lot of through actions, it’s cause we create constants – the action class creators, it seems to cause an undue amount of stress. How much actual code do you actually have to write – how do you feel about that? 11:12 – Guest: I didn’t want to write all of this code! That’s what I wanted to avoid. 11:44 – John: I wrote them, didn’t like them, I went back to them... It wasn’t just that I created a new action I had to create the constant and other things – also the place you do the union type, I’d forget to do the union type at the end! If you don’t have all of those things then it won’t work. Even on a simple project I’d have 120 lines of code for a simple task. 12:49 – Guest: Yes. Sometimes I would forget this or that. I’d have to figure out what I did wrong. I went back and created classes for a lot of things. I like the benefits. 13:19 – John: I like your ideas and your tips in your blog. How do you feel about the NAMES of those actions? 13:55 – Guest. 14:51 – John: Important part is the naming of the string inside of it – that’s the value... So you can see the actions that are being displayed. 15:25 – Guest: If you didn’t do it right that’s where the problem would be. 15:38 – John: To me it’s a love/hate relationship b/c there is so much code to it. I usually copy and paste which means that I usually forget to change something. I agree, but I don’t’ like creating it. 16:05 – Guest: I’ve been trying to figure out a solution for it eventually I gave up. 16:23 – John: Moving onto effects – inside that happens inside of the Redux cycle – if you want to do something outside of it that’s when you do effects right? 16:40 – Guest. 16:49 – John: Using the effects is good or do it a different way? 17: 20 – Guest: It makes my components cleaner. I have seen projects that DON’T use it and it’s not the best. 17:36 – John: Like getting a list of customers... (I am using my hands and nobody can see me!) It’s weird to me to NOT use the effects! 18:52 – Guest: If you implement some type of caching then it’s everything to put everything in the state. 19:07 – Chuck: I haven’t used it as much as I would like, but I haven’t do much with it. 19:23 – John: I am curious from somebody hasn’t dove into it – does effects make sense to you, Chuck? 19:39 – Chuck: It seems like effects is a side effect? Like calling out an external API... 20:10 – John: Yeah even multiple effects. John asks a question. 20:23 – Guest answers the question. 20:29 – Chuck: I like that you can make constrained assumptions and all of the complicated... 21:10 – Guest: I am using my effects like functions. 21:26 – John’s question. 21:31 – Chuck: Doing everything! You said implement the 2-payload method – that doesn’t make sense? 21:43 – Guest: Not 100% convinced you need it. What people are doing on these actions... 22:43 – Chuck: How much magic you want? 22:50 – Guest. 22:59 – John: I am confused about ERROR HANDLING. What do you advise for people to do? 23:21 – Guest: Basically, when you deal with that effect you deal with the actions, and the actions... If you get an error on it it’s done. I was trying to explain there that...do it on another stream. Try it on another stream and handle it. What happened to me – I did it on the action state and I got an error and then everything will stop. 24:27 – John: That’s not good! 24:32 – Chuck. 24:35 – John: Good tip! 24:40 – Chuck: Angular has gotten better at that. I still find, though... 25:06 – John. 25:16 – John: Hey I appreciate these blog posts that don’t always show the happy path. To show the unhappy path is a good idea. 25:32 – Chuck. 26:00 – Going down your list, Adrian, let’s talk about effects are services. I agree, but not that we have... 26:24 – Guest: I have seen cases where people forget that. They say I want to call a service, how do I do that? They forget... 26:50 – John: You have to provide your services somewhere. The old way was you could go into the... What do you do? 27:28 – Guest: Most of the applications... 28:17 – John. 28:25 – Chuck: I love deleting code! 28:32 – John: You end up in a spaghetti pool, though, if you needed that deleted code. Nooooo!!! 29:00 – Chuck. 29:01 – Guest. 29:10 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 29:49 – John: Let’s talk about reducers – the smallest part of your tip sections. You say, “keep them simple” – how do you keep them simple? 30:07 – Guest: I have received this observation from several people. This is the biggest problem I had. How to keep them simple... 31:08 – John: When someone makes that type of code – where would you want them to put it? 31:23 – Guest: It depends on different types of actions. Maybe I have some sort of matter that I added to the data – an action from my application we can catch it into an effect and... Not all of the actions have to go to the reducer. 32:04 – John: I say, “Hmm...” when I see reducers like this...they are running a synchronized code inside of a reducer. And I see that a lot. 32:24 – Chuck. 32:28 – John: You go call a reaction, and...sometimes they are doing HTP there, but it’s hard to explain. 33:11 – John: What are some of the things that they can do to step-into, when they are using these? 33:16 – Guest: That’s why I only have these things about the reducers. 33:48 – Chuck: I am wondering what is the life cycle look like? What do you call a reducer from an effect from an action or vice versa? 34:09 – Guest answers the question. 34:37 – John: It can be confusing with all of these different terms. Where does it end? Your component you have to say: call this action. Perform this action and then the action says get customers – the NgRx library listens for that and helps connect to the reducer for you. Look into the action and then return that to a stream to whatever... 35:29 – Guest: Yes, it sends it to reducers. Guest goes into more detail. 36:09 – John: You never talk to the reducer directly? 36:17 – Chuck: ...is that something I should have done before – or does it call effects and the effects load the information into the state and the reducer pulls it out for the action? 36:46 – Guest. 36:58 – Chuck. 37:03 – Guest. 37:53 – John: It really depends on what you want to do, Chuck. John will give a hypothetical scenario. 38:58 – Chuck: In your scenario, let’s say... 39:14 – John: Everything is right up until the end there. It’s a little magical, honestly. I just know here is my selector and here is my data! 40:17 – Chuck: Selector is essentially I am interested in THIS state or THIS state change. 40:40 – Guest. 40:50 – Chuck: So when that changes... 40:56 – Guest. 40:59 – John. 41:05 – Chuck: A little piece of the overall store. 41:18 – Guest: My tip there was a bout the selectors... 42:30 – Chuck: So I can hand off my selector to multiple places? 42:36 – Guest: Yep. You don’t need to know anything else. 42:44 – Guest: Combine it as needed. Another benefit here is memorization. It says that each time you select pure functions it wont call the function again. 43:42 – I am seeing a trend in your tips, too. I am seeing easier way to code. You are always saying selector technique. There are a lot of terms in NgRx module. Dispatchers and states and stores...it’s nice to have a way to create the code easier. 44:21 – Guest: It does take a lot of time for someone to grasp. 44:30 – Chuck. 44:35 – John: Don’t use the store all over the place – that’s what Adrian says! 44:54 – Guest: I think it’s more like dumb components. I have a container of all of these dumb components. The container is the one that KNOWS. 46:22 – Chuck: It’s just a button. 46:28 – Guest: You click the button and it triggers. Whenever you want to use that component then you... 46:48 – Chuck: Any types of data that you wouldn’t want to use in your NgRx store? 47:07 – Guest: It depends – I am not holding any logging information there, though. 47:51 – John: I like to ask WHY. Property initialization. You are saying... 48:11 – Guest: It’s less code and it’s reasonable. If I can have less code then I’d love to have it. I think it’s cleaner b/c it’s not that much code. Most people might think blah, blah, blah, but I think it looks okay. 48:46 – John: I can see why it would be less code. 48:57 – Guest. 49:07 – John: I haven’t seen this: looking at your property initializer... Looking at your code here, Adrian... The store object itself is a reference to the NgRx store. That means you have to... To me I don’t want my app to know that NgRx is involved. I started to do this...I was creating an Angular service, which... Have you done this before? 50:33 – Guest:  I have seen this function but I haven’t played with it. It makes sense. This takes it a step further. Like you say it’s perfect b/c nobody knows anything about that store, but it’s a new level. I think you have some benefits with that way of doing it, too. 51:23 – John: The one thing that sticks out is company name is your observable, then your... 52:10 – Guest: Yeah that’s good b/c it might be better! They might not even know what NgRx is, and you have a service so just use them. Yeah it’s just an observable. 52:33 – Chuck: You don’t want to see my garage. 52:44 – Guest: Some services are underrated. Like you suggested we could use them for much more. 53:01 – Guest: It was nice writing these tips. 53:19 – Chuck: What are working on now? 53:23 – Guest: Writing a new blog. 53:41 – Chuck: We will keep an eye out for it. Where do you post? 53:55 – Guest: Usually Medium, and Twitter. Search for my name and you will find me, b/c I have the same handler on all the places. 54:15 – Chuck & John: Let’s go to picks! 54:30 – Chuck is talking about future episodes and potential topics. You can vote stuff up on Trello on NgRx so we can go deeper on this topic. 55:40 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 1:02:00 – Advertisement – Cache Fly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular C# Chuck’s Twitter John Papa’s Twitter Adrian’s Medium Adrian’s Twitter Adrian’s GitHub Adrian’s Blog Post Adrian’s Article: Testing NgRx Effects Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Cache Fly Picks: John NgRx Data Conferences  - Don’t feel mofo Charles Discord App Adrain Angular In-depth Doc Wallaby

John 10:22-42

John 8:37-47

This is the full collection of sermons preached at City Light Church in Vicksburg, MS. For more information on the church and its ministries, please visit citylightvicksburg.org

This is the full collection of sermons preached at City Light Church in Vicksburg, MS. For more information on the church and its ministries, please visit citylightvicksburg.org

Episode 172 “Kiss off Mickey” 0:15 We’re Live! Chuck immediately says he world is blowing up. Chuck mentions having to find ways to pay things, such as server hosting. John says it is good that things blow up early, to figure out how to not go into the hole bad.  3:30 Chuck talks about how some of his revenue is not till a few weeks away, according to to sponsor payment cycles. “Its just freaking hard.” Chuck talks about an upcoming conference he is coordinating for quick income.  5:44 John asks questions about how to avoid short term solutions. Chuck talks about how at the beginning of the month he will have funds for business, but questionable for personal stuff. Chuck talks about adding possible podcast sponsor to his lists.    9:00 Josh ask what cause the “Current Crunch.” Chuck says it was paying taxes for the whole year last year. Chuck talks about his plan to not going into he red with paying taxes at the end of the year. Chuck talks about cutting on spending an saving in places where he is not using services.  14:00 John says to tells Mickey Mouse to kiss off. John talks about how they have to live an die based on looking at the monthly report. Chuck says he expected this year to look like last year as far as number goes. John says “You need buffers.”  17:00 John suggests to have your book keeper level off or spread the cash over the next few months to get a better idea of how much money you have. Chuck says this is kind of a belt tightening mode.  21:00 John talks about 6, 12 month rolling averages to gauge budgets. Josh suggests going back a looking the sales cycle, it is the summer, and that effects sales every year.  25:00 John says that Chuck is setting up himself great for the future, he just needs to survive till the future. Chuck says he is not going to be able to get to a promised project. John says just to do the deliverables, and tell your clients what you are going to do next.  29:00 John talks about threading or multitasking, and how that still slows progress. So bucket own and do the projects.  31:00 Josh ask if Chuck heard the new of Josh hitting mile stone 2, and is now a 50% Simple Programmer owner. John talks about arm wrestling his father. John says there is only two things that can only happen with money in Simple Programmer, expenses or income.  36:00 Josh talks about exporting his bank info. and built a budget around that information. Josh talks about getting a call from his bank, and how they see that he is run a business out of his account. So Josh is opening a credit card account for business.  40:00 John suggest just setting up a business account rather than changing banks. EntreProgrammers talk about business credit cards.  44:00 John talks about using 99 Designs or a designer for the UK  for the book landing page. John talks about DHH.    Thoughts for the Week Chuck - Git yer done.  John - Like is an obstacle course..  Josh - Carve away stuff.. 

Bob and John discuss some news stories and on the way end up at a butcher shop!

Xiaohua: Hello, and welcome to RoundTable's Word of the Week. This week we are talking about some fruit-related idioms.John: That's right. Today we are going to be looking at， in particular apples. So I think everyone knows about apples. Apples they come in so many different varieties. And for some reason in English, there are so many different idioms and sayings around apples.Xiaohua: 苹果好像在英美文化中有非常重要的文化属性，所以有很多的idiom短语是跟苹果有关的。John: That's right, so we're going to take a look at a few here. So starting off, “as American as apple pie”, basically saying that apple pie is the epitome of being American, and so if you’re as American is apple pie, then you’re just very American.Xiaohua:苹果馅饼是非常具有美国特色的一种食品，as American as apple pie 就是说像苹果馅饼一样极具美国特色。John: Yeah, so baseball, jeans, hamburgers, the American flag, fireworks on fourth of July, things like that.Xiaohua: Disney, something like that.John: Yes, as American as apple pie. And the second one, you can compare “apples and oranges”. This is actually one of my favorite because what happens a lot of times that people like to make comparisons between what seem like are similar things. Apple and orange are both fruits, but if you look at them, it's impossible to compare them because they are so different. Xiaohua: 当你在指出别人逻辑上的错误时你可以用这个短语comparing apples and oranges, 就是把完全不一样的东西放在一起比较。John: Right. There's “apple of someone’s eye”, so a favorite or a well-like person. So for example, my children are the apple of my eye.Xiaohua: So for anyone who has heard the song "you're the apple of my eye", right?John: I have no idea what that is.Xiaohua: What? Are you an American?John:I am, but not as American as apple pie.Xiaohua: Yeah, that's what I'm going to say. 所以apple of one's eye 就是极为珍视的人，非常珍爱的人。 John: Then “the apple never falls far from the tree”, so a person’s personality traits are close to those of the person’s parents. This can be good and bad, in fact. And usually the way I remember to hearing it is in a negative context. You know his parents or her parents, they won't very nice people. The apple really falls far from the tree.Xiaohua: I see. 这有点像中文里的有其父必有其子，“苹果落地离树不远”也是这个意思，这个短语有褒义也有贬义，但这里好像贬义的应用居多。John: Then “as sure as God made little green apples” basically just means that you are very certain. So I'm sure this, as sure as God made little green apples.Xiaohua:当你对一件事情确认无疑毫无疑问的时候你就可以说as sure as God made little green apples.John: Then to be a “bad apple” or a “rotten apple” is to be a bad person. You can also say that “one bad (or rotten) apple can spoil the whole bunch (or barrel)” implies that one flawed person can basically undermine an effort or a group, and you can be “rotten to the core” to be thoroughly bad or worthless.Xiaohua: bad apple 就是坏家伙, rotten apple也是这个意思。而one bad apple spoils whole bunch有点像中文里的一粒老鼠屎坏了一锅粥的意思，或者说害群之马，而 rotten to the core就是说这个家伙坏透了。John: Then there is “How do you like them apples?” It’s kind of a rhetorical question not actually looking for an answer. Usually it can be neutral or taunting just kind of you take a look at the situation and for example, you’ve created a situation where the other person’s going to like it and you're kind of poking at them and say "Well, how do you like them apples?"Xiaohua: “How do you like them apples?”就好像是用一点揶揄的口气问或者反问，这儿事儿你怎么看？这回你怎么看？John：Yeah, perhaps a good example might be you know, when you are kid, and you have some really good food you brought from home, and one of your friends wants that food, you say no because you want to eat it all. And then the next day, they bring food that you want to eat from their homes and they say no and also say how do you like them apples? Basically, just kind of throwing it in your face, that you did something bad and they did something bad.Xiaohua: I see.John: Then you can “polish (one’s) apple” is to flatter someone and then a flatterer is an “apple polisher.”Xiaohua: "Polish one's apple"就是拍某人的马屁，而apple polisher 则是阿谀奉承的人。John: Like for example, I can polish Xiaohua's apple. You know Xiaohua, that scarf is just so lovely today.Xiaohua: It doesn't work on me, anyway.John: Anyway, last but not least “upset the apple cart” is to ruin plans.Xiaohua: 嗯，把苹果车给弄翻了，就是说把事情搞砸了的意思。And that's all we have for this week's Word of the Week.

Xiaohua: Hello, and welcome to Round Table’s Word of the Week.本周我们来讨论一个非常实用但是又比较三俗的话题，怎么说去上厕所，尤其是上大号？ John: Right, so the question here that we are trying to address is not necessarily about going to the bathroom, but we are going to be looking at how to say I need to poop. Now the thing is there are many different ways in English, usually slang, but you have to remember, usually, most of the slang is not going to be what we call polite company. A lot of things are considered to be quite vulgar and usually younger men tend to use many of these phrases. That’s a bit of disclaimer first of all, because you don’t necessarily just want to be going around using these words in front of the people especially you don’t know very well, but at the same time they are interesting bits of culture. Xiaohua: 这个声明还是蛮必要的。很多关于上大号的说法，其实都是在英语中属于俚语的说法。大家听就听了，千万不要在比较正式的场合随便用出来。 John: Exactly, so first I want to take a look at one of the most simple, is going number 2. In English, we say going pee is number 1 and going poop is number 2. Xiaohua: This actually has a direct Chinese translation. We say the same thing, 上一号，上二号。 John: Oh, really? But you can also say that you have to drop a deuce. And deuce, I am not quite sure where that word comes from, but it also means number 2. So drop a deuce would be the same thing is saying I need to go number 2. Xiaohua: drop a deuce也可以是二号，上大号的意思。 John: Right. And then, of course, there is a take a dump, right? So drop a deuce, take a dump and drop the kids off at the pool, so we can say in English there is a lot of dropping kind of imagery there. Xiaohua: 这个动词听上去不是很雅观，但是我有一个问题: drop the kids off at the pool is that means you are going or your kids are going? John: No, so the point is that the toilet bowl is the pool and the poop or the turds are the kids. Xiaohua: It’s the kid. Oh, my god! John: Sometimes people say drop the Cosby kids off at the pool. Bill Cosby and his TV show. He had, I think, four or five kids in that show and they are all black. And usually poop is brown, so Cosby kids. Xiaohua: OK, a little bit politically incorrect. John: Slightly politically incorrect. But I don’t think anyone would have a big deal with it. Looking at some more interesting ones I wasn’t familiar with before we prepared for the show. Download a brown-load. Xiaohua: Download a brown-load. I don’t know how to translate that. Anything brown doesn’t bold very well for me. John: Yeah, exactly. So here is the interesting one, so this is one of the phrases from one of these Austin Powers movies. One of the characters, he says I’ve got a turtle head poking out. But more commonly, people say I’m prairie-doggin. So a prairie-dog is a type of rodent that lives on the American plains in the mid-west. And it’s a type of rodent that it digs holes, pops its head out a little bit and then retreats back down if it senses danger. Xiaohua: prairie dog就是草原鼠。 John: So I’m prairie doggin. It just means you really, really have to go, like it’s almost impossible to actually keep it under control you might say. Here is a really funny one, again very, very cultural. I have to take the Browns to the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl is the championship of American football of the NFL. Now the Cleverland Browns are a notoriously bad team, so it’s funny obviously because they call the Browns and poop is brown, but also because the Browns never go to the Super Bowl. Xiaohua: Oh, I see. Taking the Browns to the Super Bowl可不是带克利夫兰布朗队去超级碗比赛，而是上大号的意思。 John: Exactly. And last but not least, this one is actually one of my favorites, because it’s just so amazingly descriptive. I have to pinch a loaf. Xiaohua: Pinch a loaf, I’ve actually heard of that as well. Is it really a vulgar way of saying it? Can somebody use it without causing trouble? John: Like what I have said before, this isn’t about necessarily vulgar or using bad words or anything like that, but you wouldn’t use these phrases in polite company, like if you just met someone, more than likely, using these words and phrases will not score you any points if you will. It won’t score you any browny points. Instead people might think that maybe you are a little bit rude or perhaps you don’t understand what to say in the right context. In general, the best rule to follow is that if you want to tell someone that you need to use the bathroom, just say you need to use the bathroom. You don’t need to tell them that you need to go poop or you need to pee, just say I need to go use the bathroom. Xiaohua: That’s right. And that’s probably the safest and best way of describing the situation. John: Exactly. But then again if you are hanging out with someone like me and you really have to poop, or you can just say John, I get to go take a dump. Xiaohua: Ok. And that’s all for Word of the Week of Round Table.